Nearing A Decision

Tomorrow marks the end of the third week of the age of Ascension in EVE Online. More importantly on a personal level, I'm coming up on a decision about the future of my alpha character, Krasiva Pesen.

Krasiva began as an experiment into the viability of playing an alpha clone. Except for the half-speed training, I haven't experienced much of a difference from normal play. But the half-speed training is starting to come into play. When some of the level 3 skills take 14 hours to train and level 4 skills are taking, in some cases, 5-9 days to train, the training is painful. The good feeling of learning a couple of skills a day will soon end. I'm currently training level 1-2 missile skills, then the cruiser skills, but after that, the progression really slows down. With only 850,000 skill points and 15 million ISK, Krasiva is still a very young character. But at the three week mark, I need to decide if I should end the experiment and return to my accounts I currently pay for.

That's the rub, at least for people with paid accounts. Our accounts still train, but how long do we pay for them without playing on them? For myself, a natural decision point occurs in two weeks. Currently on my third account, I have a character that finishes the training necessary to run a data core farm, then she goes on to another area of study. The account also has an empty character slot. The perfect time to begin a new character.

One thing I learned about myself with my alpha clone experiment is that I'm ready to begin a new character. But I don't like the limits of the alpha clone, especially the reduced speed training. I like to log in and see the list of skills I trained. With my main characters on training paths learning 20 day skills, I forgot how much I missed hearing Aura say "skill training complete".

So do I continue with the alpha clone, start up a new omega clone, or go back to playing my main characters? Krasiva faces a challenge I need to complete, so I will put off a decision until then. But if I have everything figured out, I complete that challenge tonight.

Right now, I'm leaning toward returning to my paid accounts. Playing on an alpha account is fun, but if I'm paying $33 a month for a game, I want to play the full game and not the reduced version the alpha account represents.