If you have 10 hours to spare, waiting for it to happen.

Eve combat typically happens like this:

Saturday 12.00 midday

you get a text for your alliance leader. "Mate, Baddy Corp is gonna attack us, get online and get in fleet".

You log in, get on voice, your told what to fly.

Muster point is a system 12 jumps away. You fly there.

its now 12.45.

Half the people havn't shown up yet. So you wait in station.

Its now 13.30. Some more people log in. Fleet Commnader (FC) says hes sick of waiting and a spy reports that enemy fleet is moving towards us. Fleet commander says we are moving out at 14.00

13.59 A director logs in wants to be in the fleet, and hes a super cap pilot, so FC says he'll wait for him. Turns out hes in empire 49 jumps away and hes already used his jump clone and he can't use his cap holding character because hes only got enough skills to fly the Nyx not enough to fight with it.

No sign of enemy fleet.

This is followed by 2 hours of mysoginistic jokes and some minor harrassment of the more hothead members to make them rage for lulz.

Its now 15.05

FC says hes has to go.

No sign of the director.

Director arrives at muster point at 15.20. FC is offline.

Your about to leave and go ratting when FC logs back online. at 15.50.

Fleet leaves, but there is no sign of enemy fleet. So we set up a gate camp.

This is followed by 2 hours of hanging about and complaining that T3 are uncatchable because of stupid game breaking configs.

Its now 17.40

You break for dinner.

You log back in for 18.30 the fleet has moved 5 jumps away and you hear there was a minor enagement when you were eating your casserole.

More people log in for the CTA, the fleet commander instructs everyone to move back to the home system. While we wait for more people to join.

Another 2 hours pass while people contact people to get more caps online. After a boring day the FC decides to attack Baddy Corps space. It is now 21.10

We go to a border system and find it empty. No sign of enemy fleet. So FC decides to attack a player owned structure with the caps. Its take another 30 minutes to put it in reinforced mode with what dreads we have...

Its is now 22.00. Then one of two things happenes, you are hotdropped by a **** storm of cap ships leading to an epic but slow fight, unless you die really fast in which case sucks to be you.

Or nothing happens and you spent the day waiting for people to walk thier dog or whatever.

Yes indeed, eve is very slow burn.

Other types of fight happen, the so called "small scale engagement" but these are far rarer, but have gotten better recently. With efforts by Kil2 and others to promote solo pvp. Most people experience eve pvp in the way above.

Edit: this is exactly what happened in my last alliance operation and it happens more often than not. I no longer play in null. Its called null because its a lot of nothing. Virtually no gameplay except the rare fight, ratting and helping someone with the charm to be an alliance leader make passive isk.