EVE General Discussion

To me it's always been about the people. EVE was my first MMORPG and it was a chap at work who badgered me into trying it.
I started out with a small cadre of his friends and a small cadre of my own (who'd started at around the same time as I did), I met other people who played and made contact with them in game and then I got recruited by an awesome corp.
Had the corp been what it was later I'd probably never have joined, it was the people who drove it who carried me along into 0.0 territorial wars, from a mining and missioning centred corp to the top PvP corp in the Alliance, it was the people in the alliance who drove me to voluntarily participate in alarm clock ops where I would fly an Osprey to rep our towers (because I was one of the few people who could both fly Caldari and use Shield Transporters, it was the guy in corp who lent me his Taranis when my last combat ship (which I'd logged off in a POS and which logged back on in a bubble outside our recently flipped station) went boom who gave me the memories which resonate so much with the "I was there" trailer.

All of that might have been possible in any MMORPG but if it'd been many others I'd probably have started out on a PvE server - and that is perhaps the biggest differentiating factor of EVE... It is a single shard universe, I play on the same server as everyone else and that means that anyone I meet in the real world is playing on the same server as me. It means that I'm playing on the server where great heists occured, on the server where BoB were disbanded, on the server where elite Goonswarmer's market manipulation still hangs in the balance.

I liked that EVE's combat was naval rather than fighters, I liked the fact that no class system existed, that by means of a modular ship I could mine and then refit to blow stuff up (although I soon realised that this was not an efficient approach) and that I could choose to train my character that way, as I tried other MMOs I would come to understand the advantages of not having to break the immersion by telling people whos alt I was when I "switched to my healer" because I was still me - just in a different ship.

TL;DR:
The single shard means everyone's experiencing the same universe.
"The Sandbox" means that a lowly miner can become a passable interceptor pilot, viable logistics, useful DPS...etc while still being him(her)self.