Screen Layouts for PVP

One thing I'm sure you've noticed about Eve is that space (as in room on your screen, rather than the empty black thing that has stars in it) is at a premium. There are a lot of windows that you'll probably want to have visible, and unless you're fortunate enough to play on a very large monitor you're probably going to struggle to fit it all on.

The default screen layout is, it's fair to say, pretty impractical for PVP. Most people make some basic changes until they find it bearable, others go for a more radical approach and reorganise the whole thing for maximum efficiency. Take a look at a few screenshots and videos of experienced players in PVP, and you'll find a whole range of different layouts built to suit the user's needs.

I'd like to take a moment to talk through the layout I'm currently using, as well as why I chose to set it up this way. Remember that there's no right or wrong here, it's all based on preference.

AAR - Ferox vs Interceptors

We're going to take a break from our regular programming to discuss a particular fight. I'm not planning to turn this blog into a journal and document every fight that I have, but this one was quite interesting from a tactical perspective, and I think some of you might find it useful. If I'd had FRAPS running I could have done this as a commentary video, but unfortunately I didn't so this will have to do. If you want to see more of this kind of stuff, let me know in the comments.

Risk

Risk vs Reward is one of the great mantras of the eve playerbase - that a greater risk of loss should mean a more substantial reward for success. In most cases this is brought up from a purely financial standpoint, usually to justify or question why one way of making isk is more profitable than another. In my opinion though, it goes much deeper than that.

Most eve PVPers are risk averse, myself included. Nobody likes to lose, and when we're offered the choice between taking a risk and making a relatively small change which would eliminate that risk, it's only natural that most people choose the latter. How many times have you seen someone wait until they had overwhelming numbers before taking a fight that they could have won anyway, or reship from something comparable to their opponent into something larger or more powerful? We rationalise it as common sense - why would we risk losing when we could win? Fighting fair is, after all, not what eve is about.

However in my experience, some of the best fights come when we put ourselves in a high risk situation and come out ahead. By avoiding fights where there is a risk of losing, are we in fact cheating ourselves out of our own enjoyment?

How to Move a Capital Ship

This may seem like a fairly bland topic (and unlike most things on this blog, isn't directly PVP related), but from my own experience I know it's something that many newer players don't really understand. Given the potential consequences should you get it wrong, I think it probably deserves an explanation. Before I tell you how to do it right however, let me tell you a story about doing it wrong.

Back when I was relatively new to Eve, I was part of a small hisec carebear alliance. Our corp had some pretensions to PVP and lowsec, but realistically none of us really knew much outside of hisec missioning to the point where your faithful narrator, having been on the receiving end of a few uneventful hisec wars and with a whole 2 killmails under my belt, was the corp's leading expert on the subject.

I remember one of the other corps in our alliance recruited someone who owned a carrier, and they wanted to move it closer to our base of operations. Having never dealt with capitals before, we just found a quiet lowsec system and lit our cyno at a safespot to bring the carrier in, before having it warp to station and dock up. Looking back, this was a pretty dangerous thing to do - had anyone chosen to warp to our cyno it wouldn't have been hard for them to tackle our carrier, or at the very least kill our solitary cyno rapier. By blind luck nobody did so, and it wasn't until some time later that I realised just how bad an idea that had been. So how should we have done it?

Note that this article deals simply with moving capital ships in a non-combat sense. This is not a guide to hotdropping or using a capital ship in combat.

Know Your Enemy - Rookie Ships

Note: This article is now out of date. Head over to the Article Index page to see the updated list.

The Secure Commerce Commission obviously got a good bulk deal on these ships, because they seem to hand them out at every possible opportunity - if you're like me, I expect you have a whole fleet of such ships distributed across the Eve universe, each of them secretly joyous that you didn't just trash them like all those other guys.

When something is as common, and as...well... free as a rookie ship, it's easy to brush them off as worthless. However, could there be more to these ships than simply a container for that free unit of tritanium? In this article, we'll look at just how effective these often underrated platforms can be in PVP.