I started playing EvE in March of 2006. After six months of paying with real money and building up my skills I haven’t paid for a month of playtime with real money since. I’ve been using in game money to buy game time. This in game money is earned by running level 5 missions, plex sites and the manufacturing that I do. I’ve worked up quite a character with a skill point count of around 75 million and my main three things I do is run level 5 missions, plex sites and also build cap ships (this includes mining the materials for them myself).
In addition to those duties I am also CEO of my own corporation and executor of the alliance I created. I have two alts that are also CEO’s of my two research corporations that run their own stations for research and manufacture.
I’ve spent a long time in this game to the point where I can finally take a breather from the hard work and maybe play every weekend and still make tons of ISK (in game money unit), enough to pay for my game time and buy materials and toys as I see fit in game.
Lots of fun once you get going in the game but it is difficult to get things started off all alone.