I've heard stories about EVE Online, stories about crazy schemes and wars and how you could do anything, be anything, as long as you invested the time (and sometimes money) in it. This is all very interesting, of course, but trying the game myself was something I needed to do and I understand some of it after a weekend of playing it, but it's not for me, it's quite boring, to be frank, full of seemingly useless systems and confusing progression. Is EVE an MMO? Probably, but not a World of Warcraft style MMO. I'd rather play one of these, they have less freedom in them, but everything you might be able to do is easily understood.
This is a bit confusing...
I'm quite surprised that the tutorials in EVE are functional as they are. They explain most of the basic stuff, warping around, shooting down enemies, using the UI, then quests will teach you how to mine, manufacture, scavenge, use your skills, hack, analyze, scan (using drones and a weird scanning mini-game where you place orbs in space to track specific things) and refine ores into materials. This is all fine and good and I've understood how to outfit my mining ship with a few lasers, drones, expanded cargo hold capacity and go asteroid hunting in 0.6 space to try and find things to sell.
But that's it. I've made about 10 million ISKs in a few hours and that's not too bad (if you need about 500 000 000 to buy a 30-days game pass) but I have absolutely zero idea of what to do now. There is no comprehensible guide to professions that would be direly needed. What should I spend my money on right now? What's my next goal? Do I need to wait until I can afford a better mining laser? Mine away until one of my skills is at level 4? Get ship X, Y or Z? Should I sell my ore as-is or refine it to something else and then build things to sell them? I didn't have any kind of info like that, left to ask other players or browse the internet. For the sake of my own look at this game, I've decided not to.
How I would fix this
Add more tutorials. I know that CCP wants this game to be a breathing, living, evolving game with player-ran economies and things like that, but better surfacing progression would help tons. Having a little box with recommended build paths for certain professions (even adding estimated money required to do it and the money you can make by using the suggested gear) would've helped me want to keep playing, because as of right now, I just didn't know what would be better, how much of an upgrade it would be, and what my end-game was.
...but very interesting
I have nothing against EVE, it's really an interesting game that exists since forever and I'm sure that being part of a large corporation working towards some goals (At this point I don't know what corporations can do in this game) and fighting in massive space battles can be amazing. I'm a solo player and I don't like fighting others, so these things maybe aren't for me and being a space miner/trucker sounded like a plan for me. Exploration was too risky and scouting would've been useless by myself. The skill system is well realized, with skills continuing to level even when you're offline (even tho I wish they would be more upfront with the uses of the skills) but without a clear goal in mind, I can't continue playing it.
Travel is kind of a chore because you need to use jumpgates and warp everywhere and using autopilot kinda slows things down. I'm sure you can get faster ships (the little 327m/s I had was too slow for sub-warp travel) and upgrade your autopilot,, but for the part I've played, it was quite difficult to get from point A to B. Also the game is very annoying about containers and the things you put in them. You have to drag and drop your ore from your ship to the station before you can refine/use it even tho you're right there. Same thing with quest items and rewards, you need to put them into your ship because they're given to you in the station. The number of times I had to warp back somewhere because I forgot an item (because they gave it to me in the 'station' container, not in my ship). That could be done a little better, at least on the manufacturing/refining side of things.
All and all, EVE Online is not for everyone, it's very much a spreadsheet in space (even if the graphics are okay) and what you want to do in it determines how much time you'll have to spend. It is probably also a better game to play socially with help from pros and tutorials open left and right. That being said, it's not for me. Looking at MMOs can be too much sometimes and I don't have suggestions for many of the points I'm raising and that's because too much of this game hangs on so many systems that it becomes too much for me.