Day 18: Daily countdown

Experience is a delivery device for skills, knowledge, and connections -- a trio that garner opportunity, advancement, and prosperity. Eve works much the same way.

Eve presents skills interestingly. Skills allow you and/or your ship to do stuff; while the label might change (feats, abilities, talents), they're a roleplaying game (RPG) trope, back to Dungeons & Dragons. In some games, your character's actions create "experience points," and you "level up" and improve a skill or two at various point thresholds. Usually, you choose to improve a skill relevant to your gameplay, but you're not required to. In the first Mass Effect, you could kill lots of bad guys with your pistol, then improve your pistol skills at level-ups -- or, instead, you could invest in persuasion or grenades, even if you rarely use those abilities.

I enjoy the Elder Scrolls games in part because skill progression works differently: to get better at something, you have to do it. Want to be a powerful swordsman? Swing one at bad guys. A lot. It's a lite version of the "10,000-Hours Rule" from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, or James Kirk telling a cadet that "we learn by doing."

Eve does its own thing, functionally and aesthetically. To start developing a skill, you acquire the relevant skill book -- digiliterally,* an item represented by an anachronistic tome.  (*My own portmanteaux: "literally," within the digital world's conceit. "My teammate literally stabbed me in the back with an energy sword!" complained the Halo player. No: your teammate did it digiliterally.) Skills take time to develop: sometimes five minutes, sometimes weeks. Once that countdown elapses, bam, you can do something new or better. Each skill has five levels of mastery, with stacking bonuses (e.g. an additional 5% boost in mining laser efficiency for each tier), and each level takes exponentially more time to reach. Some skills are prerequisites for others. The clock ticks in real time, and it ticks even when you're not logged in: my capsuleer right now is training Industry to level 5, and it won't be fully baked for nearly four days. It doesn't matter whether I play a lot or not at all during that span: come Monday morning, my character will reap a four-percent boost to manufacturing time.

At first, I lamented that Eve didn't have a more Elder Scrolls-esque recognition for "getting better" by doing. Maybe it's the educator in me. But, then it dawned on me that Eve's closest relation in this regard isn't an RPG, but rather the turn-based strategy game Civilization. (Note, again: strategy games, unlike RPGs, don't care too much about characterization or storytelling.) Civilization doesn't have skills per se, but it does have a technology tree: you invest time in unlocking technologies, from the wheel to nuclear physics, with each technology leading to another. Like an RPG's and Eve's skills, Civilization's technology allow players to do stuff: fly, communicate, wage war, and foster commerce.

The skill queue has a neat mechanic without a parallel in Civilization: all skills in the queue must begin within 24 hours. I could line up 23 hours of quickie skills, and then one more that will take 26 days to train (e.g. Advanced Weapon Upgrades V, clocking in for me at 25 days, 19 hours and 50 minutes) -- but, until the time remaining dips below 24 hours again, I can't add anything more to the in-game queue. This is a nice preventative against, say, lining up a month's worth of skills, then returning to the game world as something of a badass (although lacking commensurate knowledge, something else I mentioned at the beginning and about which I'll write later).

No surprise, there are myriad third-party tools and apps that help players plan their skill queuing much further ahead then the 24-hour start-time requirement. I use Vitality and Aura. It's daunting to see that it will take 100 days to fulfill the remaining minimum skill requirements to fly a kind of über ship that caught my eye. But, it's also been nice to see the counter for piloting a new miner tick down to just three days. And, hey: while the clock ticks down for the big ship, I'll use that miner to harvest resources to start building smaller ships, or just harvesting ore to sell to pay for the big guy. One thing leads to the next.