In an attempt to be critically and hostilely neutral, I'd like to comment

Eve is a game, and games should be fun. Not everyone has the same concept of fun, but some people find being "the best" to be fun. This leads to some people having to be less than the best, at least in the eyes of the best. Wait, scratch that, this isn't where I wanted to go.

There are two extremes of dealing with the date you started when they relate to games. On one extreme is a simple game where you get a number based on when you start playing. The lowest number wins. The other extreme is a game where a winner is randomly selected from the pool of players. These examples aren't air tight, but I tried to cover extremes with out bringing other variables like skill, intelligence, desire to win, amount of time you play each day.

Eve, like Wow, has a bias toward older characters. Initially I would have said Eve had a larger bias, but now I'm not sure that such a statement is wholly truthful. In a pure numbers scenario you'd likely measure a character age in Wow by level/gear and Skill Points in Eve. Both of these measurements have their upper bounds based on real time since the character was created, but these are the extremes.

I think that Eve from numbers perspective appears to be significantly more biased than WoW, I mean how can feel competitive with a player that has 57 mil SP? But where are all those points? Is that person an industrialist, an empire level alliance CEO? A capital ship pilot? The thing is, if they aren't doing what you want to be doing, those points are meaningless. If he doesn't have Cloaking I and I do, I'm a better cloaker than he is. Eve has so many avenues of play that the uber players are distributed across a larger skill base. I've heard estimates that to learn all the skills in the game would take anywhere from a decade to half a century. How long does it take to get an epic geared 80 in every class on both factions?

This of course sidesteps the simple question of should a player who has played longer be granted bonuses or an advantage at all. Also, should there be a shelf at which point you've played long enough and any additional playtime no longer provides a significant advantage. Wow and other MMOs do this with level caps. There is a point to which you can get and then you are just as good as everyone else at that point. Once again this simplifies things like raid progression and all other things besides time out of the equation.

As someone who left wow because I had little to do besides get yet another character to 80, I'm in the camp that thinks time invested should provide a benefit. An intersting antecdote to this is that I have a character in Eve that is almost 6 years old. He currently has 4.7 mil SP. For perspective, I have a character that is less than 6 weeks old and has 3 mil SP. I could have been one of the gods of Eve with my first character, but I stopped playing and never even considered paying a subscription to just train. Despite this extreme example of reversal, having been on of the early players and effectively being a new player I don't feel the balance is too far off. I've got more to do than just get another 80. I've also helped kill 3 year old pilots in a character with only 2.3 mil SP.

Okay, this isn't exactly what I set out to write, but thats what happens when you have lunch and a few beers in the middle of a post.

- Souca -