Not really a "simulator" since it's driven by real humans interacting. I'd say it's just a virtual world with its own real economy.
An interesting thing you can do with a simulator is pause, rewind, make arbitrary experiments, run counterfactuals, etc -- all of which are prohibited in Eve since it needs to respect the users who are there to have fun, not be test subjects.
An interesting thing you can do with a simulator is pause, rewind, make arbitrary experiments, run counterfactuals, etc -- all of which are prohibited in Eve since it needs to respect the users who are there to have fun, not be test subjects.