http://www.eveonline.com 

It's a MMORPG. You create your charater and decide what you want to do in the game such as being a miner or fleet officer (fighter). You start in a basic crappy ship and have to do stuff such as mine, kill pirates, do missions to accumulate wealth. Once your wealthy enough you can buy a better ship and better weapons. You choose a skill you want to up and it takes a set amount of time before you learn it, rather then WOW where you just grind XP, once that skill is complete you can then start to learn another, though you do need to buy some of the skills before you can learn them. Your best bet is to try the trial.  I used to play it, but it tended to feel more like work then actual gaming so I stopped playing.

Eve Online is stupid. You have to have been playing for at least a year to be able to do anything. Otherwise people just kill you, and you lose all the stuff you worked for. Too much like real life for me.

We're in offtopic...

Ooh, didn't see that part.  Somehow.

Never mind.

Well Eve Online in my OPINION is the best MMO out there. You can run missions (PVE), Mining, Science and Industry(build stuff and research stuff) to make money, Ratting ie kill pirate NPC in low sec and 0.0 space, Pirate(PVP), join corperations and fight other corperations for territory. You can join Faction Warfare and fight with your militia against the other empires. Now you can find wormholes and explore them and meet sleepers. By killing sleepers you can reverse engineer tech to build Tech 3 ships. You train skills to become better and raise your attributes to learn faster cause I think it was said somewhere if you wanted to learn everything its like 20+ years. Also Eve Online is the hardest and most brutal MMO out there. You can risk everything and win it all or lose it all. But you can play on the safe side...carebear. For pirating you can fight by yourself, join small gangs, small fleets and this can go up to 1000+ ship size fleet fights. Theres also intel given between corperations and faction warfare. But that just barely scratches the surface.... There are 15-60 day trials for Eve (you can even get a friend to join you on the trial) but you have to find them. They just got back into retail. Box is 35-40$ I think. Its 15$ a month and expansions are free. You get 2-3 Expansions a year. I would give it a try.

Yeah, too much learning. Slow at times, esp moving between systems. PVE gets stale. The game is more geared for PVP, which is fine, until you lose 15 million from your ship and items being destroyed and insurance pays 10 million...thats why I stoped playing, for PVP I'll stick with shooters or RTS.

I tried the trial (10 days I think?) and couldn't even stand playing it after the 2nd or 3rd day. Traveling just takes way to long, even for the required 'learning' missions. On one mission I forgot various components (it did not inform me they were needed) and so had to spend 3 hours going back and fourth between a pair of stations in different systems. 3 hours during which autopilot did EVERYTHING. The game has long travel times for balance... But they should at least give you something to do to keep the unshakeable boredom at bay.

Skills take forever to level, since they are time based (not logged in time, but real time) rather than skill based. This means no matter how well you play the game, you will suck horribly for the first year or two, during which times you were paying litterally hundreds of dollars in monthly fees just to keep playing. At least in WoW you can choose to level up skills fast if you put in the effort. Eve's system means you will be screwed for the first year, after which you might be lucky enough to win pvp fights. Unless of course the other person has been playing for 2 years and so still has an advantage over you.

LOL 2 years just to be able to do something? LOL this isn't a sport its a game.... it shouldn't take 2 years to be able to play and have fun. I like the graphics but they don't mean much if the gameplay is broken. Sins is borderline unplayable anyway because of how long games are.

It doesn't. But it is an MMO, and all MMOs by definition require considerable time investment to get the most out of them. That's why they are MMOs.

Trying to find a good one that you don't need to put a lot of time into is impossible. Notice, I said good one

You don't know what Eve online is well I will try to tell you the short version

Eve online is THE BEST MMORPG EVER!!!!!

Well, EVE is really no different in that regard. The only real limitation is no capital ships in safe space (and the logistics of capital ships don't lend them very well to casual play). Everything else is fair game and you don't need that much time to start having fun. Obviously you do to get all the best ships and the best fits for them, but you know, those guys in capitals and tech 2-fitted battleships still need interceptors and frigates to tackle for them otherwise all their firepower means squat if the target can just warp away. And the PvE side even easier on the player for casual-ness.

I was a hardcore player for a while. Was in Goonswarm (the alliance, was not in Goonfleet the corp) during the most recent Goon+friends vs BoB+friends war. I left that a few weeks after Goon started pushing into Delve. It was fun, but all the action happened way too late in the evening for me and made it hard with work, so I didn't have much choice.

I miss the fleet action, but for now I just don't have the time to commit to an alliance for hardcore play. So I'm casual. Logged on last night, still had fun blowing up a bunch of Serpentis battleships in The Blockade mission, made good cash and salvage and logged off to watch Transformers.

And now with Apocrypha and the Sleepers, PvE is going to get more exciting. But I'm waiting until the wormhole craze dies down a bit before going finding them.

Even though I don't play the game yet (It looks like a huge time vacuum), I still read the EVE thread every day because it is just so interesting to me.  Here is the thread I always check: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=80&threadid=2255450&enterthread=y

The game looks and sounds bad-ass to me, but paying $15 a month for something is something I have a mental block on doing.

If your intrested you should really try the trial first, but I would recommend that for all games. If your hanging on the forums you dont have much to lose by trying the trial, the forums is what got me started too.