When I had trouble recruiting my Alt account from my Main, I had guessed it related to both accounts being on the same email. It made sense. Yet – I was still reading about other players who did not seem to have the same issue.
A Casual Carebear Gamer kindly offered up their recruitment link, so I used it on my Alt account.
Success. I then used the link on my Main account.
So was CCP classifying my two accounts as one, because they shared the same email address? Again, makes sense – but didn’t match the experiences of others.
So I went looking for my Free 1M Skill points, and they were not on my Alt account, but were on my main.
So even though I entered my Alt’s account details, it logged me in as my Main. I double checked my Chrome browser and I wasn’t obviously logged into any EVE website / forum / account management with my Main Account. So assuming there must be some glitch where there is a cookie or token or something in Chrome showing me logged in, I tried the process on my Alt account again, using Firefox. (A browser I never use for EVE.) The recruitment process worked and I was allocated 1M free Skill Points on the second account.
Success.
Then finally – when I went to look at what benefits A Casual Carebear Gamer gets when I buy some PLEX or OMEGA time, I notice my Main comes up as being logged in on the recruitment page…
What a silly gotcha.
Given there was a 20% off sale on PLEX I added another 6 months to my main account, which should give A Casual Carebear Gamer 15 days of free Omega time (can take a day or two apparently) and an increase of 1 to their recruit count.
There were a couple new skills recently added to the Game. I undocked – for the first time in a very long time – and purchased them.
I immediately applied unallocated Skill Points to get them to Rank 4. Somewhere in recent past this process must have had a quality of life update. You used to have to read the points required for the next level, and manually type them in. This time they were already pre-populated in the Apply dialog box, making it quicker and less error prone to do.
I then did this – just to amuse myself.
I spent just shy of 14B ISK for the Astronautic Engineering skill. This skill has no use in game, having been removed many years ago. Since then there has been a slowly dwindling supply of the skill books in player hands, that I’ve seen priced for over 25B ISK. This was the one single skill I did not have on my Main. Now I do.
So one of my old, old goals has finally been achieved. To have trained every skill in game to at least Rank 4.
After my undocking, I’ve realised I am going to need to update my overview layout and settings. Things have changed, and on first glance in some positive ways.
For some time EVE has had a bonus mechanism where you get rewards if you recruit new players into the game. The scheme has had a few iterations, some more rewarding than others.
In the past this only worked for new accounts. I was alerted by a comment from Yadot and a blog post by Wilhelm Arcturus that CCP had modified the scheme so that now you could recruit existing accounts. Every account can now become a recruit, but only once.
I’ve noted many people have recruited their own alt accounts. I currently only have two accounts, and they both use the same email address. This meant it did not look like I could recruit my Alt.
If anyone who writes an EVE blog wants to drop a comment with your recruitment link, I will become your recruit. It will apparently give me 1M bonus Skill points, and bonuses to the “recruiter” if I sub an account via the account management page or buy PLEX. I can not say for sure if or when I will do either, but you will get a bonus if I do. My main is subscribed until October next year, so it might take a while…
As part of EVE’s latest update, you can pick up 7 days of Omega time on each of your accounts for free. All you need to do is go into the New Eden store.
If you already have Omega, the 7 days is (apparently) added to your subscription. (I did not double check.)
I am not sure how long it will remain available.
As you would expect, while in the store I noticed other things for sale, including a rather impressive 45% off the in store PLEX price of 24 months’ worth of Omega time.
That is certainly worth looking into if you PLEX your accounts.
Always up for a bargain, I decided to check how this compared if I purchased 2 years of Omega time direct from the account pages.
First up was how much 6600 PLEX cost.
Around $270 USD for me.
Next was how much 2 years of Omega time cost directly.
Around $270 USD for me…
So, certainly not worth your while if you need to purchase PLEX, but still a discount if you already have the PLEX and subscribe that way.
In my first post on this blog back on January 16, 2011, I remarked:
“I find myself a little aimless, but not ready to mothball my ships. To help focus my attention, I plan to blog about goals, thoughts, and observations around the game.”
The blog has subsequently helped direct my play, possibility feeding into my Solo game a similar influence that people’s corporations or alliances might. It worked for a decade.
Over the next 1,180+ posts there have been three other underlying themes which crop up.
The first was that I don’t really enjoy social and competitive online games. I try to play them however to help combat my natural inclination towards being a hermit. The older I have gotten, the harder that is.
The second was that my life is impacted by anxiety, but that EVE offered up a cathartic distraction and downtime for my mind away from Real Life.
And third, hopefully without oversharing, was how Real Life intrinsically impacts on my EVE play. In that way I have tried to mimic the example of other bloggers I have followed over the years – in how they humanize the EVE player and attempt to remind us of the complex nuances behind the actions and behaviours in game.
All EVE players are linked like that – motivations to play, benefits, costs, and an ever-present influence of their real life.
My life is currently far busier than I could have imagined dealing with. This year in particular has belittled my attempts to maintain a semblance of balance. I can’t say I am terribly happy about it, but I have not been overwhelmed, and am managing to maintain a glass half full instead of half empty mindset.
I do however miss EVE. Not so much the game itself – I log in occasionally to spin a ship. I miss its old ability to steal my mind away from the busyness and stress of real life. The escape. I blame CCP in part for this. Their focus on making people play EVE the way their statistics suggest earns them the most money. I have tried replacing the gap it has left – but so far have not found anything.
I try to write blog posts, but I never seem to finish them.
A common thread on this blog is me whinging about being too busy. It turns out that can get never endingly worse.
Some of it is good. Our daughter has been the goalie for 8 hockey teams this year and is constantly training or playing.
Here she is, fearsome and fearless, playing for our state.
Our Son managed to get his Karate Black Belt, and while he still attends two classes a week, he is now working towards almost daily coaching for solo and pair roller skating competitions. He has been skating for a decade and is very good at it.
Some of the busyness is not so good.
Off the field our daughter still causes havoc. She was diagnosed with clinical anxiety at a young age. Her coping mechanism is to be very controlling and exploding violently when overwhelmed. With an extraordinary amount of effort and the guidance of a behavioural Paediatrician, multiple Psychologists and Therapists, we have a structure and consistency around our daughter’s life which helps. That has left us however in a Juxtapose where she has no problem throwing herself in front of a hockey ball but threatens never to play hockey again if we try to force her out of the car at a venue until she has seen at least one of her teammates arrive.
Off the rink our son has oscillated between brilliance and being a complete fuckwit. After quite a journey a recent diagnosis of ADHD has gone some way to explain his behaviour, but we don’t seem to be able to stop the worst of it.
Both our kids have the world at their feet, and the propensity to throw it all away. Makes for very busy and stressed parents.
The sibling I remarked on back in March as being very unwell has now passed away with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. It was an unnecessarily exhausting journey that was heading towards being an unnecessarily horrific death. Thankfully at the last moment she finally accepted palliative care and had a peaceful passing. She left two orphaned children, and an unprepared, dysfunctional, and messy estate. Trying to get that in order is taking up a lot of my time.
The stress of this hastened the deterioration in my parents and pushed to the forefront signs of dementia. That journey, given the personalities involved, will be utterly awful.
Work continues and I continue to dislike it. I dream about a career change and doing some relatively mindless job for a while, but the reality of doing 3 times as many hours for the same pay traps me.
What else is there in my blog notes.
I passed 350M Skill points on my main.
I started on a post about how important it was for the developers of an online game to focus on having their players habitually logging in.
I mentioned how EVE, like most online games I have played, have daily logon bonuses, frequent and time limited events, and game mechanics that require you to connect often to update queues and processes.
I then pointed out how little of this existed when I first started playing EVE. I suspected that aside from people with addictive personalities or OCD tendencies, that the artificial attempts to get people to log in daily do not work long term. The developers really need to focus on immersive and fun game play and goals.
Oh – there was a note about how everyone in the family has had COVID now, except (as far as I know) me. That remains the case. I did just have my 4th vaccine dose earlier this week. I am not a fan of the side effects.
I had some notes on how I tried to get back into World of Warships. It had new content and updates, so I thought after a long break I would give that a go. On a whim I made use of a sale and purchased another year subscription, but then soon ran into a brick wall. There was enough change that I had to re-learn parts of the game via YouTube. There I found all my old content creators deep in bitter vet status, complaining about the game instead of playing. I felt too far behind the current meta and never logged back in after the first week. I think the same thing happened the previous year.
I had some notes on how I went through a process of buying a whole heap of old PC games. Games I had loved and spent many hours playing. They had been updated to run in later versions of Windows on Steam. Various releases of Command and Conquer, Blitzkrieg, Star Wars, Total Annihilation and so on. None really worked, often crashing. Much of the problem I expect relating to trying to run them on 4K monitors. I reattempted to play these again on a FHD gaming laptop. They keep crashing.
I had some notes on how I went through a process of buying a whole heap of somewhat newer PC games. Games I thought I might get into, like Terraria, Sins of Solar, Rain of Reflections, Northgard, Planet Coaster, Halcyon 6, Galactic Civilizations, Cyberpunk, Cities Skylines, Banished, Ashes of the Singularity, Elite Dangerous. Mostly I could not get past the tutorials. I just couldn’t get into them. I get some value out of Minecraft and Factorio at times, but they do not hold my attention for long.
I also remarked – that from all the entertainment available to me – a PS5, XBOX X, 4K Blu-ray players and a library of movies and shows and books, multiple streaming services, multiple PC’s and laptops, an iPad, and an Android Phone, that my most played game by far is Solitaire on my phone.
And back to life. I need to put tea into a thermos for my son, then go pick up him up from Band practise, then drop him off at Karate, then try to organise tea for the rest of us before going back to pick him up.
Evehermit 