I got the 14 day free trial last night and I completed the first tutorial mission thingy. I found it to be pretty overwhelming, but most MMOs are when you first begin so it's not something exclusive to EVE.
I went with the route I imagine many traditional gamers chose. I'm going for the combat path, and hopefully I can become a pirate or perhaps join a group of pirates so we can pillage and rape as a swarm.
One thing I must say is that I really like the interface as there's a newbie chat box open as soon as you drop into the game where you can ask questions and get swift answers any time you're confused about something. There are a lot of menus to navigate but I think I'll grow used to that in a week at most.
The slow and calm nature of the game is a double edged sword. On one hand, it's a nice experience to be slowly drifting in space, warping from one place to another, orbiting enemy ships as you watching two pieces of titanium shoot lasers at each other.
On the other hand, I wanted to do a quick quest before I left for work and what felt like 5 minutes was actually 30 minutes gone. This isn't because I was having barrels of fun, it's just that by the time you read the mission, warp to the location, wait 40-60 seconds for your ship to destroy one enemy ship, close into enemy ship's debris to pick up some loot, and travel back to the drop-off point to finish up, you've just completed one quest in the time it took me to complete 5 when I was LV1 on WAR.
The game mechanics sound really cool but I want to see if they are fun when you put them into practice. I like the idea of taking contracts from bigger companies where REAL players pay me ISK to escort transport ships who are also REAL players in case of an enemy attack by more REAL players.
Skills taking time to learn isn't a huge deal for me, even if the high level ones can take a month to learn. There will be plenty of other things I can do for that month in the game, like going into lawless zones and ambushing ships for money or amassing some spare cash by taking contracts from players.
EVE would be a nice secondary MMO due to it's passive gameplay style. Even when you're in the game, you're not doing a whole lot but looking at various eye candy. This isn't a bad thing, it's just another way of doing things though some may not like it. I look forward to seeing how much I can learn about the game in these 14 days.
