I'm on the west coast too, fast connection etc. another friend had the same issue yesterday.

I did not get the hang of the game in 10 minutes, I received an experience I perceive as indicative of the rest of the game.

While I am not sure about you download speed of the game, I can say that the game don't usually take 5 hours to download. Like Arga said, it should only take about 30 minutes.

I would take some more time with the game. Read some of the guides. Visit blogs and wikis.

If you need help ask in the help or General Chat channels. The community is always willing to help new players.

The download time was just a minor annoyance, but definitely should not have happened.

I should mention the people, as they were more than helpful, offering advice left and right, unfortunately most of the advice was a little too advanced for someone new to eve/perpetuum.

I understand its a complex game, fantastic, I prefer that, and I probably have a lower tolerance for frustration and annoyance than most.   A multitude of smaller things in the tutorials just added up to a point where I didnt see the future game being fun, like having to walk around an entire building to prove I knew how to control my bot.

bottom right of post between Report and Quote.

For torrents and file sharing I have a gigabit connection I could use.

Joining a corp is pretty mandatory to having a good time, it's a sandbox afterall.

I don't remember the tutorial much (been playing 3 weeks) but that was probably because I was just so amazed by the music it made me fall in love with the game

Hope to see you around if you decide to give perp another chance ^_^

Sorry you had a bad experience.

I signed up 3 days ago, Sunday night (January 8th, 2012) and it took me approximately 30-45 minutes from the time I downloaded the executable to signing into the game for the first time.
I live in the Midwest with cable internet. In fact, it's not even the fastest package from my ISP.

I can understand your frustration with the first 10 minutes of game play but to be honest it is not nearly enough time to really feel the game. You have to remember, this is a Sandbox, not a Themepark MMO. It's going to feel very different than what you may be used to and the developers are attempting to help you acclimate through that unfamiliarity.

Again, I understand your frustration, there are a lot of unfamiliar windows popping up everywhere and taking up your screen. The controls are not familiar. The graphics are choppy (turned down for low end machines, beautiful when the anit-aliasing and antistropic are turned up in the options menu). There are no friendly NPC's guiding you on what to do, etc.

If you give it a chance to acclimate, you will understand that there is more to the game than the first 10 minutes. I'm still on the starter tutorial as well, but I'm an ex-EvE player so I know that there is a vast game play experience at the end of the tutorial tunnel.

Make it through the tunnel, join a Player corp, give it the 14 days of free time and then decide. One of the greatest differences between a Themepark game and a Sandbox is the "Multi-player" part of "Massive Multi-player Online". I'd hate for you and your friend to miss out on what can potentially be a genre of MMO of which you may really enjoy.

I was on when the OP started. If I remember his first question was "how long till I pvp?". I do understand that pvping is fun but go play call of duty if you just want to log in and pvp. Mmo,s are not like that. Have to keep in mind that most mmo's made these days are a hand holding session. I found you learn the basics on the tutorial and if he made it to the forums to rant he was only a click away to the resources and guide section. It took me 2 different times to play eve, but I just sat down and said, damn it I'm going to learn this and was reading every guide I could find. A week later I was like damn this is actually easy. Then you start learning about the more indepth parts of the game, which is the best part of sandbox games.