The main problem is that, in my opinion, when it comes to fighting, that is, close-range piloting, EVE delegates control of the ship to something that isn’t more capable than the human player. All you can do is choose a target and “approach” or “orbit”, or click somewhere in space and let your ship fly in that direction (with the fundamental problem that choosing a 3-dimensional point to fly toward on a your screen’s 2-dimensional input field can lead to “interesting” results).

In a way, it’s as if EVE is the other way round from the standard MMO fighting: instead of controlling your character’s movement, but having an auto-attack (supplemented by hotkey attacks), EVE gives you full control over all your actions, except movement. I know that you like some sort of “automation” in your games, for the lack of a better word: stand and exchange hits, auto-attacks, etc. And I’m with you to a large extent. It’s just that with EVE, doing it the other way round always struck me as a strange decision.

Then again, the game would be unplayable (well, even less playable) during extra-large fights. Flying a ship during 10% time dilation already sucks, from all I heard, but I can’t imagine how bad it would be if you had to manually pilot it.

When it comes to “flying” spaceships, one thing you almost never see in what I would class as “real science fiction” is the equivalent of a pilot flying an airplane. You have sentient AIs, non-sentient machines, organic gestalts, drug-enhanced or psionic individuals and massive teams but, other than for the space equivalent of sports cars or taxis you don’t have one guy heaving on a joystick.

If EVE delegates control of ships to something more capable than the human player at the keyboard that seems eminently reasonable to me. Maybe one day I’ll download the trial and see for myself.