Character Progression
In Stars Reach character progression will be skill based. There will be no character levels or level ups, and no classes to choose from at character creation. (The will be some Playable Species to pick from though).
Instead, you get to mix and match a certain number of skills you want to train, chosen from a full list over 40 possible skill trees. Within those trees, skill can be dependent on each other - that means you can only learn a subsequent skill, after having learned the prerequesite one. The image to the right shows a diagram of the economy. All skill-trees will (including combat and service-based skills) be able to participate in the player-driven economy in some way.
The primary method of training skills is by using them - but there can be other methods of training for individual skills as well. For example crafting skills are going to earn (additional?) training when the crafted items are being actively used by other players. There might be more special training options like this.
There is a limit to how many skills you can learn at once - but how exactly that is going to work and what that number is going to be, is not yet known. You can disable learned skills though, they call that "putting it out of practice", thus opening slots for new skills to learn. If you later want to switch a disabled skill back on, you can put it in practice again. You will not loose any training in the process - your re-enabled skill will be at exactly the same level it was when you disabled it. The process of re-enabling a skill will some time though. How much exactly is still to be determined, but developers have mentioned "a week" as a preliminary value.
