First few days are spent educating yourself on how everything works. The tutorial is very well done and is surprisingly immersive, but it's more learning than y

First few days are spent educating yourself on how everything works. The tutorial is very well done and is surprisingly immersive, but it's more learning than you'd expect from a game. By the first week, you're just about ready to start enjoying yourself and finding creative ways to use all the things you've learned. After the first month, you're just about ready to PVP and put up a reasonable fight against veteran players. There is no leveling, but there is skill training which simply takes time (no need to kill rats). The "first month" barrier is a combination of building out the minimum skill training (which can happen offline) to become competitive and acquiring the financing you'll need for decent equipment (which can be done by grinding or finding some random lucrative venture of varying risk and reward). You'll have a better time if you join a corporation and try to get involved—much of the game experience is optimized for this kind of gameplay. If you're not willing to put in at least a couple of weeks of time "investment" (at least a couple hours per day) into the game before it starts paying off in entertainment and unique experiences, it's probably not for you. I've never put in more than a month or two into the game at a time, but I'm convinced that it's unlike anything else out there.