So I've been thinking about something that would make you feel like you're making progress on your way to that proto suit. Right now, you can only put points into a skill if you have all the points required to bring it up to the next level. What I'm proposing is allowing you to put however many skill points into a skill you want, regardless if that would bring you up a level or not.

How it would work

I have 5,000 SP and want to put it into a skill, say, Scrambler Pistol Operation, which is currently at 0. I dump 5,000 SP into the skill. I don't have it at level 1 yet, so I can't use anything beyond militia, but I now have a picture / bar that shows I've made progress to this goal. If I'm already capped out and am gaining 1k SP per match, I can watch this bar move after every game I play.

Why

Free to play games can only thrive if you're interested in the content and feel a drive to progress. What this would do, rather than the current "tiered" system, would show visible progress towards a goal. It is much more satisfying to see a bar slowly fill up than to continuously play game after game with no changes being made other than the pool count.

In the example above, a new player would see visible progress being made towards his goal. This may make them want to stay on to fight another few matches to see that bar go higher. I feel that having a visual representation would give that feeling of "almost there" better than numbers would.

If this were Eve, I wouldn't even have brought this up since everyone that flies internet spaceships is extremely proficient in Excel / OpenOffice, however we're working with FPS players. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying FPS players are stupid. This is an entirely different playerbase that, for the most part, doesn't want to deal with "math", "numbers", or "spreadsheets", but wants to be able to quickly glean what they need to know from simple graphs so they can get back to running and gunning.

TL;DR - Allow skill points to be spent, regardless of whether or not this would bring the skill up to the next level. Introduce a progress bar when allocating skill points to show current progress to the next level.

I would like to note that the proposed changes in no way, shape, or form, involve changing any skill requirements.

Lemme know what you think. There are flogs to your left and pig-friendly cookies to your right. Do with me what you will.