Seems that an awful lot of new players to EVE Online are confused by the control setup at first. Not that they don’t make sense, it just seems that people are expecting to be able to manually pilot their ships through space rather than inputting commands and having the process being automated. CCP have taken note of this because they’ve come up with an experimental keyboard flight control system for the game.

An opt-in Beta version of it will be included in the Rhea mini-expansion next month, and the bugs worked out. If the experiment shows that keyboard controls can work within the game, CCP will think about implementing it proper. If not, it won’t be sticking.

Given that EVE is quite a large game, I doubt that the controls will be as simple was WASD. Automated controlling might have the edge in the big battles that happen frequently in EVE’s player-driven galaxies, but maybe the keyboard controls will be quicker to react to separate events. We just don’t know yet.

They’ll be available at first on the public test server, Singularity; with a mass test coming some time during the next week.