This article intends to share with you how to reduce lag while playing eve. While lag still does raise its ugly head from time to time, CCP did an excellent job over the Summer/Winter of 2011 in decreasing lag. Hopefully this page won't be nearly as useful to you as it might have been in the past.

The first thing you are required to do is determine the source of your lag.Lag in large fleets is generally Server Lag, which is to say lag generated on the server end. This will often manifest as failing to load grid when jumping or warping, and modules doing a single active cycle and then doing their off cycle repeatedly.Another type of lag is client lag. This is as a result of your computer being too slow to process the multiple moving objects. Usually occurs on older computers, computers with low memory, or computers with slow graphics cards.Lastly there is connection lag. This is lag as a result of a slow internet connection.

This type of lag can occur at any time for those with slow connections to the internet. Large fleets should have absolutely no bearing on the generation of this lag although it will still make them more difficult to handle. Luckily this is the simplest type of lag to deal with. If you are streaming music stop it. If you are running through a wireless router ensure that no one else is freeloading on your connection. If you are running gnutella, bittorrent, or any other downloading program turn it off. Ensure your anti-virus isn't updating its database. Basically keep turning off things which download volumes of data from the web until you don't have any issues. If the issues persist then you are pretty much out of luck and should try and find a service provider which doesn't suck – or if you're living in the frozen Canadian arctic or other remote area just learn to cope with it.

This type of lag occurs when running a lower end system or when dealing with many objects in space. Large fleets will, to a certain extent, have a bearing upon this.

• The first thing to do is to check to make sure your computer is not running anything too ridiculous in the background. If your anti-virus has scheduled scans, for instance, you would really rather NOT have them start in the middle of a five hundred ship engagement with whomever we're fighting now. Other programs may have similar processor or memory requirements at scheduled times. On a Linux computer running Firefox in the background with a adobe-flash video loaded with have a huge detrimental effect.
• Turn off/down the fancy graphics settings. Many people with older computers will already have these turned down but there is no reason to have drone models generated, especially in large fleets. As pretty as the sun being occluded by ships is, that is a rather large graphics processing sinkhole. Bloom lighting effects, really? Camera shake? None of them necessary. Chances are in a large fleet fight you'll be too busy looking at your overview to admire the graphics anyway. Unless you're making a video turn off the frilly stuff. This will also help to an extent with loading grid.
• Overview settings. If you have brackets turned on in your large fleet overview settings turn them off right now. As impressive as it is to see all the little red brackets go flying around the screen your computer will hate you for it. If you have purple and green and blue brackets on top of that you should probably just quit EVE now (not for real, but seriously – deal with that stuff!) Some people will tell you to completely remove brackets, although personally I like to keep planets, star gates, and stations bracketed so if I start to end up seriously hurting and I'm not scrammed I can just warp to the one closest to the front of my ship. This is a strategy for close range ships and tackles only though, if you're in a sniper HAC/BS or any number of other ships in a large fleet fight your FC should have already told you a celestial to align to.

This is the most dreaded type of lag, since we have absolutely no way of dealing with it at our end. The best we can hope for is to mitigate its effects.

• If you're the FC (and if you are reading this for the first time you probably shouldn't be the FC for a multi-hundred strong fleet) make sure you notify CCP as much as possible so they can reinforce the node you will be fighting in. This is maybe effective for POS bashes, but in general the best one can normally give is a range of systems where we might engage. After-all the enemy has a say in where a fight is held too. Some FCs believe CCP is untrustworthy and will alert the enemy fleet. This is possible, but pretty bloody unlikely. If you are concerned though don't tell them until a little bit before.
• Turn your guns off auto-repeat and delete any weapon groupings. To do this right-click on the icon of the gun in question. Often in a large fleet fight the lag will be so bad your guns will fail to cycle – or worse they will cycle once and then do about fifty de-activation cycles. You can track this by watching the ammunition counter (sorry Amarr fliers) if they continue to cycle but only one round of ammunition was expended you are experiencing this and it'll be a cruel reminder to turn off auto-repeat for the next time. The way you make this work is with auto-repeat off activate the guns. Wait for them to complete a FULL cycle (don't get antsy and manually de-activate them before one full rotation). If they de-activate on their own great, re-activate them. If they continue to cycle then click again to turn them off. They should at the end of the next cycle. At which point you repeat until the enemy or you are dead. This will halve your DPS – but it beats having your guns jammed for the entire fight, and who knows you might actually get lucky and they will auto-deactivate when they are supposed to. It is probably a bad idea to do this with things like MWDs and Scrams/Disrupts. If you do it with your Scram then there will be a period of time the enemy will be able to warp away. Likewise if your MWD ends up jammed likely you will get the speed boost without the loss of capacitor.

Lag, as bad as it is, can also prove beneficial. Assuming you have an intelligent and switched on FC. As Atlas/GC/CoW showed in the Geminate campaign of Christmas 2009 a smaller/weaker opponent can often win fights in this broken version of EVE by simply having a better position. As it takes so long to load grid often times the defending force (those already positioned) will likely have a huge advantage over those who are jumping into their position (via warp, cyno, star gate, whatever). The reason is the people who got there first already had a chance for their clients to load grid. The people who are jumping in are vulnerable until they manage to load grid and actually get some feedback from their clients. Often times this might even take so long that you will be dead before you manage to load grid. This can happen even at a star gate as often it will take longer for you to load grid than your cloak from jumping through will last. THERE IS NO SOLUTION TO THIS. Don't bug your FC about engaging entrenched enemies in Large Fleets (it's still okay in small gangs or even small fleets vs other small fleets) as it's pretty much paramount to committing suicide. If you jump into the enemy fleet, especially on an un-reinforced node, you will die. Simple as that.