I have never played WoW but from what I understand it leans heavily on PvE elements. EvE is dope as fuck insofar as PvE takes a backseat once you start to get into the swing of things and most interactions start to involve PvP. There's an in-game currency you must amass to buy bigger/better ships and better weapons for them (in addition to developing skills to better use said ships and weaps) and so the in-game market is a huge component and trade hubs have developed organically where shitloads of trading (and scamming) goes on. Instead of guilds you have corporations and most of them specialize either in industry or in PvP.
Industry is important because ships and weapons and most goods in general are entirely created by players but it requires a huge effort to acquire the raw materials and research the blueprints and all that other fun stuff to actually build something that will sell for a profit. Since the market is entirely player driven there is a lot of competition so there are also corps that exist purely to fuck up the supply chain of your competitors. It's basically uninhibited capitalism at it's most ruthless.
There are a bunch of professions you can get into in various forms, like industry, exploration, trading, piracy, even being a mercenary is a profession. Basically, to PvP you need ships and weapons which requires goods created by players which requires raw materials that are put in place by the devs so there is a core of PvE that the game relies upon but there are so many player-driven layers created on top that it's lead to professions that deal exclusively with PvP and playing a part in power struggles between alliances to corner portions of the vast universe and the resources found there. This, again, points back to the sense of ballsy free enterprise that the game is ultimately about.
TBH, there is so much that can be said about the game and the community that it sustains that it's impossible to summarize all the neat nuances so I'd say just get a trial acct and see for yourself
