Down To Two

I finally did it. Yes, I reduced the number of my EVE Online accounts from three down to two. When the price hike hit in the middle of May, I looked at my accounts and realized I didn't need three. I really only had 5 characters with a significant number of skill points. Two of my characters have over 250 million skill points, one has over 100 million, one over 50 million skill points, and a specialized PI character with almost 20 million. A lot of people have multiple accounts for multiboxing, but the days of my little three character mining fleets is behind me. So down to two accounts I went.

Consolidating the accounts wasn't really painful. I just needed to transfer two characters from my third, now Alpha account, to my remaining subscribed accounts. The process does take a couple of days. First, deleting a character takes 10 hours. I can think of a couple of reasons for the delay. First, EVE players have a tendency of getting drunk and doing stupid things in the game. By putting in the delay, a lot of tickets are probably prevented each year from hung-over players requesting a character restoration. The other reason is if someone accesses the account, he characters have a higher chance of survival from a malicious actor hitting the delete key on all the account's characters.

The actual transfer process took longer than expected. I kind of expected the 10-hour transfer period. What never occurred to me was I could only transfer one character at a time from an account. Transferring two characters took a combined total of 20 hours just sitting in queues. Once again, I am not complaining about the inherent reasons for the length of time.

However, getting to the page so I could select the characters to transfer took some patients. I kept timing out. I only timed out three times before I could select a character to transfer. But the next night, I abandoned the effort after 10 attempts. I wound up waking up early the next morning and succeeded after only a couple of attempts.

By taking advantage of the recent sale on 12 months of Omega time, I only spent $280 for my two accounts for one year of game time. During the sale I spent $119.99 for one year of game time for each account plus $20 to transfer a character to each account. The sale saved me $30 per account off the normal $149.90 for 12 months of game time. Unless CCP offers a really good deal on multiple character training, I've probably spent all I need to on EVE unless I go to Fanfest.