As a noob, I can see I've been very unlucky in finding players I can trust and are willing to hold my hand until things start to click. Everyone says, the big ISK is in null space, i.e. mining or ratting. I'm just messing around wasting time in hisec compared to the riches just waiting to be harvested in null. So I go to null, this is null space supposedly owned and guarded by my corp. Oh well, you can imagine how that went. In Elite I know how to build a ship and escape from any ganker attempt, knowing full well the cops are a joke. I suspect its possible to build a ratting ship that is also capable of dealing competently with PvP surprises, but that's probably months down the road for me.
Yeah, you are either going to sink a ton of real cash into skill injectors or just slowly train skills up over time.Either way it doesn't feel rewarding.
For me (and I have no idea if this is still the case) but Null Sec was out as a solo player due to always instantly showing up in the local chat list of players. Once wormhole space was introduced with delayed local so you didn't show up in it unless you spoke and people didn't see you unless they were in the system and online when you did speak. This instant free intel basically screws solo players because without having to monitor the gates and wormholes a single person can monitor an entire star system and call in a hunting party the moment they notice some random solo.
In my entire six years I spent an entire month in nullsec, as a miner. Instant local chat here was also a frustration because it meant that enemies could just camp AFK and had a banner on the whole time that they were there. So many mining ops got canceled because one random unknown cloaky was just sitting somewhere in system and everyone was too scared of a cyno'd in gank fleet to do anytthing. Pure silliness.
I was fortunate in that instance not to get into a scamming corp, but it was a terrible corp all the same and part of a meh alliance. Yes they had territory but it was a meh experience over all and wasn't helped by the fact that while cool, the mechanics of the game create political landscapes, territorial control and it results in actual political structures rising within the player base and along with it player rulers in the form of dictators and such. Amazing game mechanic but the games mechanical discouragement of solo play in these regions of space really killed it for me.
I actually spent the majority of my time in EVE doing high sec mining for... funsies? I'm not even sure what I got out of that... and being part of a high sec war-dec corp of ~10 members who would dec larger groups and engage them in guerilla warfare in high security space (AKA lawfully ganking miners, mission runners etc) until our CEO ransomed the corp/alliance to get us to stop and split the ransom between the crew. This typically involved a spy placed in the target organization. Most fights were decided by outfitting before the battle even occurred and our size and lack of open recruitment and real life connections to each other meant we were spy-proof. As such every major battle we ever went into included full intel on what everyone would be equipped with. We'd use it to determine our tactics to great success.
The fact of the matter is EVE Online is less about spaceships and more about the complex interactions between people and organizations that can only be offered by the zero-instancing, single shard nature of EVE. Without that, EVE isn't a very compelling game outside of PVP, imo.
My greatest wish for Elite has always been to have that single shard, no instancing approach in open play combined with separate saves. One for open, one for pg/solo. Combined with an inability to change ones commander name Elite would instantly become a towering leader over all space games.
Since I'm on the topic, my biggest complaint about Elite has always been that gankers do not need to suffer the consequences of their actions. Not by mechanical design and not by player reaction. Why? Because most of them just log into solo/pg when they do their grind and only show their faces in open when they are ready for pvp. As an open play purist I've always found that to be extremely discouraging and constantly see it push people into solo/pg because people don't want to get jacked with if the attacker can't be retaliated against and to be frank, if you are half decent in Elite; you are not going to die unless you make a really stupid mistake or are flying something poorly equipped, neither of which really happen often in the case of pvp'ers. The problem was excaberated when bounties were detached from the player and assigned to the ships in order to give criminals the ability to "play the game normally" when not committing crime.
Must have bought it years ago and forgotten. Never played it.