Its basically about your character fitting as a member of an organisation, such as the “knight templars” or the “grave robbers”. If you meet the criteria of membership which for that game was loosely set up by the game master you can join the organization. Once in it you can study the skills which belong to the job you got. This is something I believe would work rather well in the MMORPG, especially with the orginsational aspect functioning as a model to group players into a social structure which is under the control of the game. Basically an introduction to the guild play which is a bit too hardcore within the standard design.

The combination of ship-type and player-skills is exactly the type of system I like. The two elements are mostly orthogonal, but there will be certain combinations that aren’t going to work. Still, you feel like you have a lot more personal choice, instead of getting shoe-horned into playing a class you don’t like.

One quick addendum – if you haven’t recently taken a look at Eve, it’s definitely worth spending a few weeks with it. It has some of the most interesting design decisions I’ve seen in an MMO. It suffers in the marketplace for it because it creates a game that isn’t that broadly accessible, but it’s a fascinating look at how an MMO need not look like Everquest or UO.

The skill system in particular mitigates some of the issues you seem to have with most skill systems. Team roles are focused by ship choice – even if you have every skill, what you can do with those skills is strongly limited by the ship you’re currently flying. Each ship has a handful of normal roles that it can play, and in a team situation you tell everyone what variety you’ve set your ship up for. The non-combat systems in the game are deep enough that there are plenty of people who don’t ever do combat. You can easily mine, trade, invent, and manufacture for your entire life in the game without touching a missile system.

This doesn’t mean you can roll radically different characters, though. You end up being defined by what kinds of ships you can fly well – and those ships have reasonably static roles. So you’re not really going to be a Melee Mage with Heal Other in Eve because there isn’t really a ship that fits that role well. But what you can do it is have one ship fit as a close range battleship as well as a logistics battlecruiser and explore both those paths.