Next, afaik nothing costs you money to start a trial account which in the 21 day time is enough to get all of your learning skills done, while you as a newbie are flying around having some fun exploring EVE have an alt or two training learning skills, under a trial account, that at least maybe one of them is activated with a free month once your main account is subscribed and bingo for a month past the trial you have 2 accounts for only 14$ with maybe a third one inactive but with all learning skills done, in this month you train on the remaining alt other important long term skills and then when it goes inactive whatever.
Let me explain how EvE works.
You start with a trial account. You get access to basic stuff up to cruisers but none of the fun ships that allow you to make any kind of isk. It allows you to get a foothold. IF you decide to subscribe, there is a one time charge now to update your account to a fully subscribed one as well as the monthly fee in advance. GTCs at this point can work to bypass the fee, but you have to buy two months of gametime to do that.
Now you have a subscribed account. Great. However, due to the way EvE works it's subscription system, you cannot have a trial account and a subscribed account running on the same computer at the same time, which basically means unless you bought a 60 day GTC from a provider and split it up into two 30's, you just shot yourself in the foot.
You CAN pull some tom-foolery in your first month with the aid of an alt, yes, but unless you make an alt each month, that trick wears out very fast. If you do want an alt, I would actually recommend using the buddy system to get the thirty free days added onto your main. IF.
The idea of a multiplayer game is to interact with people, to join corps, alliances and all that fun stuff. Sure, you can be an island of alts if you wish but WHY? If you play it like a singleplayer game where you have to do everything yourself, you are going to get bent over a table, lubed up and butt-fucked by those who have actual people behind the others they bring along. I don't care if you profess to be an octopus, one person will never be able to stand against many people.
But hey, I have no problem with carebears doing what they do. What I do have an issue with is when they give bad advice and then proceed to get butt-hurt and try to claim that because we're blunt in our opinions here that they are somehow less valid.
Still, you're at least willing to listen to ideas.
But you still have your main, and once you've started making 300 mil a month from doing level 4's in a raven (which is easiest way to do missions I hear, 1 month of skillpoints roughly to train to use it with basic skills maybe 4-5 months for t2) and then you can reactivate your alt, use it to salvage and now your money is essentially increasing and now you have a support alt for harder missions, corp mates can help this process get by isk wise faster and provide a funner social enviroment, this is assuming your just in a newbie corp for starters for the first year or so. Get +4 learning implants on both characters, this will help to speed up training times.
Except...
Imagine that new players don't have the support of established individuals and their bank-roll. How do they buy this raven without putting in an inordinate amount of time? level 2 and 3 missions provide shit isk when it comes down to it and level 4's are very difficult for low skilled/poorly equipped characters. So add another four-five months on top of that to afford everything you need to run these isk mines. It's closer to a solid year of play to get on your feet before you can begin to start affording plex cards and if you happen to get bored with the game before you reach that point (which is severely likely on your own)..
Lets also look at the fact that you need skills to actually fit ships. That takes time. Then you need isk to buy the modules. Where's the isk coming from? a new player would have to be seriously determined and never sleep to be able to afford a battleship in any reasonable amount of time. Then there is the tank issue. A character less than a year old is going to have alot of problems running level 4 missions to the point where they can knock them out quickly and efficiently enough to actually turn a large profit. In many cases, even 3-5 million skill point characters have problems at times.
Your estimates are off, or have you forgotten what it's like to be a new character?
The fact is that while EvE is ALOT easier for newbies than it was, it is still a very difficult experience to plow through when you are on your own and do not have access to someone else's wallet. There are means to getting isk without needing combat but that route is an even more time consuming path as scouring the galaxy for places where cheap equipment can be bought in one place and then sold expensively in another is tedious, to say the least.
After about 4-5 months you might have your alt trained in science and R&D and doing R&D missions, thats 80% of your plex cost, your now making in theory enough isk for 2 alts and paying only 14$ for your main, with intermittant free months from when your alts subscribe.
Except...
To use R&D agents, you need standings. To get standings, you run missions. I hope your alt has been trained for combat because otherwise he's going to be the proverbial smear on some pirate's windscreen.
The datacore thing is a good way of generating isk though, but to be honest, I would suggest you keep this solely to your main character. Even combat specced characters need science at some point and that lends itself to picking up the basic r&d books. Once you can run one agent, you can just leave it running and collect the minature isk bundles every so often. You do not need an alt to do this at all. It doesn't exactly take long to train up the needed skills with 100% training bonus either.
There might be some merit to the idea of putting together a guide for newbies though, seeing as quite a few folk on the forums are EvE'ers.
Xcom ; Standing proud and getting horrifically murdered by Chryssalids since 1994
