What sets Eve apart?

EVE has been, by any stretch, a very successful MMO. It's not been a WoW or EQ, but nor has it been any of the zillions of failed MMOs. My gut is that it's roughly on par with City of Heroes in terms of commercial success. But what sets it apart from those MMOs? What should other MMOs look at it for?

The knee jerk reaction is to say PVP and Player run Economy. And those are certainly true answers from a certain context. PVP is built into every facet of the game and no one can fully opt out of it. Likewise, the economy is very nearly fully player run. Some things are still made by NPCs but largely these are the very low-level building block items (blueprints and skill books). But even these, at least in the case of blueprints, are "player run" in the sense of being regionalized such that if you want to buy a Megathron Blueprint in Caldari space, you have to either travel to Gallente space or buy one from a player.

Some people, upon further reflection, would probably also add "single server". The game has not been localized by region (in fact, the strongest alliances have to balance their EU Time Zone against their US Time Zone to make sure they can defend and attack at any time of day). So when you read about "The Mittani" and his "Goonswarm Fleet" you know that it's YOUR server and those people are people YOU could see someday.

But I think those initial responses miss the broader point. The real beauty of Eve is that player decisions matter. Your decisions change things. PVP isn't fun just because it's PVP. It's thrilling and heart pounding because the results actually matter. The penalty for losing in PVP is pretty brutal. It's punishing for making bad decisions. Likewise, Eve has built up trade hubs for no other reason than geography. People figured out that certain sections were high traffic. That system got more buy and sell orders and it snowballed. As a result, we have Jita which organically grew to 60+% of all economic activity in game. And the single shard is beautiful. It completely strips away anonymity. It's hard to scam someone. You can't pay to transfer servers afterwards. You have a reputation and you're stuck with it.

This is the first MMO where player's really, truly make a difference. In WoW, I could clear the highest level dungeon every night for a year and nothing would really change. EQ had a little bit of this with raids needing to sign up or else the placeholder PC would train the whole zone to the warp in just to screw you for not signing up on the appropriate calendar. Those kinds of things have occurred on a very low level but never as a driving principal of a game.

So to future game makers, make sure you take the right lesson from Eve. While I love the player run economy and would like to see it emulated, what I REALLY think you should focus on is making me and my choices matter.