I’ve fallen into the  “Alt-Zone” once again. This time in Oblivion.  After playing my Argonian, and really liking some of his special racial abilities (namely speed, virtual immunity to poison and disease, and the ability to breath under water – esp. helpful for one of the mage guild quests), I was curious what the Khajit might have to offer.  I also wanted to see if I couldn’t really stick with a melee style character this time.

Now some (a lot) of folks would groan loadly that I made a Khajit melee character, but that’s another one of my “hallmarks.” Creating unusual characters.  I’ve never been a “min-max’er” type of player, so that gives me the freedom to be “creative” (stupid?) with some of my character builds. Anyways, I got Sabnach out of the sewers and on his way to join the fighters guild.  I did pretty good using a sword, which really isn’t my playstyle, but I was determined to have a successful melee character in my Oblivion repetoire.

I’ve done the first few Fighter’s Guild quests – which reminded me how annoying it is going back and forth between towns to get my contracts – and I’m doing fairly well at sticking with melee.  But there are times when it’s just too tempting to whip out the bow and “sneak-attack” one-shot kill things, or just blast ’em with a flare. Must resist the urge – but it’s SO much more efficient – it’s painful! LOL 

My other active game at the moment is EVE Online.  It’s very difficult to be an alt-o-holic in EVE since they’ve got a huge design flaw – you can’t train more than one character at a time. Now the EVE fanboys are going to say they do that “for balance,” and that’s just bullshit.  They do it for economics.  It forces people to pay for extra accounts just so they can add some variety to their plate of playstyles. So, of course, I have two accounts, which isn’t too bad since I’ve heard of several people paying for up to four accounts.  It isn’t a balance issue, people are making multiple characters anyway, with the side benefit to CCP that CCP gets extra revenue. 

But I’ve got news for CCP – even if they allowed people to train multiple characters on each account, there would still be a lot of folks (like me) “multi-boxing” just for the sake of efficiency. I doubt they would take any kind of hit in the pocketbook nor in the balance arena if they would just wise up and allow multiple characters to train at the same time. 

That aside, I have four characters that I try to maintain in EVE.  Two on each account. Since I multi-box, I play two characters at time.  My current actively training characters are an Amarr miner and a Minmatar “guard” for my miner.  Markosias (Marchosias was already taken, grrr) should be able to fly a Maelstrom battleship this weekend. He’s currently flying a Hurricane. And I’m hoping  Orobas, who now flies the Caldari Osprey mining cruiser, will be in a Retriever mining barge, which I’ll need in order to make enough money for Marko to actually afford his Maelstrom.

My other two characters are mission runners. BubbaJoe is a Gallente trained in drones, so he currently flies a Myrmidon battlecruiser. And my Caldari, DJ RJ (created when I had visions of joining EVE Radio) is BJ’s missle boat back-up flying a Caracal, and DJ usually gets post-mission clean-up duty flying a Cormorant loaded with salvage gear. They currenly only have enough standing to run Level 2 missions, but soon they should be able to run Level 3’s. DJ RJ is trained enough to fly battlecruisers, so I’ll probably get him into a Drake very soon.