What's a good MMORPG for a first-timer?

[Pascal]

I'mSavy makes a good point. You spend the first like month in WoW just levelling to get to end game. Sure, it's fun, but it's also a massive time sink where you're waiting to be max level so you can take advantage of all the cool stuff like raiding etc. I imagine EVE is the same

[bigred]

While out of date content wise (many improvements since then), this is a good overview.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTuoqthVhok

And an objective review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJqx5ZbbY0

[Renton]

I'mSavy makes a good point. You spend the first like month in WoW just levelling to get to end game. Sure, it's fun, but it's also a massive time sink where you're waiting to be max level so you can take advantage of all the cool stuff like raiding etc. I imagine EVE is the same

It's not really the same. In eve you're limited by real time more than anything else. You don't have to grind to level 80 to have fun, but you do need to wait a few weeks of real time before you're competitive at something. For example to get a battleship flying skill from level 1 to 5 takes about 6 weeks. This might seem worse in away but it sort of forces you to do things within your paygrade while you wait to get to the advanced stuff. That said, within a few days you can have skill enough to be a valuable asset to a crew. To fly a small ship well takes virtually no time at all, its the highly specialized stuff that takes weeks or months to arrive to.