I’m going to go ahead and assume you meant something more specific than just “copy it”, given the history we have of games trying to just copy something successful and how poorly they’ve performed (including the mobile market in a general sense).
From every person new to EVE I’ve helped their opinions of EVE have been similar - they’ve heard of the grandios large scale battles in the game, be it from a person that plays or an article and decide to check the game out. They find themselves intimidated, confused, or lost by the open-endedness of the game, the overall design of the UI and it’s various windows, or the substantial amount of information they happen across as they do the tutorial (or discover by chance).
They feel as though they should avoid any sort of player confrontation due to being new, or feel as though they’ve messed up with skill training in some way due to the real-world time requirement it uses, and either decides to reroll using a new account and starting over or simply stop playing. Others simply just don’t find it’s the game for them for one reason or another.
As far as them joining corporations go, they might have gotten the short end of the stick and got themselves stuck in a corporation that takes advantage of them, have a terrible experience as a result, and stop playing. Or they put their eggs (ISK) in one basket (an expensive ship they can’t replace), have it blown up (usually in null where the rental corps try to mass-recruit to pay their bill) and have the experience flatline their morale and stop playing.
So with all of that said -
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A redesign of the UI could be useful in getting over the initial “shock” to the game, it’s just a matter of exercising creativity to make it work.
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Some of what’s been mentioned in the last CSM Minutes or the AMA thread a few weeks ago (cleanup of inactive corporations, expanding on the game’s tutorial to provide a better introductory experience)
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A possible change to skill training as a whole (also mentioned to a degree in the CSM Minutes in the form of the removal of attributes), though this should have its own thread if it’s going to be discussed.
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Probably some of the mystical spaghetti code that can’t be changed because it would break everything. I’m sure CCP’s devs have wished they did x differently on more than one occasion.
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Pushing the reminder that they will lose the ship they’ve just invested money into, which could be done through a mission (be it a tutorial, agent, mission arc, whatever) that branches based on if their ship is blown up or not). The first thing that comes to mind is basically a tutorial segment where the player joins a faction warfare corp (and is given a ship and mods to be blown up), initiates a scripted event in deadspace that branches based on them getting blown up or not (with a reimbursement being the reward) , and ending with leaving the FW corp to continue whatever they were doing. So like one of the military agent missions, but more involved.