If you spend your first couple months getting the basic skills to Mine, Mission, Belt Rat, Trade and PvP, you should NEVER find yourself in a situation where skill training was wasted.

Taking your example of manufacturing, even if that activity isn’t how you’re going to blaze your trail through EVE, you can now produce your own combat ships for the price of supplies. You can provide corp mates with ships and ammo at reduced price too, which strengthens the corp, and have some more experience to share with newer players to the corp. You can spend a couple days and get yourself back into a tackling frigate or PvE cruiser, or immediately switch over to basic trading. These probably won’t pay as well as simple mining, but you can get straight to the point of doing them without waiting two months.

Diminishing returns and permanence are the strongest parts of EVE’ skill system. With diminishing returns you can do any basic activity to an acceptable and useful level relatively quickly, once you’ve found the area you really love, then you can specialize in it. Permanence means that if you have learned something once, you’ll never have to learn it again and can always switch over to doing it if you think it would be helpful.

So yeah that NEW activity isn’t as fun as you thought it would be, so go back to having fun doing what you did before and start working on opening up something else. If you weren’t having fun while you were training it, either EVE just isn’t your game, or you’ve been trying to play WoW/EQ/TR/ in space, not EVE.

Just so I do say something on the topic at hand though, I find the concept of the council interesting. However growing pains alone will make the first couple of years hell and I’m glad I’m not going to be on it for those. But five years from now I get the feeling we’ll look back on it fondly.

@Coherent: Yeah. Though I wonder if they get more subscription fees from “making people waste their paid account time” than they lose from people saying “well, screw that grind, I’m not gonna suffer through that again.” My guess is no :-)

@Julian: “we know how much real pull something like this has: As much pull as CCP wants it to have, and nothing more.” Yeah. And that is a very wide spectrum of possibility! Their real power could be very narrow, or CCP’s attitude could be an idealistic “we really want to let this virtual society govern themselves, even if they shoot themselves in the foot and cost us short-term revenue, because in the long term, that’s going to be the most interesting virtual world we can create.” Their background document certainly sounds idealistic. I agree it will be interesting to see!

About the skill system in EVE: The problem with the permanent skill system is that you can spend six months learning a skill that opens up an all-new player activity… only to discover that your new player activity is as boring as watching paint dry. If that happens, you’re just out the time – there’s nothing you can do to respec or recover that lost real-time character development.

So, suppose you spent 3-4 months developing a manufacturing guy because you like building stuff and want to make extra money… but then you discover that without exclusive plans, manufacturing stuff is a total dead end and factory time is insanely difficult to get and the whole thing is a huge hassle.

Well, too bad. Spend the next 3-4 months making better choices, LOL. But without playing a specific role, you don’t know if you’ll enjoy it! And you can’t play it without investing the time to train it!

So it’s a Catch-22 that’s designed to make you guess blindly about what part of the game will be fun for YOU and god help you if you’re wrong. It’s designed to make you waste your paid account time by making blind choices that can not be undone or reversed.

Attributes determine how fast you learn Skills. Skill Levels determine what other skills you can learn. If you want to min/max, just check the forums, there are a bunch of stickies on the newbie forums about character creation.