To an extent, EVE may as well put up a sign saying "newbies not welcome" and leave it at that. Their introduction to the game is really unhelpful and the nature of the game mechanics means that a solo player can be left without direction or purpose because the game lacks clear options for the new player. The interface is complicated and generally unfriendly (though much better than it was, if I remember correctly), with many useful features obscured behind layers of complicated menus or key-mouse combinations that aren't included in any tutorial. In that sense, I'm not surprised that you were put off.
Unfortunately, the game in EVE isn't something you're going to find within 3-4 hours play without coming into the game with an understanding of where you're aiming for. I played once before right back at the beginning so I knew a little of what I was getting myself in for. I feel that for one to find the fun in EVE you have to understand both what kind of game you're going to be playing and be prepared to take the game by the balls and make your own direction, find your own fiction, figure out your own reasons to play.
EVE is Elite on steroids. You need to get comfortable with comparing stats on equipment, considering profit margins, doing the maths on different ship loadouts, planning skill progression towards particular game roles, and you need to start that on day one. In Elite, it was all about getting bigger and better equipment and either running cargo for a profit or hunting pirates for a profit, with the promise of being called "Elite" if you were ever good enough (I made it to Deadly before I gave up...
). EVE adds a few elements to the game beyond that, throws in another 30,000 players and removes the cool but rather meaningless ratings.
The guts and real pull of EVE are probably in six main parts:
- The Ships - liking the array of different ships and wanting to play with them is a huge part of EVE; it's pretty similar to wanting different sets of armour in WoW, I imagine, except that different ships fulfil different combat roles so even a cheap, early-game Frigate has uses in the more advanced game
- The Market - people refer to the EVE market as EVEbay and it plays out that way; the market is almost entirely player driven as even the useless scrap ultimately breaks down into metals that can be recycled into making stuff and the knowledge that everything is interlinked in that way makes trade, haulage, salvage and more all meaningful activities within the scope of the game
- PVP en masse - this game allows fleets of dozens if not hundreds of ships to duke it out in real time where the large ships don't necessarily dominate the small ones, where consideration of tactics, fleet balance, the economy of war and so on are all pertinent factors
- Player Owned Stations - if you can take it you can claim it for your own, and this is embodied in the ability to put up permanent structures in the game that you then need to give consideration on how to supply and defend in order to retain your control; it's player ownership of things and places in the game in a way that's not really done elsewhere
- Supply Chain - the game's supply chain has been thoroughly thought out so that mining leads to refining lead to manufacturing leads to use in combat leads to wrecks leads to salvage leads to more manufacturing; it's a beautiful system under the hood and if you like seeing these sort of systems ticking this can be a big winner
- Real time training - so I can't play as much as the rest of them but I can still keep my skills moving such that I can continue to broaden my available options in EVE; it works both ways in that I can't realistically ever catch up with someone who has been playing a year more than me, on skill points, but I can still be competitive by picking my skills and role carefully and hitting them where they're weakest with me and a fleet of my mates; gone the problem of unassailable opponents purely because they're twinked to the eyeballs
Notice I don't even mention missions in there, which are limited in their scope and, I feel, are really only interesting when they're hard enough that you can't do them by yourself and you need to get social and get other people involved. They are, unfortunately, rather necessary given the standing they give you (akin to reputation in WoW) but the number of combat missions seems pretty small and their nature fairly predictable such that I'm sure you could play that bit of EVE text-only. But, I feel, one doesn't play EVE purely for the missions but for what the missions enable, rather like one doesn't repeat the same dungeon in WoW over and over just because you want to see the architecture or those mobs again but because you're chasing after the remaining piece in your armour set.
Of those five things, what could you be doing of them on day one? Probably almost none without substantial prior experience. That is where EVE sucks. However, if you stick with the game you start to see the possibilities that it holds, the places where it can do things no other game in the MMO market yet offers at this scale. The tools are often peculiar and difficult to use but they tend to offer a breadth of scope and freedom that allows for complex structures to be built (e.g. how Corporations are structured) and the nature of the wider game is that, with some time and effort, you can legitimately take part in the bigger game content such as PVP wars; note, not "end game" content because there's no end game aside from what you choose.
If you don't choose a direction for yourself in EVE then you're probably screwed. The game won't help you. Once you've chosen a direction that you feel is worthwhile working towards, though, the game then offers you the freedom to go at that how you like and keeps all the other possibilities perpetually open to you.
