People keep asking for this in the striker thread. It's not a very good idea for this game, and here's why:

1: Supporting all this extra hardware for a minigame is going to get expensive. We don't currently have enough active players to even think about such a thing.

2: The game is designed specifically for keyboard+mouse. It plays pretty well with keyboard and mouse once you get used to it. They would have to change the gunnery mechanics significantly for it to play very well with a joystick.

3: A joystick game gives a big advantage to joystick users. When I plugged in my new proper joystick (I'd been using an Xbox gamepad) and played X-wing with it, TIE Advanced went from being very difficult to kill with an X-wing to being a lot easier, and the trench run would have been an absolute nightmare without this thing. People will complain about being at a serious disadvantage because they don't have a joystick, and they will be correct-if the game is designed for joysticks. If the game isn't designed for joysticks, there just isn't much point to adding support.

Oh, and sticky this please. It's a very FAQ.

Thank you.

I also want to point this out: over the course of these forums, a reasonably common complaint, usually posted by an angry noob, is "this game is all about gear". It isn't true, and we can link threads and videos, and we do. Sometimes that fossilboner guy comes in and talks about how he never has fun, but mostly the forums are pretty willing to educate on this topic, because it's mostly a slander aimed at a problem the game doesn't have.

....but if joysticks were allowed and correctly supported, you would see people come in and complain about how they can't afford an X-55 and it's unfair, and that argument would absolutely have merit.

And you put it best with "...People will complain about being at a serious disadvantage because they don't have a joystick, and they will be correct-if the game is designed for joysticks. If the game isn't designed for joysticks, there just isn't much point to adding support."

Someone is reading this, thinking, "oh, those guys just don't want me to show them what I could do with a proper input scheme". What would actually happen is he would queue into a game of aces with HOTAS support and get ownfaced even harder. It's not like the regulars don't have joysticks, or can't access Amazon, or didn't play flight sims, or don't know how to run one of those, or are blind to the advantages.