Regardless, it’s certainly going to be an interesting few decades

The real sin here is that there’s a way of converting ISK into offline cash. But, I’ll leave that discussion to others.

@Beej Definitely. Especially as the worlds start to blend exchange of money more closely - you can certainly expect people to start taking notice then. We also need to consider how real life laws should affect gameplay because some countries have vastly different laws to others and yet you could have millions of players playing together from everywhere in the world.

First off to entice you further in here’s some of the more juicy stories and sites I have found:

Record breaking heist rocks Eve Online guild to the tune of $16,500 USD in virtual goods
http://eve.klaki.net/heist/

The adventures of Romeo, eve’s most lovable scammer
http://eve-scams.blogspot.com/

Sins of a Solar Spymaster by The Mittani, spymaster in chief of Goonswarm’s GIA
http://www.tentonhammer.com/eve/exclusives/

On to the actual new player experience.

As Andrew has said it’s slow and I have mitigated this recently by playing Eve alt-tabbed. I play WoW with the WoW sound off and EVE minimised with the sound on and my ship on autopilot or whatever. I can even do combat missions in Eve with this minimal attention span although I’ve lost 2 ships when I forgot about it completely while in combat.

My combat strategy is Caldari Cruisers using a Caracal and 37 km missile range. I just turn the weapons on and hit the Keep At Range button (set to 34 km) and stuff dies. I have an active shield tank but usually don’t really need it as most NPC ships don’t even hit me at that range. To mix it up I tried a close range ship (Vexor) and died horribly. The Caracal is the best thing I’ve found so far for level 2 missions and leads later on to the Raven a bigger missile boat which can solo level 4 missions.

My main direction is mining and I’ve joined a mining corp. Almost everyone in the corp is very relaxed and laid back and most of us are semi-afk much of the time which suits my alt tab playstyle.

Mining is rather dull though. With hindsight I think it might have been better to go straight for level 4 mission running which probably pays just as well while being more fun.

I particularly enjoy planning and testing various get rich quick schemes. I have paused my main character’s skillpoints long enough to get to 40 buy orders each on 2 alts. This means I can jump to an alt and collect the cheap loot those buy orders have brought in and flog it off at Jita for fat profits.

I’ve also quite accidentally wandered into the meta game, accidentally finding secret information about one of the major alliances. There’s a ton of low level secrets around though. Still one day I plan to do some spying, seems like it would be a crime not to try it.

I’m also very interested in pvping later on. Space piracy seems like a wonderful pastime and the great wars out in 0,0 look intensely fun.

Many of these plans are a long way off. I’ve accepted that I’ll have Eve ticking along at a low level even if I’m mainly playing something else for the next couple of years. It’s not a game for instant gratification!

Ricdic stole something that had a cash value, and the more integrated cyber-realities become with real life, the more there will be the need for effective legal measure to be put in place.

Despite the woman on MySpace doing everything “within the rules” of the online environment and getting off, her actions impacted someone’s real life. There needs to be some kind of law mandating that.

But then there comes a fine line between what is a use in game (ninja looting and scamming and PKing and griefing) and actually harming another person. And that’s a gray area I don’t even want to touch.