Caution, if you get into Eve online no other MMO will ever feel quite the same afterwards.
Eve is unforgiving
But most importantly Eve is real. There is no other MMO out there that is as true to the concept of the sandbox as Eve is. It has a player driven economy, player driven story and player driven politics. I'm not going to talk about the gameplay, the awesome graphics or the thrill of combat with the risk of losing what you worked hard to acquire.
Instead I will give a couple of examples of the amazing things that happen in New Eden.
The Meta Game.
A few years back there was a terrible alliance that pretty much ruled all of Eve called BoB (Band of Brothers). And although they were on a decline due to infighting and in general extremely bad moral they were still the biggest force in Eve. Enter Goonfleet, an alliance formed around the idea of being a dick and **** with people. They used to run a scam where they invited people to join the alliance for a fee, had them move all their assets into a goon owned station and then took it all before booting them out. One of the targets of such a scam turned out to be a BoB director but even after that the man said that he would much rather be in Goonfleet than with BoB. And the Goons Pounced, using the director access given to them immediatelly. They cleared out the BoB accounts of isk, cleared out more or less their entire stock of capital ships, and to top it off disbanded the alliance and stole the name (with creating a corp called band of brothers) right away to twist the knife. The estimated value of what was stolen (in USD) was in the thousands.
The Power of the Players.
Last year the players of Eve rebelled. After an incomplete update that should have been released as an optional tech demo was forced uppon the players with the addition of a leaked internal CCP news letter that suggested that CCP was considering Pay-to-win as a possibility.
There was a massive outroar with thousands ending their subscription and even more gathering together ingame in an open show of rebellion. Players by the thousand entered Jita (a high security system that acts as the games biggest trade hub) In there they started shooting at an indestructible orbital structure. By the thousand the npc police shot them down but it could not keep up, the protest went on for a long time. CCP responded immediately with a heartfelt formal apology from the CEO of CCP where he seemed on the verge of tears (and in fact every single footage of him in that time period he looked absolutely miserable) and followed up with a complete refocus of what is important to the game, chugging out a massive expansion in Crucible that was one of the most well received expansions in the companies history. The orbital structure that was shot at can still be found in Jita, as a floating wreck, marked as a memorial to past mistakes.
The Grief
This is a very recent story that still doesn't have an end, and again it centers around Goonswarm who have now become one of the biggest forces in eve. The Goons harbor a certain lothing for pilots who dwell in high security space for the entirety of their stay in eve. And an even greater hatred for the "elite" pvpers who pray on those players with their expensive ships in what is essentially a bullies game. And to strike at the heart of high Security space they moved over ten thousand ships to Jita, the trade capital of the world. Now normally Jita is a high security space, which means that it is "Safe" in the sense that noone can reliably get of more than a single shot from their ship before the ingame police show up and take the culprit down. The goons however gathered together ships with high volley damage, that would do the greatest ammounts of single shot damage. In packs of thirty to fifty they undocked from the station and went the the gates leading in and out of the system. Shooting any high value target that tried to move in or out of the system and for 72 hours Jita was more or less on lockdown. If you tried to fly anything larger then a frigate through it you would most likely get shot down.
Eve is a game where you get an ambition, its not a game where you just make a character, level him up and gather cool gear. Its a game where you can create your own dynasty.