As someone who starting in January, I would disagree with this.

The most HN relevant things that are awesome about EVE are how open the devs are with data. The developers have released their databases (Items, ships, stations, etc) which I have made some extremely handy apps with. The market is a ton of fun to play with an also has pretty easy to use APIs (Eve-Central). A lot of the files can be read extremely easily, and there is apparently talk of making market orders updateable via API in the future (This could mean full or partial automated trading).

With my ~4 month old character I've explored low-sec, played in worm holes, gotten into PvP fia FW, etc. There isn't much I haven't been able to do and I currently have more ISK (~2B) than I can really lose with the ships that I'm currently flying.

Exactly. One thing that Sean's story makes really clear is that EVE is only about playing a video game on the surface. Rather, it's about power and politics on a grand scale, if you want to play that way. Vile Rat often played, according to the article, just by chatting with other players. You don't need in-game training or money or skills to do that.

On a similar vein, almost everything in EVE is about money. If you have enough, you can fly wherever you want, and the only thing at risk is your time (which you might not value always) and the ship -- which you have insured, and which you already expect to use and therefore have a replacement ready. Gevlon at the Greedy Goblin did a series of posts on playing EVE, and how one can amass quite a bit of resources in-game simply by playing markets intelligently.

If playing PvP-style things is your bag (it's not mine), then EVE can be very rewarding (I hear) even if you've only been playing a couple of weeks. Just as in real life, there's always someone with more experience or skill than you, but you shouldn't let that be the excuse you use to prevent you from trying.

I was thinking about getting into EVE. I'd be interested in a few things: How often do you log in? Daily? Weekly? How long are your sessions on average? Hours? Did you have friends to help you along?

Thanks :)

It depends.

I have a lot of fun toying with the market and writing apps to leverage APIs to make me money in game. If I'm station trading (Which I have been a lot- this is similar to playing the stock market in that you sit in one place and buy low sell high) your orders cannot be updated more than once every 5 minutes. I'll usually have EVE up on a monitor but I'm not paying much attention to it. I'll pop over to the game every 20-30 minutes and quickly update orders then head back to my coding project / a blog / etc.

I also have swings of near obsession where I'm really excited to play with something new to me. When I was learning about exploring I spent probably 6-7 hours in a row flying around and tracking down litle exploration sites.

I log in maybe 3-4 days a week, but only get a nice block (more than a half hour or so) of time maybe once a week. I'd say the game is up on a monitor and accessable to me probably 15 hours a week. I'm probably actually spending more like 5 hours a week actively engaged. Honestly I have probably spent the same time coding applications around the game as I have playing.

I started the game solo but have since realized that a couple friends also play but weren't vocal about it. Occasionally we'll play together but I don't have the time or desire to join a permanent group ("Corporation") yet so I've been playing lone wolf for the most part.

I believe you can start the game for free with a 14 day trial. There are also 21 day trials that are available if a current player reffers you. I've never done it so I'm not sure on the details on that though. Either way, you should get a good taste of what EVE can offer you after that period.

Cool, thanks!