The Skill Queue

One thing I find incredibly annoying lately is keeping the skill queue updated. I've been playing less lately but with an even dozen accounts it seems like almost every day at least 3-4 characters need their skill queues updated.

It's a hassle, especially when a character is at the point where all the skills he needs to train next take around a day to train (15 hours, 1 day 20 hours and the like). I can't just not log in for several days because I need to update skill queues nearly every day.

Less annoying but still not fun is when you have a character on a very long skill train (a month or more). You don't have to worry about it for a long time but eventually you will need to update the queue on a specific day which may not fit your schedule by the time it finally rolls around.

I have to wonder why the skill queue has that hard 24 hour limit.

Maybe CCP intentionally wants skill training to be a PITA and force us to log on more often. No doubt it helps make the logon and concurrency numbers look better too.

Or maybe it's about not wanting us to be able put years worth of skills into the queue and not logon at all again until the training is finished.

Whatever the reason, it doesn't matter, 24 hours is too short. Why not change it to be more user friendly?

I'd like to see it change to allow more than a single skill go beyond 24 hours. If they really want to keep the total number of skills in the queue down they could always do something like this.

1. You can always put at least 5 skills in the queue no matter how much time they take.
2. Once there are 5 skills in the queue you can only add another skill as long as the total training time is under 24 hours.

That'd keep things sort of like they are yet be far more flexible for when we need some time away from the game, whether it be just to take a break, go on vacation, a work deployment or whatever.

Addendum

Caedes came up with a great idea in comments.

Your skill queue should be as long as you subbed for the game. Sub for year fill it up, or 1 month. So whatever you have left on your sub should be your skill queue. You played for the time mone as well be able to use it.

I should also add my suggestion doesn't have to be 5 skills, 4, 3 or even 2 would be better than now. I picked 5 because that would help with the most annoying times, when you need to train a bunch of skills that take around 1 day each. But 5 might be too much for really long train time skills. 2 wouldn't help very much with the ~1 day skills but it'd still be better than nothing and it'd be great for the really long trains.

In that case maybe my ideas combined with Caedes' would work better. Allow up to 5 skills (or 2, 3, 4, w/e is deemed appropriate) regardless of how long the total train time is but only if your subscription time is long enough to still be active when the last skill starts.

For that matter even just allowing 2 skills in the queue would be nice. That way you could slap a 1 day 5 hour skill (or an even longer one) into the queue that you really need/want to train next, back it up with a long train time skill and take off for a week (on vacation, working out of town or w/e). When you come back the skill you really wanted to train would be finished and you wouldn't have lost most of a week's worth of training time in the process either.