[roganartu]

There is a lot of empty space in EVE, but there's also a lot of activity. The fact that your empty space can rapidly turn hostile forces you to take a certain approach to gameplay that I've yet to experience in any other game. I used to live in wormhole space, which feels even more empty than regular EVE space as there is no "local chat" listings of people in the same system as you. Corps that live in wormhole space generally just assume that there are cloaked spies everywhere (and they're usually right).

I also don't think permadeath is a reasonable parallel. Your pilot's skills in EVE are not lost on death, and these are required to pilot certain ships as well as gating some other things in game. XP for these skills are simply gained over time from a queue. On death, you respawn as a new clone, retaining all your skills but losing all the physical possessions you had on you at time of death. These have an in-game monetary value, which is where the desire to avoid dying comes from. There are two categories of possession you can lose this way: your ship and everything in/on it (called the fitting), and your implants. Implants augment your skills, and can be rather expensive. Once they are inserted, they cannot be removed without being destroyed, so it's quite common for people to go out and have fun in cheap ships after losing an expensive clone before later reinserting expensive implants again.

I miss EVE too, but I also simply don't have time to give my old characters the justice they deserve anymore.

[shultays]

In my experience EVE online was hours (days?) of boringness for a relatively small amount of extreme fun

[2000UltraDeluxe]

This. I was there when BoB fell, and despite being on the losing side those weeks of intense battles were _awesome_. That was it, though. Nullsec warfare became a rather tedious grind shortly afterwards, and CCP didn't bother to fix it, instead prefering to focus on microtransactions.

I assume my characters are still sitting in Amamake a decade later, but getting back into a game only to have it feel like a second job? Narh, I prefer playing Civ6 with the missus instead. Most of the people I played with quit anyway.