My Eve online update....

I've seen the  number of players increase in the starter systems but not in the ratio I thought I would have seen. I expected more older accounts to come back online and the place to be totally flooded with new Alpha's. While the number of older characters back is greater in my view the flood of new new Alpha's has not really hit yet. For the older players the nostalgia will only last so long.
I guess it's like a trickle of water in a basin, small amounts over time = large buildup. Lets hope there is staying power in the new free Alpha's and that they do become a consistent thing.

I've not had a lot of real activities to do in the game. Nothing other than self imposed busy work.

Outside of the quick nostalgia of getting access to older characters (that I thought I'd never see again) I've been spending most of my in game time "sorting" those old characters out. Checking skills, running them through the career agents etc. Getting them through the basics.

It's all down to micromanagement of these new "alts". I have so many of them, 6 accounts with 7 characters.
- 3 (on 3 accounts) old trial ninja looters.
- 3 (on 2 accounts) my old pre sub game trials.
- 1 old character inherited from a transfer (1 account).

The older the character the more skills that need to be trained.
Running the characters through the starter/career agents is funding any skill books needed etc.

The three ninja characters have been the most neglected, I may form them into a corp and use them to be a base for "careless activities".
2 accounts with three characters are my old pre sub trials of Eve. Nostalgia to the max with them. I've been spending the most time on these as they need more attention to detail.
The other "inherited" character is all but done with just a few skills to clear up in the alpha list. This character with the pre Alpha trials characters mean more to me than the others I used as ninja's. I'll finish sorting them out sooner rather than later.
My 2 main old subbed accounts have 3 characters each. All are unsurprisingly maxxed out on the Alpha skill list bar one character which does has some room to learn a level or two of the allowed Alpha skills. So the free training is not going to waste on that account for now.

It's all busy work. My own doing from my own need to run these characters through the career agents and get them trained.

My thoughts on that are to finish off the career agents and leave them with a pve fit cruiser, T1 hauler and a mining venture. With the skills simmering along the way. The fewer the skills to learn the less I am likely to actually use them. Long term I see no reason to have them outside of nostalgia and being able to have them spare. Of all these alts I may end up only using my pre-alpha 60 day new account character which is currently still an Omega.

I've come to the conclusion that for anyone to get any value out of Alpha clones the player will have to subscribe. I dont' see this being taken up in a huge way but I also don't see a lot of people staying long term with the Alpha's for the same reason at least in a long term continuous way. To add to that mix I found it interesting that this poster found it hard to find ways to make money from Alpha's.

The ongoing patching of the expansion has resulted in 2 extra downtimes today which are understandable yet annoying.
Besides the known problems, I hope to not see any further "quirky" problems pop up.....