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Most massively multiplayer online (MMO) games handle skills, abilities, and leveling the same way. You create your character by choosing your race, which sets some stats, then you choose your class, which may modify those stats further and add some features, and maybe you have some points to sprinkle on your stats and early skills before you drop into the game world to start a tutorial.

You level up by earning experience points via combat and quests, and gaining levels increments some of your stats, often based on your class and even race. These stats control your effectiveness in the game. Stronger players swing clubs better, smarter players fling magic better, and faster players dodge better. Leveling can also give a point or two to spend on special abilities or skills every so often.

Where to spend these points can be a difficult decision, but as time goes on player guides appear telling you the "right way" to spend points to get the most bang for your hard-earned skill point bucks. Skills in one area often keep you from trying skills in other areas without starting over, and your character joins a larger population of me-too players who have been configured to follow the "best" way of doing things. It behooves you to follow these guides since you're paying to play the game and want to get the most value and least frustration for your money. And if you discover these guides after you start assigning skills you think would be useful? Well, you can always start over.

EVE Online differs greatly from all of those other games. There are no levels, and your character's stats do not affect how you play the game. There aren't any experience points in the game, either, and your skills actually do not improve with use. To be fair, it does track your standing with various factions, and performing favors -- combat or otherwise -- for them does get recorded, but you don't receive the universal reward of experience points like you do in other MMO games. From the classical MMO standpoint this sounds almost heretical and at first glance doesn't seem to make sense, but a quick run through of how the skill system works should clarify things.

Skills Over Time
Personal advancement in EVE hinges partially on your skills and how valuable they make you to a corporation. Skills are learned in real time whether your character is playing the game or not, and skills have five levels, with some skills requiring others be present at a certain level before study can begin. Each level takes an increasing amount of time to achieve, and the act of studying a skill costs your character no money whatsoever. Skills not already in your repetoire are purchased as skill books, bringing money into play. Choosing to stop studying one skill and start choosing another loses nothing -- your progress towards that next level in that skill is preserved should you decide to return some day and finish it.

Some skills grant new abilities while others improve existing ones, and all of them operate passively, not needing to be specifically invoked to do their job. These can run the gambit from ones that affect ship performance -- increasing sub-warp speed, reducing the power a certain type of module needs from the ship to operate -- to character abilities like being able to place more orders on the interstellar market.

So if skills accrue automatically with time whether you're playing or not, where is the grind in the game? The grind comes in the form of money and, to a lesser extent, faction points earned with various NPC corporations and entities. Since the ships you can fly and the modules you can use on them are dictated by your skills, you are limited in ability similar to other MMOs, but you don't need to repeat any action unless it advances your goals or those of the corporation you choose to join.

Character Creation
Defining your character when you start play is merely an exercise in choosing a backstory followed by a decision as to where a bank of initial skill points will be spent. Your starting stats also are unique in this game, affected by your chosen backstory, but only have an impact on how quickly you learn certain skills. Skills each have a primary stat behind them, and usually a secondary stat, so having high scores in those stats make it easier for your character to learn those skills, but it doesn't prevent someone with low stats in those skills from taking longer to reach the same milestone.

The skill system isn't an either-or affair in EVE. In other words, while you choose to spend points in one skill in a conventional MMO over another, thereby at least temporarily cutting off that kind of gameplay for your character, in EVE you train over time and all skills accrue. Accrual can be halted or reversed if you fail to buy a clone with enough skill points to replace you if you're pod-killed, but as long as you're careful enough and earn enough money you can prevent the loss of precious time and points.

The Greenhorn Vs The Veteran
There are, however, a seeming multitude of skills to train, opening up a wide variety of abilities and skills. Certain modules need certain skills, so while you may outfit your space ship one way, a much more experienced pilot can fly the same ship with the same modules outfitted far more effectively simply because he or she has trained longer in the game. Indeed a much more experienced player can sometimes fit modules to the same craft that lower-level players couldn't because of the pilot's ability to make the CPU and energy system more effective.

At higher levels it can take several days to train skills, so it stands to reason there will be some specialization between players. That said, given enough time, players can be equal in ship piloting ability and module use, breaking down the game into one of pure skill between pilots should they go head-to-head. That isn't likely to happen anytime soon, however, as starting players come out of the gate with 800,000 skill points assigned and milestones mentioned for skill points number in the tens of millions. It certainly seems like the sky's the limit in this game as long as you hang in there and pay your subscription fees.

The Tools Make The Difference
With so much time invested in training and so many craft and modules to read to determine what order to train in, the age-old problem of "the right way" to train comes up. This has been addressed by unofficial third-party utilities that combine with open APIs tied to your paid account that let you construct training regimens in order to reach certain types of craft and other goals (see EVEMon). While you don't need to use them, you will be able to set and reach goals without much guesswork while using them. And combine that with a ship fitting tool (EVE Fitting Tool) to let you experiment with what kinds of ships you can build without having to drop money on modules you might not even be able to use based on your skill set and you have something that turns a deep game into a manageable one.

Good For You?
As someone who doesn't have time to grind everything to advance, being able to move up to better ships by managing skill training even on a passive basis sounds appealing. EVE's reputation is definitely not one of being friendly to casual players, so this is surprising to me, but having just finished up a 14-day trial of the game I've found that it's possible to enjoy oneself in lower-risk areas of the game. Which is better for you?

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons: Darwin's First Tree
Skill education: The Drone Bay podcast, episodes 1 through 10.