quote Robert Ninja

• 1 - Skills boost your abilities in a certain area. Basically, all the ownage Snake is capable of is taken away from you and you have to dedicated yourself to certain skills.

For example, to stop the shotgun being a really slow weapon, setting one of your skills to it allows you to pump it and reload the shells faster. Same with assault rifles, except the reload time is hastened and the recoil dampened. It should say what the skill does when you select it.

To increase skills simply select one of them as a skill and play the game. Over time, if you've been using the skill, it will advance. The bad part though, is that to use the skill on its second level, you'll have to go back to the skill menu.

From here, you'll see the 4 slots again. Remove one skill, go to the skill you've advanced in and press R1, it will slide across to it's second level. This will make the skill better (assault rifle having even less recoil and aim much better) but will take up 2 slots instead of one, lessening the amount of skills you can have set. You can never be master at everything in one game. You'll never be as skilled as Snake with your character.

Skills have 3 levels, but it doesn't mean the lesser levels bad. I sometimes set my CQC back to level 2 so I can use shotgun level 2 as well for action packed levels. Mix and match, don't always stick to one thing. It's nice for a change, too.

I've noticed level 3 skills can sometimes surpass Snake's ability (except for CQC lol). Like the knife, you can swing it much faster than snake when it's set to level 3.

You can still perform actions without skills. Like, I can still shoot a pistol without having pistol set. Bad thing is though it usually sucks then. Like CQC not even set as a major skill, you can't even grab people, you just throw them to the ground and take a tiny bit of stamina off. Set your skills to the things you usually use, you'll survive longer. don't be afraid to change em for appropriate missions, either. It's never permanent

Check this out to see the advantages of full CQC ability.
To slit throats, you need level 3 Knife and level 1 CQC, that means all your skills for one action. Whether it is worth it depends on the amount of times you manage to put yourself in situations like that. It's all for you and nobody else.

quote Order66

Also helpful information for leveling up, the higher the level of the person you kill, ko etc.. the more experience you get. For example if you went into a room full of level 16 pro's and only killed one the whole round you would still most likely get a + still.

quote Uhud

does that mean if you kill someone who is much lower level than you, it has no effect? example I'm level 8 and i go into a mixed room from levels 0-16 and I keep owning the level 0 dude. im guess it wont have any effect on my leveling? not sure...