I had a fight last week, Frozen Dawn contacted us and said they were doing a LAN party and had been rolling wormholes for fights and had no luck so did we wanna fight them. Spent two hours rolling our static till we got there home system, jumped a 30 man gang through, ended up killing six capitals and had some of them dance naked on their twitch feed of the LAN party to ransom out the last Moros.
This is why I will never go back to live in nullsec again.
1. How long does it take to get stuff? Like, is advancing in the game fast at first, but slow later on?
2. Can a midspec computer from 4 years ago run it alright?
3. How much can a person accomplish alone? Is solo gameplay very different from playing in groups?
4. How's the community?
5. What do you even do in this game? From the bits of the website I looked on, it looked kind of limited.
It depends entirely, in the beginning of the game you might aspire to buy your first battleship which is entirely doable inside a month, your skills to use it effectively will suck however. But then you get into aspects like tech 2 ships, tech 3 ships and capitals which are each much more difficult to skill effectively, I didn't even touch capital skills for three years of play because I wanted to focus on smaller things
As far as "Getting them" it depends entirely on how you make your isk, theres miners in high sec who make five million an hour an good days, there's mission runners and nullsec ratters who make 20, there's incursions making 100, wormholers making 300, traders making absolute silly money and the leaders of nullsec blobs who sit and laugh as they skim the fruits of their members. Your isk is your effective limit on what stuff you can get to have fun with.
I'd say the odds are you could run it, mine used to run it fine before it shat itself and got replaced and I've even had a certain amount of success with old laptops.
A solo person can accomplish whatever they effort they put into it, I know people who have ran ten toons, made enough to plex them and justify in their minds running all those accounts. Its upto you what you intend to do but generally speaking, the social element of EVE is what gives its staying power, if you don't have a working microphone I wouldn't even bother as every entity worth belonging to uses voicecomms.
Community is like anything on the internet, you got assholes and you got decent folks, I remember something a few years back where CCP said the average age of an EVE player was 29 and it shows somewhat, but recently I wonder if its been infiltrated with more 4chan-esque dipshits or if thats just the culture of Goons and Reddit type bullshit getting more exposure.
As for what you do, generally you kill NPC's for money and other players for fun, because at the end of the day its really a 100% PVP environment. Otherwise you can mine those minerals to build those modules, to do some inventions to build better ships and modules and sell them to players like me as almost every single item on the EVE market has been produced by another player.