Ah... well Milk is very well although he still hasn't found his coat and in fact there's a very real chance that he's since lost another one.
In fact - and this really is off topic, there is a very very real chance that he's going to loose his coat tonight at some swanky London do where he's going to tell a lot of very attractive, rich women that he's something he's not and then demurely suggest that they have their wicked way with him
Cleo - as for EVE it's probably one of the most 'gripping' games I've played for a while. I liken it to Elite gone MMORPG if that makes any sense. All of the in game play is in 'ships' you get a little character avatar but you don't walk around and interact with your environment like SWG although they are implementing stations soon which means that you will be able to walk around in station and interact with people.... but atm you can't!
You choose a character based on race, all of which have a rich background to aid roleplaying but there is no inherent restrictions imposed on you at the time of character creation.
All skills are learnt realtime, there is no grinding required to improve a skill. You simply purchase a skill and start learning it, as you increase in level in a skill it takes longer and longer to gain the next level. i.e.
Level 1 = 15min
Level 2 = 45 mins
Level 3 = 4 hours
Level 4 = 1 day 8 hours
evel 5 = 6 days 19 hours
You can learn skills that reduce the time taken to learn subsequent skills and if you're in it for the long haul then they are worth while.
In terms of what you do when you're online you can fly NPC missions, go on Corporation (guild) organised events, go mining asteroids, perform trades and hauling, do a player defined mission (hauling or bounty hunting normally) go out into less secure space and fly around looking for NPC pirates to kill. Or you can knock all that on the head and be a pirate, killing anyone doing any of the above
There is never anything to stop somone attacking someone else... but depending on the system that you're in when you do it there will be a variety of reactions from the local police force.
Security status of regions range from 0.0 (oh I'm gonna die) to 1.0 (yay nothing can hurth me)
In anything higher than 0.5 the local police will instantly attend your attacker and destroy them.... that may or may not happen before he destroys you but there will be retribution.
In 0.1 to 0.4 space you will get no help but your attacker will suffer a security rating hit... the lower their security rating the fewer systems they can occupy and once their rating goes below a certain level anyone can attack them anywhere with no reaction from any of the NPC defence systems.
To give you a fuller picture a few clowns have tried the two week trial recently and not found it quite to their taste while others have been playing for three years or longer.
If you want to give it a go then get a two week free trial (I can send you a link to it and if you accept it I think we both get something? although I'm not sure)
In the trial I would suggest you do the tutorial, it's quite detailed and teaches you a lot if you're patient. Then find where some of us are... come fly with us and either do nice things or do nasty pirate things (there are plenty of both going on - I have two accounts, one for each).
After two weeks I think you'll have a good understanding of what the game is about.
Also there is only one server IN THE WHOLE WORLD!!!!! No issue with 'so which shard are you on?'
Anyway... what were we talking about?