[mawburn]

> it probably needs an exuberant amount of time

EVE can actually be played very casually. The grind is for money, but you can supplement that with real money. I know that sounds really bad in a world where every mobile game is a P2W nightmare, but it works for EVE. You cannot P2W EVE. Most people don't use real money, once you get to a point where you understand most of the game it's not really required. The only significant time sink Eve requires is learning how it works because it's an extremely complex game.

EVE has a really good Free to Play system in place and I definitely recommend checking it out.

I would not suggest getting an account then trying to throw a bunch of money at it until you really understand what that money is used for. We once killed a new 15 day old player who was flying high end implants that buffed their shields, in a ship that was armor tanked. In real money terms we probably blew up $40 that they were using completely incorrectly. There were 3 of us flying a total of less than $5 worth of real money ships. It's a very unforgiving game, but most players are nice to new players and we ended up giving that person a lot of advice on what they did wrong, what they can do to fix it, and which direction they needed to go to get better. We throw money at newbies often if we kill them, but since this one was flying several times more than our entire fleet we figured it was pointless. To put it into perspective, I've been playing for about 4yrs total spread across 14 and the most expensive thing I've flown cost about half as much as what this person was flying.

For the other payers: it was a full High-Grade crystal set in a blingy Apoc we found ratting in a Haven, so you know he was injected too. Almost 7b total on zkill.

[stereographic]

It takes a lot of time to get familiar with how the game works, how combat works, and how you should fit your ships for your play style. Definitely can feel like a job and/or hopeless at first, but once that initial investment of time has been put in the game can definitely be played casually.

It's a lot of fun to just mess around with a few people in some cheap frigates (basic small ships), sometimes more so than the actual "expensive" areas of the game.

[mawburn]

My favorite ships are faction frigs and T1 Cruisers/BCs, by far. They are the most fun to fly and if you pick your fights you'll easily beat bling.

[stereographic]

Even just a couple people flying around in Rifters can take on some decent sized ships if people know what they're doing.

I haven't played Eve in years but now I'm suddenly back to wanting to play.

[ajacksified]

Back when I was TEST's training director, my favorite thing to do was lead squads of about a dozen people in either alliance-provided free rifters, or any T2 frigates people wanted to bring. Great learning for the newbies; easy to replace if we lost everything; and every once in a while, we'd find a T2 battleship or carrier doing PVE, all alone, out in space...

[stereographic]

If you are who I think you are, you were always so helpful and actually got me interested in the game, thanks man o7.

[LanceH]

For a while, I got into doing this in hi-sec with destroyers that cost 200k-2m each.