Wednesday 10 December 2014

Skill Queue Changes Affect on Hours Playing Eve

The 24 hour limit on the skill queue was removed recently, allowing us to set up much longer skill queues and ending the game of "skill queue online". We can now set up queues containing many short skills that take months to train them all and no longer have to log in every day or every few days to add another skill to the queue.

Once the queue is set up on a particular character you can forget about it and not log that character in at all until the training is all completed.

The question is has this training queue change affected the amount of time you spend playing Eve?

IOW, are you logging in less often and/or spending less time playing Eve after the change than before?

If not, is it about the same as before or are you spending *more time now?

Myself, I find I'm spending significantly less time playing Eve now than before. Before I'd check daily to make sure I didn't lose any training time. Most days there were several characters that needed their queues updated. That'd get me logging in and once I was logged in I'd usually decide to do some other things too and wind up spending an hour or two playing Eve.

Now, I don't worry much about skill queues, I check every few days and rarely need to do anything. Not only do I spend far less time playing "skill queue online" but I log in far less often and spend far less time playing the rest of the game too.

How about you? What's your story?

13 comments:

  1. Gone are the days of loggin in to eve to queue skills and then quit and do something else anyway but otherwise impact is minimal. The skill queue affected my number of logins but not my actual playing time.

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  2. Well, I am playing exactly the same, but with the character that I want and doing the things that I like. For me was an awful time when I need to loggin just to check the skills, etc. Is a good improvement for me.

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  3. Keeping my skill queue up to date used to get me to log in religiously to make sure I didn't lose any time. Then I had an epiphany that it just didn't matter that much. Oh, not that losing time not training skills doesn't matter to the game, etc, just that it didn't matter to me. For a long time, my only EvE activity was logging in to add a skill. But once I realized I wasn't really playing, keeping my characters training lost all meaning.

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  4. I am definitely spending less time playing. Also I have found that what is in my queue matters less. I haven't really taken much thought, just thrown everything in "it will get trained at some point".

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  5. I spend about the same amount of time, only because I'm always doing something with market orders or running a combat site before work. I can see how it would allow spending less time though. It's for sure a nice thing that I dont have to constantly logon to update the skill queue though.

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  6. I am on about the same amount of time, although I am trying out a new trading method and so that is the main reason why I am on. These are on my 2 accounts alts though, my main, I have hardly done anything with to be honest. That coupled with the fact I am toying about moving corp and so kinda feel in limbo with the game at the moment.

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  7. One thing I'm wondering about is how much of a relationship there is between the number of characters you have and how much of an affect the skill queue change has had on your logins and playtime.

    I have 12 accounts and 30 characters. Are the ones who say it's had no effect or minimal all players with only a few accounts/characters or do some of them have multiple accounts and characters too?

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    1. About 4years ago I was very similar to yourself I had 10 accounts with traders covering almost all markets. I have made all my ISK now, the number ticking up doesn't have the same hold on me as it once did. I now have 2 accounts, one will expire on xmas day and I will move an alt in training before then. I will become a single account warrior.

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    2. I've been at the point where I don't care so much about how much I make anymore for a while too. And it's getting worse, the last last few months I'm content as long my balance isn't going down. Even when it does go down (which it has several times, albeit briefly) I really don't care much since I know I can pop it right back up again within a few days.

      Also finding my income mostly scales with how much time I put into it now. That wasn't the case when I had less ISK but most of my markets have been pretty much saturated since I hit around 500 billion.

      I really can't do any more business than I already am without driving the competition crazy and actually lowering profits... At least not without finding untapped new markets or breaking someone else's grip on certain lucrative, high volume (and therefore very heavily camped) markets. Either one of which is not only very time consuming but also quite risky. Gotta move into stuff like that slowly or risk losing my shirt.

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    3. Or I could go into long(ish) term speculation, which can be extremely lucrative. But I don't think I'm rich enough for that yet to work out better than what I'm doing now. I figure I need at least a couple trillion for that and I'm not even halfway there yet.

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    4. Up until recently I made ISK reselling characters in the bizarre. To begin with I would find characters that had some obvious skills missing that would add value, this grew to take too long. So I simply looked for well skilled characters that were undervalued and poorly marketed.

      My best yet was a Loki/Claymore booster, very well skilled, very poor post making more of the fact that it had some scanning skills! I bought the character for 7Billion ISK and had resold it for 12B before the 10hour transfer timer had completed :)

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    5. 4 accounts, 4 mains and a freighter alt. the rest of the slots are filled with basic PI alts that are currently not used. Skill queues are between 15-240 days, since the release of ISIS over a year ago I have been basically training existing skills to rank 4.

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    6. Ah, PI alts that are not use. I know that story, my first 3 alts (on the 2nd account) were in a similar situation. Although they're traders now, they started out with a million or so SP in PI before I realized PI was terrible income compared to Trade and dropped PI completely.

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