Editing Skills and Implants (section)

===Omega Clones, Skill Injectors, and Expert Systems===

Omega clones, Skill Injectors and Expert Systems bring us to the increasingly gray area where real-world money can enter into the equation. Whether or not you are willing to spend actual money on your EVE character is your decision to make, and this section is only intended to give you a better idea of your options. Take the information as you will, but please use your best discretion if you decide to put actual money into your character, and don't spend more than you want to or can afford. 

Before jumping into the possibilities for reducing your training time with real-world funds, a brief explanation of PLEX is in order. PLEX is sort of a middle ground between ISK and actual money. You can buy PLEX with real money, you can sell PLEX for ISK, and you can buy PLEX with ISK. The cost to buy PLEX with real money is set by CCP (the company that owns the game), but the exchange rate between PLEX and ISK is market-driven as with other EVE commodities. 

Whether having a direct and transparent route between in-game currency and out-of-game currency is a good thing is the subject of much debate, but for our purposes here we only need to acknowledge that it is the case, for better or worse. 

====Omega Clones====

The simplest way to speed up your training is to upgrade to an Omega clone, which is what EVE calls its premium or paid subscription. Omega clones have double the training speed of free-to-play Alpha clones. You can purchase Omega time by the month for real-world money, or you can pay for it with PLEX that you buy from other players with ISK. 

There are other perks that Omega players enjoy, but for this section on skill training we'll just note that Omega clones train faster, get access to more skills, and can train as many skills as they want with no cap on total skill points per character. Enough said.

====Skill Extractors and Injectors====

A skill extractor is a purchasable item that allows a player to remove a certain amount of skill points from a character; the usual amount is 500,000 skill points, although there are smaller versions that are somewhat less expensive. Once the extractor is full, it's known as a skill injector. Skill injectors can be used in two ways. 

The first possibility is for the skill points to be injected back into the same character, but into different skills than before. This is a way for experienced players to change careers for a highly trained character. 

The other possibility is for the injector to be sold on the market, allowing another player to purchase those skill points and inject them into one of their character's skills, shortening or eliminating the training time for those skills. Skill injectors are a free-market item, which means that they sell for as much as people are willing to pay. 

Daily Alpha Injectors are a type of skill injector that, as the name implies, can only be used for Alpha clones, and only once a day. Each injector adds 50,000 skill points to be allocated as the player likes, and skill points from these injectors can be used to exceed the Alpha skill point cap. These can be purchased with ISK at market value, or with real-world money at a set price. Whether these are a good deal or not varies based on supply and demand within the EVE markets. 

The net effect here is that you can spend the ISK you earn to shorten your training time. You could also spend the ISK that you get from selling PLEX to shorten your training time. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is for you to decide, and whether you want to take advantage of that situation is also for you to decide.

====Expert Systems====

Expert Systems can only be bought with real-world money. These are essentially sets of skills, chosen to support a specific career path, that you can rent for one week at a time. Depending on who you ask, Expert Systems are a good way to try out a career to see if you like it, a starting boost to make new players' first few days easier, a completely useless feature you can easily do without, and a blatant ploy by CCP to sucker new players out of a little cash up front. Or some combination of those things. Here we'll focus on the skills granted by Expert Systems for exploration, and how useful brand-new players are likely to find them. Whether Expert Systems are a good thing or not, and whether you care to use them, is up to you.

Going back to the very first part of this section on skills, you might recall that there are some skills that you should probably train to level 3 as soon as possible. As far as those particular skills, an exploration Expert System will start you out with Racial Frigate 3, Astrometrics 3, Astro Rangefinding 3, Archaeology 3, and Hacking 3. With those skills already trained, you should be able to fly a T1 frigate out into a hisec system, find a wormhole to j-space, and scan down a relic or data site there. You'll have a reasonable chance of a successful hack, if you have a decent understanding of the mini-game and above average luck. Without those skills, you might get stuck finding a site in j-space to hack, and it's unlikely that your hack will be successful without a very heavy dose of good fortune. 

You can check out the rest of the skills that come with the Expert System by looking at the tab in your in-game character sheet (don't bother looking at the EVE website for details, because for some reason they aren't there). Here's a general summary of what you'll find there in addition to the essential skills just mentioned:

Long Range Targeting and Target Management can be useful if you want to use a cargo scanner to check out your cans before hacking them. Signature Analysis and Sensor Compensation are less useful: you don't need fast targeting for cans that don't move, and anyone who could be jamming your sensors could just kill you instead. 

Evasive Maneuvering and Warp Drive Operation are useful skills, but the align time you'll get from Evasive Maneuvering 3 as opposed to the Evasive Maneuvering 1 that you'll get even without the Expert System isn't going to make your align time crisp enough to save your ship without the right modules. Warp Drive Operation will help you avoid those situations where you have to initiate your warp twice, although that isn't a very serious problem in most circumstances. 

There are a lot of shield and armor related skills included that vary according to which racial Expert System is chosen, and how important they are is debatable. On the one hand, a determined and moderately skilled explorer hunter will destroy you with or without shield and armor improvements. On the other hand, your ship comes with shields and armor, and it can't hurt to make them a bit better since you're going to be bringing them along anyway. You probably won't run into any NPC enemies (generally called "rats") that will be just dangerous enough for better shields and armor to make a big difference, but fortune does favor the prepared. 

Probably the most useful of the skills included that aren't specific to exploration are the sort that help you manage your resources and fitting. You'll get Capacitor Management 3, Capacitor Systems Operation 3, CPU Management 4, Electronics Upgrades 3, Energy Grid Upgrades 3, and Power Grid Management 4. Some of these will give you more resources for using modules in-flight, and others will make it easier to fit different modules to your ship. How much benefit any particular one will be for your specific situation will vary, but all things considered it's a decent collection. 

Possibly the best way to determine whether an Expert System is worth it to you is to look at the skills it provides and figure out how much sooner you can start using those skills with the Expert System than without it.  Just looking at the skills that have an immediate and direct impact on exploration, and that you don't get for free as starting skills (Racial Frigate 2 and 3, Astro Rangefinding 2 and 3, Archaeology 2 and 3, and Hacking 2 and 3),the overall training time at the Alpha rate of 15 points per minute is 5 days and 18 hours. 

So, an Expert System that provides those skills immediately will put you almost 6 days into your exploration training from the very beginning. If you queue up those same skills to train normally while the Expert System is active, you will finish training them to the Expert System's level about one day before the Expert System expires and the skills revert to only what you have trained. 

Is that worth it? It's your choice, and hopefully we've made it a little easier to see the whole picture.