Yahtzee did a review of EVE in the past, but this is the kind of game where you really have to spend time on it to truly know how much it sucks.
One of the most common complaints is the overly-complex nature of the skill training system; there's hundreds of skills and the game includes a skill planner to help you figure out which one you need to train next. It has kind of a steep learning curve, but it's really not that annoying until you've been playing the game for about a year and all your skills now take weeks or months to train. The more time you spend in EVE, the more time EVE expects you to spend in it and it really takes years of grinding before you can really do anything fun.
Basically you start the game with a rookie ship and a small amount of ISK, and you are forced to go through the game's many, many tutorial missions to learn the gameplay and get all the basic skillbooks and ships you need to actually start playing on your own. It doesn't matter if you've done it before and have other accounts, you have to do the tutorial with every character unless you want to beg for money to buy the many skillbooks you need.
The player community is best described as stupid. EVE players represent every annoying, unwanted subculture the Internet has to offer. SA goons, 4channers, redditors, furries, RPers, you name it. There's a huge division between players who engage in piracy and war; and players who stick with safer occupations such as mining and mission running, who are referred to as "carebears" by the more experienced players. But one thing all players have in common: they are all annoying and they all hate you. Everyone wants to be a troll because apparently the only fun to be had in EVE is reading angry text in the public chat window.
The first thing you do when you get into the game typically is join a corporation and roam with a fleet of other players. The problem is, the fleet mechanics are designed so that one player is the commander and is responsible for making all of the decisions and basically flying everyone's ships for them. Many times it goes right to their heads and you'll hear them barking orders on voice chat and screaming at people [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-kGGW0UlPA] for not doing what they're told. A lot of these hardcore fleet commanders have been playing the game for nearly 10 years and have more accounts than they can count on both hands; they expect you to be just as obsessed with the game as they are and don't care for pathetic excuses for not participating such as "I have a job" or "My kids have to get to school."
The fleet warfare itself is nothing to write home about. When you think fleet warfare in spaceships, you think squadrons and wing commanders and ships zipping around all over the place attacking multiple targets. But in EVE, basically one massive group of ships slowly approaches another huge group of ships and they each focus all of their firepower on a single target. The lag is immense, probably the worst lag in any commercial videogame. So much lag that you can't even fire your weapons and the entire battle comes down who has the best gaming rig and if you get targetted, you're dead instantly.
There's a lot of insta-death in EVE online. You'll hit the undock button and before the loading screen is even finished, you've already been killed, your escape pod destroyed, and thoroughly ridiculed on public chat. Fans of the game defend it by saying its just part of the learning curve and the unforgiving nature, but anyone with an objective viewpoint can see it's just sloppiness on the developer's part. Crashes are frequent, especially with new updates and a recent change to the game's EULA declares that client bugs are no longer a valid reason for having losses reimbursed by the game moderators. They conveniently added this change after releasing their most buggy client update yet.
Finally, CCP, the developers of EVE have let the success of their game go completely to their heads. They recently made a bold attempt to branch out into the trendy world of vampires with a vampire-themed MMO called World of Darkness. The game was a massive failure, and CCP responsed by laying off half of their employees and adding microtransactions to EVE. They were previously embroiled in a heated scandal over their attempt to charge their players $70 USD for a virtual gold monocle for the players avatar, and articles of clothing such as shirts and jackets that cost more than their real-life counterparts. And the real kicker is, it's not even possible to see other players at this time because the walking around in stations mechanic hasn't been fully implemented, so even you spent your real life money on a Quafe t-shirt, nobody would even see it. The fact that this company is still in business after making decisions like that should tell you a lot about the fanbase of EVE.
In conclusion, EVE is a boring, shallow game that tries to hide it's boring shallowness by adding a lot of unnecessary complexity. It's riddled with bugs, the developers are incompetent greed-heads, and the player community is basically 4chan in spaceships. The PVP is annoying, laggy, and completely rewardless for everyone except the fleet boss, and the PVE missions are mind numbingly boring and repetitive. Don't bother playing this game, it's a huge waste of time.
One of the most common complaints is the overly-complex nature of the skill training system; there's hundreds of skills and the game includes a skill planner to help you figure out which one you need to train next. It has kind of a steep learning curve, but it's really not that annoying until you've been playing the game for about a year and all your skills now take weeks or months to train. The more time you spend in EVE, the more time EVE expects you to spend in it and it really takes years of grinding before you can really do anything fun.
Basically you start the game with a rookie ship and a small amount of ISK, and you are forced to go through the game's many, many tutorial missions to learn the gameplay and get all the basic skillbooks and ships you need to actually start playing on your own. It doesn't matter if you've done it before and have other accounts, you have to do the tutorial with every character unless you want to beg for money to buy the many skillbooks you need.
The player community is best described as stupid. EVE players represent every annoying, unwanted subculture the Internet has to offer. SA goons, 4channers, redditors, furries, RPers, you name it. There's a huge division between players who engage in piracy and war; and players who stick with safer occupations such as mining and mission running, who are referred to as "carebears" by the more experienced players. But one thing all players have in common: they are all annoying and they all hate you. Everyone wants to be a troll because apparently the only fun to be had in EVE is reading angry text in the public chat window.
The first thing you do when you get into the game typically is join a corporation and roam with a fleet of other players. The problem is, the fleet mechanics are designed so that one player is the commander and is responsible for making all of the decisions and basically flying everyone's ships for them. Many times it goes right to their heads and you'll hear them barking orders on voice chat and screaming at people [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-kGGW0UlPA] for not doing what they're told. A lot of these hardcore fleet commanders have been playing the game for nearly 10 years and have more accounts than they can count on both hands; they expect you to be just as obsessed with the game as they are and don't care for pathetic excuses for not participating such as "I have a job" or "My kids have to get to school."
The fleet warfare itself is nothing to write home about. When you think fleet warfare in spaceships, you think squadrons and wing commanders and ships zipping around all over the place attacking multiple targets. But in EVE, basically one massive group of ships slowly approaches another huge group of ships and they each focus all of their firepower on a single target. The lag is immense, probably the worst lag in any commercial videogame. So much lag that you can't even fire your weapons and the entire battle comes down who has the best gaming rig and if you get targetted, you're dead instantly.
There's a lot of insta-death in EVE online. You'll hit the undock button and before the loading screen is even finished, you've already been killed, your escape pod destroyed, and thoroughly ridiculed on public chat. Fans of the game defend it by saying its just part of the learning curve and the unforgiving nature, but anyone with an objective viewpoint can see it's just sloppiness on the developer's part. Crashes are frequent, especially with new updates and a recent change to the game's EULA declares that client bugs are no longer a valid reason for having losses reimbursed by the game moderators. They conveniently added this change after releasing their most buggy client update yet.
Finally, CCP, the developers of EVE have let the success of their game go completely to their heads. They recently made a bold attempt to branch out into the trendy world of vampires with a vampire-themed MMO called World of Darkness. The game was a massive failure, and CCP responsed by laying off half of their employees and adding microtransactions to EVE. They were previously embroiled in a heated scandal over their attempt to charge their players $70 USD for a virtual gold monocle for the players avatar, and articles of clothing such as shirts and jackets that cost more than their real-life counterparts. And the real kicker is, it's not even possible to see other players at this time because the walking around in stations mechanic hasn't been fully implemented, so even you spent your real life money on a Quafe t-shirt, nobody would even see it. The fact that this company is still in business after making decisions like that should tell you a lot about the fanbase of EVE.
In conclusion, EVE is a boring, shallow game that tries to hide it's boring shallowness by adding a lot of unnecessary complexity. It's riddled with bugs, the developers are incompetent greed-heads, and the player community is basically 4chan in spaceships. The PVP is annoying, laggy, and completely rewardless for everyone except the fleet boss, and the PVE missions are mind numbingly boring and repetitive. Don't bother playing this game, it's a huge waste of time.