[stcredzero]

unlimited freedom and unlimited possibilities

Unless you become a lackey of a powerful group, you can't set out for a new frontier without the expectation that another powerful outside group will come along and wreck and/or steal what you've spent time and treasure to build. Wormhole space was designed to break this pattern. However, people have recently figured out how to invade and break those places as well.

The only way there could be unlimited freedom and unlimited possibilities, is if the in-game world were truly unlimited. I've been thinking about how to build that. (Basically, Eve with a No Man's Sky sized universe, and an equally vast forest of procedural tech trees. Throw in in-game coding of player-owned assets.)

[skrowl]

The powerful groups in EvE will also require that you have at least a year worth of skill points before they'll take you.

A literal real life year worth. Not kidding.

Skills level up in EvE even while offline, and there's not way to increase them other than the passage of time (except by leveling up other skills that decrease the learning points needed for new skills, but still).

[stcredzero]

A literal real life year worth. Not kidding.

I remember when I was a noob in Eve. There was a caper involving some billions of ISK in the official magazine, and I was in low-sec and saw one of the characters from the article. We hid out in the station in fear. After awhile, one of us asked one of them, if we ran for it, if they'd try and kill us, and they were like, nah, you're good.

Later in corp chat, we were telling about our run in with characters so infamous, people wrote articles about them printed on actual paper!

[jdougan]

Your information is years out of date. There are now alternate ways to acquire skill points quickly (injectors) and since the cultural revolution and the rise of the F2P accounts there has been a new appreciation of new players in Eve. Most large groups now have some form of new player program in place, often a corporation, (eg. Brand Newbros, Karmafleet) and in the largest cases they have full on newbro alliances (eg. Pandemic Horde, Brave Newbies, etc.)