The Temptation of Alts

In most MMOs, there exists the phenomenon of the "alt."  I have always hated the idea of alts, especially since I play Eve Online as a bit more of an RPG than a lot of other people do.  I think that having a second character is really not good for the game in terms of how much it encourages metagaming; in a strict RP atmosphere, you would have to keep those two characters perfectly separate to prevent what probably comes closest to "cheating" in an RP-heavy game.  That's why many games that enforce strict RP generally simply don't allow more than one account (well, they at least try to thwart it).  I also think that it dilutes the focus on your main character, because you aren't playing them to the best of your ability.  It also means that restrictions on your main character -- for instance, in Eve, if your sec status is low enough, you can't fly to the highsec markets -- mean nothing, because you can make an alt to get around those relatively easily.  And it makes spying much easier than it would be otherwise, or at least the consequences for getting caught would be much higher.

Unfortunately, for pay-for-play games, multiple accounts is good for business.  More accounts means more money and higher subscriber numbers, which are both good things for companies to show to investors.  That means that alts aren't just allowed, in many cases they are encouraged.  In Eve, for instance, the number of people running multiple accounts is probably at least close to 50%.  Because you can't just grind a character up to the top of the game in a week, many players have second, third, fourth, even fifth and sixth accounts to have characters with various specialties.  Some people (notably the ubiquitous macrominers, Eve's version of the gold farmer) have a half dozen accounts to run medium-scale mining operations all on their own.

Currently, CCP is running a promotion where you can get six months of a second account for 50 bucks, in the hope that you'll start your second account and then keep it after the six months are over.  For the longest time I have been vehement in my distaste for this but now I'm being tempted to give this a shot, for a variety of reasons.  I'd like to get a freighter and do some trading, but I don't really want to take away from my main character's training time, and because having a freighter alt in a non-wardeccable NPC corp is much safer, I'd rather have my hauling character not be in a player corp.  Another character would also mean I could do more research.  I could even use it to train up alts and then shift them to my main account (since you can't train two characters on the same account at the same time).  Should I do it?  I don't know.

I was discussing it with Jeremy, whose feelings are much the same as mine, but he gave in to the temptation a while ago.  He says that you should continue to complain about it and try to get the problem changed, but that not getting that second account keeps you at a big disadvantage.  This sounds to me like "everyone else is doing it, so why don't we?"  I just don't know if I want to compromise my principles like that.  Unfortunately, the more I think about it the more I think it would be a good idea, and I'm worried that before the beginning of November (when the offer expires) I'm going to give in.  I really hate that the whole business model is geared towards this sort of thing -- is it inevitable?  There has to be a way to discourage this sort of thing, but honestly, I can't think of one, other than charging a premium for a strict RP atmosphere, and that that is a small enough market already.