While these everyday tasks take a lot of time and are thoroughly unengaging, they play an important role in allowing people to play at a relaxed pace or even run EVE in the background and still make progress. I’m not ashamed to admit that I often spend evenings quietly mining or hauling on one screen while playing Overwatch or watching Netflix on the other, and there’s something compelling about knowing that I’m still being productive in my downtime. Making these activities more actively engaging might improve the minute-to-minute experience of new players, but EVE would lose something fundamental—the contrast that makes the exciting bits so exciting and the pain of loss so devastating, the slow progress that makes joining a corporation so important and encourages socialization and specialization.

When you do have the time to actively engage with EVE, a faster pace of action can be found in other activities such as combat missions and exploration sites. On the extreme end of the activity scale are PvP and the new Abyssal Deadspace PvE dungeons, both of which require your complete attention as you have to rapidly respond to changing and emergent circumstances. The user interface is another major sticking point for many new players. My housemate once described it as an “unfriendly, scary, complicated calculator,” and he’s really not wrong. EVE’s age is partly to blame for that, as there are now over 15 years of features built on top of each other and it all has to be crammed in somewhere. The UI is now a hodgepodge of windows and other elements designed at different stages of EVE’s lifetime and following different visual styles. Unifying features such as tooltips, the taskbar, and notifications help add some much-needed cohesion and explorability to the interface, but the rookie help chat channel is still always packed with players asking for help finding the options they want. 

New players also often find the realtime skill progression system unfamiliar and limiting, and some of the higher level skills require several months of just waiting to acquire. Skills essentially act as roadblocks between you and the ships and modules you want to use, and there’s no way to actively train them up through normal gameplay as you would in a typical MMO. Rich players can also buy skill injectors from other players to add skill points directly to their characters and skip those realtime roadblocks, a feature that is regarded by some to be a form of pay-to-win gameplay.