Tuesday 21 May 2013

Account Consolidation: Mara's Way

CCP has announced that they will allow players to pay a PLEX to allow training a second character on the same account for 30 days. I'd like to go further than this, with the ability to consolidate accounts and pay for specific services as they are needed.

Here are the basics of my fledgling idea, which is no doubt a pale echo of the actual plans in motion over at CCP.

First, I'd like to be able to consolidate all my characters into one single account. So imagine that I have four accounts with three characters each. Rather than having to maintain three sets of account details, three sets of API keys, and dealing with the hassle of remembering which account has which character, I'd like to have all my characters behind one log in, with one API key for the account (of course I will have individual API keys which only access certain details on each character).

Second, I'd like to be able to buy login slots as and when I want them. In my hypothetical example, I might have 12 characters, one of which flies an Orca, three of which fly mining ships, three fly destroyers and T2 frigates, three are just market alts, and a couple are just there to look pretty. To run my typical four-ship mining fleet, I would want to subscribe for four login slots. Then when I log in, the launcher will present me with the login slots and then the list of characters. I can then drag a character to a login slot and the launcher would then spawn a new EVE instance with that character selected. Used login slots will show the character using that slot, and logged-in characters will be unavailable in the character selection list. The character list would allow multiple selection, so multiboxers can just do a Ctrl+A, then drag the selection into the login slots and the launcher would spawn a rainbow of EVE clients. Each active account would come with a free login slot.

Third, I'd like to be able to buy training queues as and when I want them. But I don't want just any old training queue, I want a queue that can hold skills to be trained for any character in my list. If I log in with a specific character, then select "Open Training Queue", the game will show me the training queues and I can drag the skill I want into the queue that I want that skill to be in. Once any queue has a skill for this character queued in it, the other queues become unavailable. There is of course the option to add another queue for 30 days by surrendering a PLEX, or I can buy the extra queue from the Account Management page using the usual 30 day/6 month/12 month offers. Extra queues will of course be in addition to the free queue that comes with an active account, so for me I would have one account plus three extra training queues and three extra login slots, all adding up to the same as four separate accounts in terms of monthly costs.

So there I am in my mining operation, and I figure that it would be nice to bum around with one of my exploration alts. I can buy another login slot for, say, a dollar a day (or a few hundred Aurum, or something). So I buy a short term login slot, log in my explorer and head off into the unknown to do some exploration. While doing that, I want to queue those exploration skills that I forgot to finish, so I add this character's Astrometrics 5 skill into a training queue that has five minutes spare.

In this scenario, at the end of the day I lose the extra login slot (since I only paid for one day), but the character's skill remains queued and will complete training (given time) because the account is active and the skill queue is paid for.

Does this idea have any merit? Does it fundamentally break the game?

2 comments:

  1. I think that this idea is very well thought out. I never understood why the game limited you to only 3 character slots only. Seems to be a little short sighted now in todays world.

    I also think I would tend to agree with your first thought that CCP also has some things in consideration for the near future. So I think that the next year to 18 months we will see something along these lines.

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  2. I too think this is a well thought out idea.

    I do think there should be some type of bonus for veteran pilots.
    How about a extra slot for every 5 years?

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