Welcome to the Lag

  CCP Atlas just posted an interesting DevBlog concerning the degradation in fleet fight lag following Dominion.  The good news is that you aren't all crazy and the CCP team does know that Dominion has broken something in the hamster cage.  The bad news, at least in my opinion, is that the primary focus seems to be on keeping the node up and running during the fight.  While the Devs are working on both issues it appears they are more concerned with node stability than directly confronting lag.  I believe that both are serious issues but with node stability affecting all parties eqaully and lag often giving the upper hand to the first party to land in a system I feel that it should be the primary focus.  In any event; I am glad that the complete and utter pounding we took in D-GTMI gave the Devs so much data to analyze, considering that the lag so heavily affected that fight.

  On a related note CCP Atlas did share some tips for operating in high-lag environments. The major point he stresses is PATIENCE which is very important when your client is responding slowly.  Beyond that the guys in Fatal Ascension have been sharing their tips since the D-G fight and I thought I would post some of the tips on preemptively combatting lag that my CEO shared here:

The Client

  Can't See Can't Fight

  It is absolutely imperative you setup your client properly before a capital battle. You may be using a NASA supercomputer in some basement in a government complex in Florida, but that still does not mean you are going to have the bandwidth to function in a capital engagement with hundreds and hundreds of ships on the grid at one time.

• Turn off ALL effects.
• Turn down ALL graphics.
• Zoom out!
• Close unnecessary channels.
• Do NOT play in windowed mode.

The Overview
 Holy Brackets Batman

  You can easily find yourself lagged out for thirty seconds if you so much as flip over to a new tab in your overview that has all brackets showing in space. In addition to that, without a proper overview setup, you'll play hell even finding the primary target regardless of whether it has been broadcast or not. 

• Turn off ALL brackets on ALL tabs.
• ONLY reds and neutrals on your primary tab.
• Create the following overview settings:

•  Planets, Stations, Sun, Control Towers, No Ships
•  Only carriers
•  Only dreadnoughts
•  Only battleships
•  Only interdictors and heavy interdictors
•  Only super capitals

 ~Mendolus (AU-F CEO)

Edit: Manasi chipped in a few good ones which I can't believe I overlooked:

1) remove the timer animations from the HUD


2) ungroup your guns

Aside from turning off auto repeat the next most important thing to remember is to ungroup those guns.