"There is no EXP or Level system. There's now a system where you accumulate points in battle that go toward your progress for making your character stronger." - Smug moronic Final Fantasy XIV developer who doesn't realize it's the same thing.
Not quite.
For us old-school pen & paper RP types, it's the difference between level-based systems (D&D, for example, which is also the system that most computer RPGs use) and skill-based systems (Cyberpunk, for example).
In a skill-based system, there are no levels. No arbitrary "hey, I just got better at everything I do" moments. Points are accrued on a smaller scale and invested as the player desires. Individual skills are increased one at a time.
Most systems these days adopt measures of both. Points or skills are awarded arbitrarily as levels increase, and some of those points are discretionary. Those are, however, still level-based systems.
I have my doubts as to how effective that can really be in a computer RPG, really. I suppose we'll see. I expect that there will be difficulties in presenting a system that is reasonably balanced, sufficiently discretionary, and still entertaining to work with.
In theory, the primary difference between FFXIV and FFXI will be that in FFXI, one can assume a certain level of commonality between two characters with the same job setup, with gear defining the majority of role variation (discounting shifts from merit points). If FFXIV is a purely skill-based system, things could well be completely different. Two characters with arguably the same "job" could have completely different skill sets.
A major balancing issue, in that event, would be creating a sufficient level of variation in each job without making the jobs entirely similar, while avoiding the trap of creating what is, in fact, only a single viable path for each job.
Part of the problem I had with WAR before I quit was that while each class had three upgrade paths, with a theoretical wide variety of possible configurations, there were typically only 1 or 2 that were truly viable for each class. Lots of functionally useless, or extremely specialized abilities.