I played in the beta, and in a free trial. My friend is totally addicted to this game, and in some last-ditch effort to have something in common with him again, I played in the free trial last month.
I decided that I just didn't care for this game any. Turns out, it's very lonely in space.
It is essentially a space combat game where people form corporations and fly around looking for things to do. You can make a lot of money mining, but yes, that's very boring. I decided I would make a trader. In order to trade, you need a big ship with lots of cargo holds, and you have to advance all these different skills to become more effective. The skills are based solely on time, but what is nice is that they continue to increase even if you're not in the game. Although, if it finishes at 3 am in the morning, it does nothing until you tell it which skill to work on next. So, you kind of have to manage the skills.
I found the trading system to be a bit contrived. It's exceedingly hard to make money doing this, at least significant amounts. You could pick up something like oxygen in one place, and then you might have to fly 15 sectors away to sell it. Which is odd, since you'd think everyone would need oxygen, but apparently not. The idea of trading contraband stuff appealed to me, but I ended up getting destroyed by someone in zero-space (every man for himself zone) by people camping a portal. You get from one "galaxy" to another via portals, or wormholes.
Yes, what others said about it being a game where you can kind of leave it on, and go do something else is true. It can take 20 minutes to fly from one spot to another, so if you're going through safe zones, you can just ignore the game during those transitions. Mining is also fairly hands off.
The download is free, and it costs about the same as other MMOGs, but ultimately I grew quite bored of it.
