On multi-boxing

Great info on PI strategy. One question tho... are all your toons on one account? If not why not follow the Epithal toon with a cloaky combat ship like a Stratios? This was my general method when i ran PI in the old corp i was in. I ran three toons, each toon while running PI sorties in the Epithal was shadowed by either a Stratios, Loki, or whatever else depending on which character was free.

This is a comment I received on a previous thread, and I when I set out to respond I quickly ended up with something that was a little more than just a 'comment'. It also raises some interesting game-play issues, so I thought I'd make a post out of it.

First, let me say that having three toons on separate accounts is just straight up better than having three toons on a single account. All three are constantly training, and you have the option of multi-boxing. The above suggestion is a very good one.

However, when deciding how I wanted to set things up, I decided to have all three characters on a single account. There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is that one of the longer term goals that I have is to pay for my account via PLEX purchased with ISK. Three characters on one account can do that with PI alone. Three characters on three separate accounts cannot.

Technically, I could do that now, but I have a number of short term goals that will be much easier to accomplish if I'm not siphoning off half of my income each month to buy PLEX. But just as I worked hard in 2012 at being able to pay for my piracy through loot alone, this is just one of those 'winning at Eve' goals we sometimes set ourselves.

Equally, though, I'm not interested in multi-boxing. I once read a post in the Eve forums that said there are two ways of looking at Eve: the traditional MMO approach, where your character is your avatar, and the RTS approach, where you are the general and your characters are simply units under your command. I fall heavily into the first category - my main is me for all intents and purposes - and just having relevant alts at all is a big step for me.

And finally, I'm not sure that I could multi-box, even if I wanted to. I'm almost exclusively an Android user now, I'm playing Eve on a minimum spec laptop that I purchased just for that purpose, so I suspect that I lack the hardware to run multiple accounts.

But I still recognize that all those reasons are specific to me, and there are probably loads of players who would enjoy and benefit from this alternate approach.