Client Setup for PVP

Original text by Rells

Copyright© 2006 by the Authors, updated 2009

All Rights Reserved

For 0.0 life and PvP combat the first thing you should know is that lag kills; any graphics settings you might have, might look cool, but the lag will murder you if 10 hostile ships jump in on you and a real battle starts. For this reason 0.0 and other PvP pilots turn off several game effects.

Firstly, the premium graphics may look really, really cool, but they, like everything else, will slow you down. (Note: Premium graphics executes the graphics calculations on your video card, as opposed to your computer's primary CPU. In some configurations, premium graphics will outperform classic graphics. Try both, use what's fastest!) To go back to classic graphics, hit escape, go to the Display & Graphics tab and uncheck the box labelled 'Premium Graphics Content Enabled'. Don't restart EVE just yet, we are not finished here.

If you look to the left of where you just were, you should see some check boxes. Untick the top three ('Turret Effects', 'Effects' and 'Trails On/Off'). Now, go to the Audio tab and uncheck 'Audio enabled'. Unfortunately the sound in EVE really is more trouble than it is worth (plus you don't want to be distracted while the instructor is talking).

One other Eve setting that you will want to turn off is auto-relocking of targets. This is a utility that makes you automatically relock anything that locks you and its deadly. The main reason to turn this off is that there are a number of cheesy tricks that can be used to get you CONCORDed in a war situation. For example, a war target might undock from a station, you start all your weapons and send off the drones to kill him; however he docks back into the station. Your ship will automatically switch to the non-war target that tried to lock you as his buddy came out of the station. Your drones and turrets go for the wrong guy and CONCORD does the rest. In addition, in 0.0 or any other kind of PvP you will be choosing targets much more intelligently, not letting them choose you. Go to the Generic tab and look for Auto Target Back 1 Targets. This setting is on the bottom left and may contain a number other than 1. Make sure that number reads 0.

Your overview will need to be tweaked as well. If twelve enemy ships warp in you will want to make sure you are locking the enemy and not the friendlies. This can be problematic in a hectic situation with your heart racing (yes it happens to us all) and your adrenaline flowing. Therefore, it's best that friendlies not show up on overview at all.

Go into your overview settings by right clicking on the arrow right beside where it says Overview and selecting the Settings menu option. Once there you will start by modifying the filters tab. Make sure that anyone who is in your corporation, alliance, gang, has good or excellent standings do NOT appear. Also make sure you filter out all concord and NPC fleet ships (leave rats filtered on but turn off things like customs officers and so on). In addition make sure that you filter off all cargo containers, drones, sentry guns, secure containers, etc. The ONLY things that should be on your overview are rats, neutral player ships and gates. There is a setting to filter out neutrals, however there is a problem with it: if you check it off, everyone except those with standings will be filtered out. That includes war targets! Unless your corp has set them to negative standings, they will not appear on your overview. Unfortunately, by leaving neutrals checked, you may get a lot of people on your overview that you don't want, however, we can make it as good as possible.

Now we need to adjust the colors and order. Look at your background colors tabs and make sure you have the colors set so that all people in your alliance, corporation, gang, and with good standings are various shades of blue. Next make sure that the icon colors match the colors of the background. Finally you need to set the valid empire targets to blink. This means that you set pilots at war with you and pilots with sec status below -5 to blink. That way you won't ever have to check anything to make sure the guy can be popped in empire or that he will pop you.

The next step to adjust the order of the icons and background colors. To understand how this work know that Eve evaluates from the top, down. The top color and icon is more important than the bottom one and will override the bottom one. So if you have security status coloring on top and alliance member on bottom, Eve will color the pilot according to their security status and not according to their alliance or standings. This is bad because you could end up shooting friendlies. In 0.0 the standings of the pilot are more important than the security status of the pilot. If friendly pilots pirate you, you should take that up with your CEO or officer and he will handle it for you. You should not shoot at alliance, corporation, gang or high standings pilots, no matter what their security status; nor should you return fire if an alliance, corporation or gang member fires on you (unless you are both just playing around of course). A fair few wars in 0.0 space have started because of pilots who didn't set up the overview correctly.

Your final order for your color tags and icons should be the following:

• Pilot is in your gang
• Pilot is at war with you
• Pilot is in your corporation
• Pilot is in your alliance
• Pilot has high standing
• Pilot has good standing
• Pilot has horrible standing
• Pilot has bad standing
• Pilot has bounty on him
• Pilot (agent) is interactable
• Pilot has security status below -5
• Pilot has security status below 0
• Pilot has a neutral standing

I would advise you to turn on all of the color-coding and most of the icons because the more information you have on the overview, the faster you can react to changing conditions in the game. The only icons that I don't use are the skulls for low security status pilots, reserving that for bounties, and interactable agents.

You will also want to reconfigure your colors according to your taste. I imagine mine would be far different than yours because I am slightly red-green colorblind, but the magic of Eve accommodates us both. However, you want to make sure that valid empire targets (those below - 5.0 security status and those at war with you) are blinking and no others are blinking. This means that you will know at a glance if the target is a legal empire target or not.

Finally you will want to set up your columns in the overview. The columns that you should have visible are the following columns in this order: "ICON", "DISTANCE", "NAME", "TYPE", "VELOCITY", "ALLIANCE". The tag column is no longer necessary since in the invention of the fleets and broadcasting targets. The "ALLIANCE" column should be resized so that they can display 6 character sized corporation and alliance tickers. The "NAME" column should be set up so that you can read longer names and the type column also appropriately resized. The type column tells you what ship you are facing, while the velocity column gives you an idea of how fast the target is moving. When in battle you may want to sort your overview by different columns depending on the engagement. In most small engagements sorting my distance is your best option; however, when in a larger engagement against many ships you'll want to sort your overview by the name column. Clicking on the top of the column will sort everything on your overview alphabetically, allowing you to easily find targets that are called primary. Finally, sometimes a fleet commander will sort his or her overview by the type column, making it easier to pick out specific ship types to pick as primaries.

Once you have your settings modified you should have your overview set up to PvP. You will probably want to keep any number of overview settings. You might have a setting for empire that only shows valid high-sec space targets (and unfortunately neutrals). You could have another setting that you use for ratting, another for 0.0 space and yet another for mining. You can click on the arrow beside "Overview" and save your settings or load them again. Once you have this set up you will be ready to get into action while minimizing your chances of firing on something you aren't supposed to.

You can save your overview settings in the overview settings panel. This gives you a chance to create presets that will have various things on them. You can have a setting for ratting, another for pvp and still more for other specialized tasks. The settings can be changed out at a flash by using the menu available by clicking on the icon to the left of the overview. This enables you to have configurable overview settings at a moment's notice (which, once you get into PvP, is more useful than you could imagine).

Other things you can do to assist in reducing the lag incurred in PVP situations are: Turn off logging - To do this you will need to open logs (it might be under accessories on the side bar) - settings tab and then uncheck the various options. Turn damage messages off - To do this you will need to press ESC and under the General Settings tab and uncheck "DAMAGE MESSAGES ON/OFF'". Keep bookmarks within folders - Only have the folder you are currently using open. The client will re-sort any open folders everytime you enter a new area, go through a gate or undock. Set Chat windows to text only - Make sure that you set any chat windows to the option that does not show avatar images. These avatars take time and resources to load and can potentially increase the lag in systems where large numbers of pilots are present. This option is in the chat window, above the channel member list, and looks like several lines stacked on top of each other.

CCP's Advice

In November 2008, CCP created this page with their advice about minimising lag in large fleets.