EVE is a massively multiplayer game, set in a world of galactic proportions. This online universe is governed by a hyper-capitalistic economy where space flight is the path to all commerce, communication, and conflict. Your mission is to establish yourself as a major competitor, trusted by your friends, feared by your enemies. To accomplish this, your principle tools -- apart from an impressive array of sophisticated equipment, customizable space ships and in-game corporations -- will be your natural business acumen, social skills, Machiavellian thinking and cunning combat strategies.

Set tens of thousands of years in the future, EVE Online is a breathtaking journey to the stars, to an immersive experience filled with adventure, riches, danger and glory. With nearly a quarter of a million subscribers worldwide inhabiting the same virtual universe, EVE features a vast player-run economy where your greatest asset is the starship, designed to accommodate your specific needs, skills and ambitions. EVE offers professions ranging from commodities trader to mercenary, industrial entrepreneur to pirate, mining engineer to battle fleet commander or any combination of these and much more. From brokering business deals to waging war, you will have access to a diverse array of sophisticated tools and interfaces to forge your own destiny in EVE.

Skill Trading is a new option for EVE Online players to use Skill Extractors to remove accrued skillpoints from one character in order to create an item called a Skill Injector.  That Skill Injector can then be traded to another character--typically for in-game currency via the markets of EVE--and used to apply a pool of skillpoints to the second character, boosting whatever skill levels they want to apply the skill points to.

In essence, Skill Trading is trading character experience from one character to another, a particular bonus for any secondary (or “alt”) characters if a player’s main character has a surplus of skillpoints in areas he or she might not currently use. It’s also a way for any pilot to reassign skills and further craft their characters, accelerate supporting skills, quickly get into an Alliance’s fleet doctrine, or jump into a new ship class a bit quicker than waiting out the training time.

EVE Online players have long been able to sell whole characters to each other through a forum-based marketplace known as the Character Bazaar. With each sale comes the history of the character, its name, and possibly its assets--but also its reputation, good or bad. While there is still a place for characters to change hands in the bazaar, Skill Trading offers more granular control and flexibility over character progression.

Skillpoints can only enter the game by being trained over time, after which players can now choose to extract and trade them to other players. Player-driven economies are the hallmark of EVE Online and Skill Trading follows the same principles that have been active in New Eden for over a decade.

Skill Extractors are available in the New Eden Store for Aurum, a secondary in-game currency, and via account management directly. They can also be placed on the markets as well, so purchase via in-game currency ISK will be possible.

Extractors always require a fixed amount of skillpoints to fill up—500,000. Depending on the skillpoint total of a character, Skill Injectors may provide diminishing returns.  It is designed this way to favor skill transfers to younger characters while protecting the prestige associated with long commitment to a single character.

EVE Online has always been a universe of innovation, built upon the player-driven economies inside the game. Like the introduction of PLEX (Pilot’s License Extensions) years ago, which allow pre-purchase of a month’s subscription time to be sold and bought on in-game markets for in-game currency, Skill Trading offers a level of flexibility to EVE players who wish to trade valuable commodities between themselves.

The EVE Online Flight Academy has two new videos about Skill Trading and Skill Injectors. For more information on Skill Trading, check out this page and read the latest dev blog.

Today’s update brings a host of other improvements to EVE, including:

• The ability to inject skills at any time regardless of requirements
• The ability to add untrained skills to a skill queue as long as they come after prerequisites
• Combat music for engagements
• Wreck hitpoint rebalancing
• Newly seeded skills for the upcoming and massive EVE Online: Citadel expansion’s Force Auxiliary capital ships and new fighters
• New Camera controls are updated and now opt-out. View the camera options in this YouTube walkthrough.

A primer on how Skill Training works in EVE Online

Unlike other class-based or grind-based character progression systems in other games, EVE ’s characters grow over time, in real-time, based on the choices of players. Each trainable character (usually one per account) can train one skill at a time and each skill has five levels. Each level of skill trained gives you a bonus to a particularly aspect of gameplay (such as 5% better damage with missiles), unlocks the ability to fly new classes of ships, or can do other things like allow you to place factories on planets or anchor your own starbase. Assuming you have pre-requisite skills trained, you can add skills to your queue and they will train in the order you put them in, growing your character’s abilities over time regardless of whether you are logged in or actively playing. Each level of a skill completes in a fixed amount of time according to your character’s attributes, any attribute-boosting implants or boosters it is using, and the difficulty and level of the skill (again 1 to 5) it is training. You permanently receive the bonus of that skill level and the next skill in your queue immediately begins training.

With this system, a character’s abilities grow over time and getting better in whatever areas players want to improve them in. There is no experience grind in EVE. If you want to switch from a DPS role to a Healer role or from a Hauler to an Explorer, you do so by simply boarding a different ship or changing your modules to suit your needs as long as you have the pre-requisite skills to do so.  Since each skill level is capped at level five, relatively new players can become numerically competitive with decade old veterans in specific gameplay areas and those same vets can still enjoy a wide array of skills should they decide to shift their in-game roles on the fly.