It depends entirely on how you define 'benefits'.
Is being able to participate in events, or have scenes run for a specific need (by staff, by fellow players, by either) a benefit? What about participating in non-GM'd RP? (A game designed more along the lines of online tabletop may not allow this, or allow this to 'count' for anything. Similarly, a game that is heavily coded may not allow completely realistic and reasonable events to unfold if there's no code to support it.)
I don't consider the above 'benefits'; I consider the ability to tell stories with others -- as GM, without a GM amongst players with understood parameters (adherence to policy and the system and the game reality of the setting), or GMed by either staff or players as either is willing or able -- the point of being somewhere in the first place.
If I have to jump through extraordinary hoops to accomplish these things, I wouldn't play there. Nor would I set up a game to run in this way, because that would just be creating more bureaucrazy and overhead that I have to maintain and support as a staffer. I'm not opposed to simple requirements: putting in a basic +request, or potentially using a simple system of resource allocation that prevents a small handful of people from overwhelming the resources of the game to provide for all players (staff time, GM time, etc.).
When it comes to individual character advancement, I am very biased in favor of 'earned', to the extent that the 'just handed out' portion I've considered implementing remains consistent and has a 'catch up' metric to not benefit early adopters to the detriment of new arrivals, but it's such a small amount it's fairly inconsequential. Key to this is providing a wide variety of means to earn XP/CP/points/whatever you're working with. This is because different players have different strengths, and ultimately I believe in rewarding the player's contribution to the game (as a community) as much as anything any given character has learned or accomplished.
This means you can do what Apos describes quite well: reward the behavior you want to encourage, whatever those behaviors may be. It may be volunteering to help newbies at certain times, it may be running plots, it may be creating on-grid businesses, it may be creating new items in character, writing up specs for items/magic/rosters/what-have-you for the game on the whole to benefit from out of character, going for the compromise rather than the kill, taking a loss... the list is practically endless. You can cap this if you need to, but I'm not personally inclined to low or universal caps for a variety of reasons.
