I've considered getting EVE but is it actually any fun if you don't like spending hours and hours mindlessly levelling up?
Nope!
The biggest aspect of EVE is the social and economic aspect. Essentially it's a realistic market simulator... that also has spaceships.
Eve is a sandbox. You can do pretty much anything you want. If you aren't enjoying what you are currently doing in the game, you can find something else to do.
The market in Eve is pretty amazing. Everything on the market, with the exception of blueprints and skillbooks, is being sold by another player. All of those items were either made by a player, or dropped by a rat (an NPC enemy; the Eve equivalent of a mob). The price of an item is completely determined by supply and demand.
In December there was player-organized event named "Hulkageddon". Participants were encouraged to suicide-gank (explained later) Hulks (the Hulk is the best mining ship in the game), and there were prizes for the people who got the most kills. Over 1000 Hulks were killed during the event, which lead to the price of Hulks almost doubling.
While the market is cool, I was never into trading. And mining/industry is just boring as fuck. I am a pure combat pilot.
In Eve, when you lose a ship, it is gone for good. You have to buy a new one, and for some ships, that can set you back quit a bit. Your adrenaline flows a lot more when you actually have something to lose in the fight. Because of that, combat in Eve feels, to me, completely different than combat in pretty much any other MMO. It also makes killing people more enjoyable, knowing how much it hurts them when they lose a ship.
The first time I tried the game was when Mids made a thread about it, a long, long time ago. I didn't know anyone else who played it, and the tutorials were terrible, so I just got bored and gave up after a while. I had no idea what you could do in the game. But then when I moved out of my parents house, my roommate had just started playing the game. His friends played, so I decided to give the game a second try, and the two of us joined their corporation (the Eve equivalent of a clan or guild).
It was a mercenary corp. In Eve, if someone pisses you off, you can declare war on them, and fight them in highsec (The "safe" space in Eve. There really is no safe place in Eve. Highsec is just saf
er) without Concord (the Eve police who keep order in highsec) interfering. But not every corp has the resources to go to war with people who are bothering them, so they hire mercenary corps to fight their wars for them. When I first joined the corp, it was relatively new, and the members who started it had been playing for less than a year, so they were still noobs (lol). We didn't have any contracts happening for the first few months I played, so I didn't actually get into PVP for about 4 months. The first time I PVP'd, I joined a gatecamp in lowsec, where we sat at a stargate, waited for people to enter the system, and then blew them up and took their stuff. But in lowsec, you lose security status when you shoot or kill people. Security status determines what space you are allowed in. 1.0 - 0.5 is called highsec. In highsec, there are the Concord police protecting people. If someone shoots you, Concord will come to save you, or at least avenge your death. In lowsec, 0.5 - 0.1 security space, there is no Concord, but there are guns on the gates and stations that will shoot criminals. In nullsec, 0.0 space, there are no guns on stations and gates, and you do not lose security status when you kill people. If your security status is below -2.0, you are only allowed in 0.9 space and below. If it's below -2.5, you can only go in 0.8 space, ect. until you are only allowed in lowsec. I managed to get my security status to -4.7 that night, because I didn't know that shooting escape pods makes you lose a ridiculous amount of sec. So there I was, a 4 month old noob who had never PVP'd before, and I was now stuck in lowsec, because Concord would shoot me if I tried to leave. The only space I could get to were two lowsec systems, Seyllin and Ane. Ane lead to one dead end 0.5 system, and Seyllin lead to a bunch of 0.7 and higher systems. So I had to stay out there until I got my security status up to at least -2.5, by killing rats, if I wanted to go back to the system where the rest of my corp hung out. Fortunately, those two lowsec systems were controlled by a corp that was friendly with us, so I hung out with them, and helped them defend the system from random neutral pilots who had the misfortune of finding themselves in our space. It took me 2 or 3 months to get my sec up high enough. During that time I got plenty of experience with PVP. That was what got me hooked on the game.
From there I participated in a bunch of contracts with my corp. Our CEO took the game very seriously, and he turned us into a respectable mercenary corporation. He had plenty of contacts, and people were always asking him for our help. Thanks to him we were getting a new contract pretty much every week. That went on for a long time, until the CEO randomly quit Eve, without telling anyone why. So then we no longer the contacts that the CEO had, and the second in command wasn't nearly as e-moral as the CEO was. We tried to get contracts, and we did pretty well without him. But eventually we realized that we enjoyed fighting people that pissed us off much more than we enjoyed fighting other people's fights. We also enjoyed just making other people miserable. So over time, we transitioned from a respectable mercenary corp to a corp full of griefers and pirates, who wouldn't hesitate to go to war with your corp if you pissed them off.
I stuck with that corp for a long time. But eventually I decided that I wanted to try 0.0 combat, and my corpmates were being douchebags, so I left the corp and joined a 0.0 alliance.
Another great thing about Eve is the
conquerable space. Alliances can literally own space in 0.0, and they spend much of their time fighting over it. Politics are a huge part of 0.0 combat, and if you make a bad move diplomatically, you can wind up shooting yourself in the foot, and it could be the end of your entire alliance.
The alliance I joined was named Sc0rched Earth. We were a pet alliance of Tau Ceti Federation, a primarily French-speaking alliance, who was a member of the Northern Coalition. We owned 35 systems, with 4 or 5 stations, and when I joined, there were 1,300 members in the alliance. The alliance was very well organized, and morality was high because they had just successfully fought off a massive invasion a week or two before. The invasion had lasted a few days, and in the end TCF brought in a fleet of 150 people, on top of Sc0rched's fleet of 140, and the enemy was overwhelmed and forced to retreat. So I enjoyed the alliance. I could rat for money, and when I needed supplies, they had a market system that I could use to buy stuff, and have it delivered to me from highsec. There were roams that I could join every couple hours, and we would go around in a fleet of 10 - 30 ships, and kill anyone we ran into. I had quite a few good fights from those roams. After I had been in the alliance for about a month, it had inflated to 2,500 members. It was definitely starting to experience growing pains.
Aggression, the alliance who lead the failed invasion of Sc0rched space before, was given space right next to our region by Against All Authorities, a major superpower who bordered our space. Atlas, another major superpower who was allied with AAA, also bordered our space. And now Aggro was moving in next door as well. So a bunch of our enemies were in perfect position to attack us, and it was pretty obvious that we would not be able to defend our space on our own, especially since much of the new members were too much of a carebear to hop into a PVP ship and fight to defend their space. Our two best allies, which included out Tau Ceti masters, told our CEO that they wouldn't be able to support us during the inevitable invasion, and so our CEO made a tough decision. On day, members of Sc0rched woke up to find a new alliance mail from the CEO, informing everyone that
we had switched sides. We had become an Atlas pet. Just like that, all of the enemies who were surrounding us became our allies, and our old allies, including our former masters, were now our enemies. TCF had a few systems in our region, and so we rushed to take them as quickly as possible, to make sure they wouldn't have a foothold to stage an invasion against us. TCF, for the most part, let us take the systems without a fight. Their space was on the other side of the Eve universe, and it wasn't worth it for them to waste resources fighting us.
After we had disposed of the TCF space, we helped Atlas invade Red Alliance, who used to be our second best ally. RA was in the Northern Coalition, along with TCF and a lot of the major alliance in Eve. Between stabbing TCF in the back and invading Red Alliance, we had pissed off a lot of people. The NC and allies were sending a lot of fleets to our space to harass us. And TNT, a TCF pet alliance, were permanent residents in our region, doing everything in their power to annoy and inconvenience us. After a few weeks of constant attacks, many of the idiot carebears had lost a ton of ships because they don't know how to play the game, and think they can rat or mine while there are enemy fleets roaming our space looking for easy targets like them. So the carebears were constantly whining because nobody defended them when they blatantly ignored orders not to rat or mine. They would get pissed that nobody had saved them, while flat out refusing to help defend their own space. A lot of the people who were actually fighting to defend the space had lost multiple ships, which was really starting to stress their wallet. Then the Fleet Commanders pretty much forgot how to lead fleets, and we wound up forming fleets only to sit inside a starbase shield for hours on end. That was when I stopped joining fleets. After the alliance leadership went to shit, my corp had a vote, and decided to leave the alliance. Shortly after that, the alliance collapsed, as we all knew was going to happen. Sc0rched Earth killed itself before the enemy had a chance to.
From there were joined faction warfare, which is pretty much a dumbed down, more organized version of 0.0 warfare. It was lame, and got pretty boring, but we were only doing it to hold us over until we found a new 0.0 alliance. Then my corp joined a fail alliance. I knew it was going to be fail just by looking at it, and I told them so, but they were desperate to get back to 0.0, and joined it anyway. While they were in that alliance, I went inactive because I was busy with real life. And I stayed inactive for a few months. While I was inactive, they left the fail alliance, joined faction warfare again, and then joined TNT, another fail alliance, whom I absolutely hate because of their behavior during my time in Sc0rched Earth. I wasn't playing much, so I wasn't too bothered about the alliance they were in. I figured they would realize how terrible it was and leave before I even started playing again. I was wrong. When I came back to Eve, they were still in TNT, and they seemed to enjoy it. I had a couple classmates who played Eve, they wanted to get into piracy, and the idea of making our own pirate corp came up. Then I logged on one day, and TNT said they were going to have a mandatory mining op. All miners were to mine, and they expected all combat players to be there protecting them. On top of this, they were forcing all CEOs to set the corp tax to 100%, meaning any money you made during that time would go directly to the corp. It was pretty much the lamest thing I had ever seen, so I mentioned in corp that I was going to opt out, and one of the new members of the corp told me that I had an obligation to help the alliance. My response was "Eve is a game, not a job. I am not obligated to do anything."
With that I decided to leave and start a corp with my friends. The only problem is that neither of them is very active, so I basically spend all day doing stuff on my own. I keep asking for one of them to bring a hauler to grab the loot for one of my suicide ganks, but they are too unreliable. So I've bascally been grinding missions for money and security status, and ganking haulers for fun, even though I am not gaining anything from it. I'm going to start recruiting soon, so we can actually do some pirating.
Yesterday I joined an event that Eve Radio was holding, which they call
Lemmings Leap. They had 30 people in noobships, which are free, but extremely weak. Also, everyone was in an alt, which had "Lemming" in its name. The idea is to go around and overwhelm bigger, more powerful, and much more expensive ships with a ton of noobships. The problem was that participation was unusually low. Really, you need about 50 noobships to do a decent bit of damage. Also, the fleet commander was really experienced, not only at being an FC, but also at PVP in general. Without going into too much detail, he saw two ships, one of them a battlecruiser, and one a capital ship. The capital ship would have taken 100-200 high-damage frigates to break. Frigates are the smallest real combat ship in the game, because noobships are so weak they don't even count. The battlecruiser, however, is much smaller than a capital ship. Really, we would have had a reasonable chance of killing the battlecruiser. But the FC, having no idea how powerful a capital ship actually is, decides to tell everyone to shoot the ship we have 0% chance of killing, instead of going for the ship we might be able to kill. We all got horribly slaughtered without getting any kills, because the FC was an idiot. But I had fun. And after it was over, I collected all of the corpses from my fellow lemmings who fail at PVP, and sent them to my main. I put them in the cargo hold of a high damage battleship, and suicide ganked a hauler. When my ship was CONCORDOKKEN'd, all of the Lemming corpses were ejected from the cargo hold, into space. It was funny as hell.
So, the best thing about Eve is that it is a massive sandbox, with a ton of stuff to do, and most of the game is completely player driven. And I think the fact that I wrote this giant wall of text is a testament to how much I enjoy the game.
(I'm sure this was terribly written, as it's late, and I didn't read it over before posting it. Sorry about that, but I am way too lazy right now.)