Eve Online has a few different resources. One of the resources is spacebucks, or isk, which is used to buy ships, equipment for the ships, books that teach you skills, and so forth. Another resource is loyalty points that you earn by doing missions. Loyalty points let you buy faction specific loot. Another resource is ore and minerals, which you mine from asteroid or get when you render down loot you don't need. This can be used to build installations and ships, but I'm nowhere near to that point yet. Another resource is faction standing, which you earn or lose based on missions succeeded and failed.

But the most important resources in Eve Online is outside of the game.

Read about it after the jump.

There aren't any classes in Eve Online. Instead, there are skills. What you can do, and how well you do it, is determined by your skills. You can't fly certain ships until the appropriate piloting skill is the required level. You can't use certain cybernetic implants, weapons, or spaceship modules without certain skills. And you can't learn certain skills without certain other skills. The skill system is arguably the foundation for the gameplay of Eve Online. And its based on a resource that exists outside the game.

You won't need to worry about this resource at first, because when you start your character, you've got a few skills for free. To get additional skills, you simply buy the book for the skill you want, click on the book, and your character starts learning the skill. To improve an existing skill, you simply click on the skill on your character panel, and your character starts leveling up. The cost? Time. Learning any skill takes time. Real time. And not "real time" like in a real time strategy game, but "real time" like in the real world.

The early skills might take ten minutes. So you click the skill and busy yourself with something else, and then when it's done, you click another skill to get it started. Your character can only learn or improve one skill at a time, so every minute that you don't have a skill in training is a minute of wasted character development.

But one of the most insidious design decisions in Eve Online is that you can't queue up skills. When my character has finished learning a skill, she'll be fallow until I tell her to train another skill. I can't just log in, queue up a month's worth of skills, and then come back in March to play. With the early ten-minute skills, it's no big deal. But then there are the skills that take several hours, and then there are the skills that take several days. And if I want to make the most of my character development, I should be there to start the next skill up when the previous one has trained.

I've actually set the oven timer while I'm watching TV so that I can pause a movie and log into Eve Online real quick. I've decided to wait fifteen minutes before I go on my daily run because my skill is almost done. I've gone to bed thinking that I need to remember to log in and get my next skill underway before breakfast the next morning. I've even installed a little program that runs in my task bar and tells me how much time is left for my skill. It can play an alert when my skill is done, or send me an email. Right now, it says I've got 5 hours, 16 minutes, and 2 second until Learning level IV is done.

What this means is that Eve Online necessarily intersects with Eve Offline, also known as real life. The limit to how powerful your character can be isn't level 70, because there no levels and therefore no level caps. Instead, there is only the amount of time it will take, eventually measured in years - yes, years - to create a character with advanced skills. The limit is how long you will live. You. You, the person reading these words, not you, the fake avatar inside the Eve Online servers. Your life span is the life span of your character's ability to level up.

Is that pathetic, or fascinating, or daunting, or insidious, or effective? Or some combination of them all? Is it a grind? Is it an anti-grind? Is it brilliant for being hands-off or wretched for folding itself into the real world? At this point, I have no idea. I just know that I've got 5 hours, 13 minutes, and 11 seconds to go until Chickley reaches Learning level IV.

Up next: a few choice words not fit for print
(Click here for the previous Eve Online game diary.)