Dual Character Training
If you've heard much about EvE or have played the game for over a week, no doubt you've heard something about Alternate Characters (Alts). Alts are generally created to have a specialized focus that differs from the focus of a persons most frequently used character. Previous to Dual Character Training, each account was only allowed to have one character actively training skills in their training queue. Thus creating an Alt required you to pause your training queue and activate training on another character within your account or, more commonly, creating an Alt required you to start up a separate account altogether.
Dual Character Training allows you to use PLEX to activate the training queue on another character on your existing account for the period of one month.
Dual Character Training
Why Would I Want to Use Dual Character Training?
Case 1: You have an alt and you just need a few days or weeks of training but you can't be bothered with logging into your main, pausing the skill training, logging out and then back in again to resume training on your alt. That or you simply don't want your +5 implanted, carefully EVEMon-planned main character to stop training.
Case 2: You need an alt, you create a new account, pay a signup fee, a month, two or three, then train the alt. After all requirements are met for the alt to do it's new job efficiently, you transfer it to your main account, i.e. consolidate, and pay a transfer fee. Sooner or later you're facing Case 1 because after all, your industry alt will need to invent new things, your market alt will need higher order capacity and your cyno alt could be turned into a covert cyno alt. Then later a covert recon cyno alt... then later, well you know where this is going.
How to Activate Dual Character Training
There are several ways to activate this feature. The first, and most obvious one is to right-click any PLEX you have in your account possession and select “Activate Dual Character Training”. Dual Character Training is account based, not bound to an individual character, so there is no harm enabling it from any character so long as you are sure this is the account you want to apply it for. Just remember time will count down as soon as it is enabled.
If you don’t have a PLEX as an item available in-game, another option is to go to the EVE Online Account Management website, log in and activate the service from there, with the same particularities as mentioned above.
Alternatively, attempting to start skill training on an account´s second character will cause a notification to appear. This message states if you wish to enable Dual Character Training by using a PLEX you already have, or by acquiring one from the EVE Market or account management.
How Dual Character Training Works
Activating Dual Character Training on your account allows two characters to be trained at the same time for 30 full days. However, an important point to note down remains the system doesn't care which individual characters are trained, as long as the simultaneous limit is not reached.
For instance, you could have 3 characters named A, B and C on the same account; activating Dual Character Training allows any combination of A+B, A+C, B+C to be trained at the same time. This provides extra flexibility for the user wishing to train up several alternate characters.
Is Dual Character Training Time the Same as Account Main Game Time?
No, and this is a crucial detail to keep in mind. Buying 30 days of Dual Character Training will not extend your account expiration date at all – it will just enable this extra functionality during the specified period. If your account main game time expires while this new feature is running, Dual Character Training remaining time will be paused, so nothing will be lost until your account is re-activated again.
As an example, if you activated 30 days of Second Character Training while 13 days of regular account game time is left, you would have 17 days remaining of this feature paused when your account expires.
Which Character Training is Prioritized When Dual Character Training Expires?
By default, the most experienced character is always favored. That means in the event Dual Character Training time expires, the character with the least skill points available will be stopped.
Can Dual Character Training Time be Purchased Several Times at Once and Stacked?
For being a new and somewhat experimental feature coming out for Odyssey, Dual Character Training time will not stack up indefinitely for now. In practical term, that means that for the time being, it is not possible to renew Dual Character Training on an account until you have 7 or less days remaining for it. This may be changed in the future if and when CCP feels comfortable enough with this feature to allow full queuing.
Note that activated and remaining Dual Character Training time may be seen at any time in the Account Management page.
Reference Links
http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/dual-character-training/
https://secure.eveonline.com/MultipleCharacterTraining/
