I tried EVE last year, but cancelled after two months or so. The learning curve is not as steep as most make out, after a week of playing you'll get the general idea.
The reasons I cancelled:
- Was playing by myself, didn't know anyone to join a Corp so it became pretty lonely. In most other MMO's you'll group up with random people and interact pretty easily, but in EVE I felt very isolated from the playerbase. Sure there are general chat channels, but you still feel dislocated from them, as everyone is hours apart.
- A large amount of macro managing and tweaking required for your ships. I've logged in and literally spent 3 hours reading up and testing to find the best configuration for my ship for what I wanted to do, not even leaving the station. if you're the sort of person who loves delving into numbers and tweaking to find optimal configurations then EVE is for you. Get a new skill or ship and you start over again. Sure, you don't have to be too detailed, just slap some gear on your ship and head out.. but eventually I found it more and more necessary.. and it started to get tedious.
- The first few weeks are fun training up, but eventually you'll get to a point where skills need weeks/months to train. If you're prepared to wait this long for upgrades then cool, but personally I'm more of an action-orientated player. EVE needs alot of time and patience to feel like you've accomplishing something.
The issues I had above were from my perspective, it's just how I found the game. Some people may completely disagree with me.
As Sylas said it took him 4 times to get into it properly, so I have no doubt what I experienced was just from not giving EVE and myself enough time to adjust. I think if you're prepared to spend alot of time and get passed the initial curve, and get used to the vastly different dynamic EVE has compared to other MMO's then it could be a very interesting experience.
It's definitely a game you have to judge for yourself, because it kind of becomes what you want it to be.