Greedy Goblin

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Business Thursday: less logins for pilots in training

Many of us have pilots in training who don't do anything else, just sit in a station and learn. Future supercapital pilots, pilots for sale and so on.

In EVE you train skills in real time and you can't queue more than 24 hours worth of skills. I mean the skill (therefore the queue) can end later than 24 hours, but it must start within the next 24 hours. In case of training pilots most of the time is spent not by managing the skill queue, but the login process. Since I stopped ganking, only 2 accounts actually play out of the 11, so the other 9 only learns. I needed a method to decrease the login numbers as much as I can.

Captain Obvious says: look at EVEMon and log in only when there is 1 minute left of the last skill and fill the queue. Captain Obvious probably doesn't have to sleep or go to work. For the rest of us, pushing the login time around isn't possible. Let's say you log in to EVE every evening, in a 4 hours long window. You fire up EVEMon and it says that a training pilot has 2 hours empty queue. The next skill in the plan has the following ranks:
  1. 6 mins
  2. 25 mins
  3. 2:25
  4. 13:50
  5. 3 days 6 hours
You can queue up rank 1, 2 and 3, placing only 3 hours worth of skills into your queue. You either have to log in later today to queue the next one or hope that tomorrow you don't come home an hour late, have ISP failure or server error, because that case your training will end.

However there is a solution:
The last skill on the picture, Wing Command 5, is 95% completed. When I logged in, it was the only skill in the queue with 8 hours empty queue. Instead of putting skills to that 8 hours hole, I put 22 hours worth of short skills before the current. 24 hours later all these skills will be complete. Such pre-inserting of short skills allows you to get rid of them fast while always having a long skill at the end, so you don't have to schedule your login. After you finished the short skills, your login frequency can be further decreased. Of course you should prioritize the skills that are prerequisites of others because you can't insert skills until their prerequisite is complete, being in the queue is not enough (you can queue Gallente Frigate 4 after Gallente Frigate 3, but you can't queue Gallente Cruiser after them).

2 comments:

Thoris said...

I usualy start by skilling a whole bunch of stuff to level 3 or (1x) skills to level 4. Then i skill all the levels 4 and 5 and only have to log in on that char every couple days or weeks.

But yea like you i try to optimize the que for max lenght when room is left. Sometimes ther's shorter skills inbetween when a level 5 is finished and gives access to an advanced or specializing skill.

Anonymous said...

Or you could buy the characters you need with the Scrooge McDuck level's of isk you have, and save yourself the time and headache.