Back to School!

A couple months ago after Jack Dancer reached 4s (along with a bunch of 5s in critical skills) in ALL the skills on the Infamous Rifter Plan I put his training aside and started working on the skills of my explorer/mission runner character.  I’m new to Eve and right now these two characters each have about 6 million skill points.  Not really that many.

My third character is the station trader in Jita that supplies the ISK for these other two to have fun.  He’s trained to 3 in three skills (Broker Relations, Retail, and Trade).  A total of just 124 thousand skill points that take about a day of study.  But very profitable skill points…

Recently I saw the “Power of Two” promotion from CCP.  This got me thinking about the possibility of moving Jack Dancer and my explorer into separate accounts so that they can both continue their training simultaneously.

For $50 the “Power of Two” promotion allows you to add another account and have 6 months of play time.  More importantly for me, you can add the additional account for 3 PLEX instead of $50.  So basically, a new account with three new characters for 6 months for just 3 PLEX.

I did a quick accounting and my Jita station trader had almost enough liquid funds to buy the three PLEX.  I definitely had enough for two, so I put up the order and my explorer character bought two PLEX for 426 million ISK each on the Dodixie market (PLEX at Dodixie’s “Buy” price is about 10 million ISK less than at Jita’s “Buy” price).  A day later I sold enough merchandise on the Jita market to have the funds for a third PLEX (this one cost about 430 million ISK in Dodixie).  4 million ISK difference in just a day - the cost of PLEX is going up rapidly right now…

So I had the three PLEX.

The process to open a “Power of Two” account is pretty straight forward and I soon had my new account in return for the three PLEX (the PLEX don’t all have to be at the same place, so don’t go flying your expensive PLEX around space!).  [Note: Since you don’t need to have all the PLEX together in your possession, it would be a Very Good Idea™ to make your “Buy” order “region wide” instead of just for the station.  I did this with my order for the third PLEX and the PLEX I bought was several jumps away from Dodixie.  I might otherwise not have bought it so quickly.]

Once the new account was opened, I immediately put up a contract to sell the Cerebral Accelerator that is part of the deal. A few hours later I pocketed 97 million ISK for it that I will split three ways between my new trader alts (see next sentence) to give them seed money for trading.  In the meantime I created a couple new station trader characters and started training them in Broker Relations, Retail and Trade just like my Jita trader.  One I put in Dodixie and the other in Amarr.  I plan to eventually put the third new character in Rens for station trading.

Then I started the process to move the explorer to the new account.  I could have paid 2 PLEX for this, but I don’t have the ISK for that right now since I have too much invested in various inventory (trade items waiting to be sold, 200+ rifters and their T2 modules for Jack Dancer to find innovative ways to lose, various exploration ships and gear, etc.).  So I paid the $20 fee to move the explorer to the new account. 

Moving a character from one account to another isn’t especially easy or fast.  He has to relinquish any current corp responsibilities (my characters were in a 2 member zero tax corporation that I set up for them).  Then there’s a 24 hour waiting period before he can actually leave the corp and join an NPC corporation to be eligible for moving to a new account.  After that’s completed there’s a 10 hour transition period between leaving the old account and arriving at the new account.

Eventually my explorer arrived in the new account. 

In the meantime my two new station traders are trained to 3/3/3 in Broker Relations, Retail, and Trade.  And now my Explorer is back working on his skill plan.  And Jack Dancer is back at school working on Afterburner V.  I still need to start the other station trader to go in the slot vacated by the explorer when he moved to the new account.  And I’m paid-up for the next 6 months on this new account with the Power of Two deal. 

Whew! 

I still have about 8 month’s worth of skills on the list for Jack Dancer (remember – that was the original reason for all this…).  They are all level 5 skills, so we’re talking several days and sometimes weeks for each of them.  I’ll also need a couple remappings of Jack Dancer’s attributes over the next 6 months to make things go faster. 

I also hope to eventually fund both of these accounts with PLEX from my 4 station traders (though where I’ll find time to keep all of their buy/sell orders (40 total for each of the characters) updated, I don’t know…). 

And I should look at the station trading model and decide if having the traders at 4 stations (Jita, Dodixie, Rens, and Amarr) is the best idea.  I might move them all to Jita and have each of them specialize in a different area (one buying/selling weapons, another implants, another armor and shields, and the fourth miscellaneous modules for instance).  Anyone out there have experience, expertise, knowledge, and/or an opinion on what’s best?

But in the end, it’s good to have Jack Dancer back at school hitting the books.