Player Features and Ideas Discussion

RNG is a balancing and enjoyment factor that removes the tedium of button mashing and the extremes of number crunching. If you don't like RNG, I suggest games like Street Fighter where the person who hits the right buttons the fastest wins. That is not, nor should it ever be, how MMOs work.

What is wrong with ECM right now?

how about removing the 20 second lock break and replace with a simple lock break...

that would make ecm annoying but not op.

The problem is twofold.
ECCM does nothing if no ECM hits you, it's an otherwise useless mod.
Once you are jammed, you can do nothing till unjammed.

Every other form of Ewar has both a counter module that serves a purpose when you aren't hit by that Ewar. TC are good regardless.
And, when you are hit by another form of EWar, piloting skill can do something about it. (To some extent).

ECM is neither. The fact it is then also purely chance based so even with ECCM, Comp Skills and the worst implant set in the game (Locking you into a single race of ships and giving NOTHING to any others) you can still be jammed by a mere drone is just icing on the cake. The first two are the big issues.

Ok, so ive been thinking, what if instead of jamming a ship you jammed each individual lock, and instead of a random function if it was based on a known game mechanic: Signature Radius.

It never made any sense to me that It is just as difficult to prevent me from locking a frigate as it is to prevent me from locking a titan.

My suggestion is to make it so that instead of jamming an entire ship, you jam its locks individually. Each time you lock a ship, that lock would be given a "lock strength" which would be:

SignalStrength + (TargetSignatureRadius/10) = "lock strength"

Then to jam a target you simply need to put more jam strength on them than they have "lock strength" and they'll lose that lock and not be able to lock anything without enough lock strength. (of course the numbers would have to be rebalanced)

This would have a few interesting and emergent side effects:
1. A slight nerf to MWDs
2. A slight buff to target painters
3. Interesting interaction possibilities . . . For instance, you may choose to increase your own signature radius when your logi gets jammed so they can lock you again etc

Thoughts?

That makes a lot of sense. Larger ships are easier to target due to large sigRad. But nothing takes into account how easy or hard it is to maintain a lock. By reducing the ability to maintain locks on smaller ships this would have a very interesting effect in small-gang pvp.

By signal strength I assume you mean sensor strength. So lets say sensor str = 20 ship targeting a HAC with SigRad=100. This would give a lock strength of 20 + (100/10) = 30. A single Falcon using max-skilled racial ECMs (14-15 jam strength) would require about 2 jammers to break those locks.

An unlinked Crow with all 5s would have a sensor str of 14.4. Currently the above Falcon would permajam it with a single racial jammer. That inty tackling a 400m target (Battleship of some kind) would have a lock strength of 14.4 + (400/10) = 54.4. You would need 4 racial jammers to break that lock.

What about targeting something smaller? Same Crow targeting another frigate with SigRad 40m? 14.4 + (14.4/10) = 15.84. Falcon would require 2 jammers to do the job.

I think your formula need some tweaking. But the basic concept seems sound, and I like it better than max locked targets. We just need to decide at what point is 1 jammer sufficient, and what role should multispectral jammers play?

I considered considering Scan Resolution in the formula. But that would intrude upon the territory of remote sensor damps, possibly making the combination of ECM+damps excessively OP.

Of course, we could always just make ECM check to break locks every cycle and call it good.

This is brilliant! I was trying to think of a way to get player interaction in there, and how to incorporate number of locks; you just did both in one elegant solution.

I would maybe modify the formula a bit though because it seems that locking anything past 2 ships would be really really difficult., so my formula would be something like:
[SignalStrength + (TargetSignatureRadius/10)] / (1.3^LockedTargets) = "lock strength"

Now of course the sensor strength numbers for each ship and the ECM numbers would have to be tweaked a bit, but I think this would really be an improvement over the current RNG ECM we have today.

The current ECM effect is the issue. Not being able to Lock is a too pwoerful effect. It cannot be implemented in ANY way without a random factor or it will be isntantly overpowered or completely useless.


Change the effect and then think on the rest.

Howabout instead of it being based on jamming targeting outright, it could instead have a variety of target-affecting mechanics:
1.) chance to break currently existing target locks
2.) decreases scan resolution in a chance-based fashion, so each cycle it's a different value
3.) decreases targeting range in a chance-based fashion, so each cycle it's a different value
4.) chance to reduce max number of targets, sometimes even reducing them to none

If it took a very powerful ECM to reliably jam out a ship completely for an extended period of time, but much less ECM strength to screw up someone's targeting a bit, then ECM would be much more scalable.

Say your ECM strength matches your target's sensor strength. You have:
50% chance for each currently targeted unit to break target (separate chance for each)
Scan resolution and targeting range decreased by 0% to 50%
Max number of targets: each treated seperately with 50% chance to break, so you average out being reduced to half max targets

If your ECM strength were half of the target's, you'd have 33% target breaking, because the equation works as A/(A+B) where A is ECM strength and B is sensor strength. You would have -17% to 33% scan res/targeting range reduction, and any negative value is just set to zero.

If your ECM strength were double you target's sensor strength, you'd have 67% values. 67% chance to break targets, 67% less max targets (average), and 33% to 67% reduced scan res/targeting range. This also means that if you have more jam strength than the target's sensor strength, you are guaranteed to reduce their scan res and targeting range somewhat. If you have less, you mightnot reduce those but yoou can still break locks and reduce max locks.

Low ECM strength will have the most impressive effect in breaking currently existing locks--not much else will be of use but breaking the target's locks every once in a while forces them to re-target and buys precious seconds. High ECM strength is more likely to make a target useless if they are depending on their range or scan res, or if they have a low number of max targets or need to keep multiple units targeted at once. Assault ships probably won't be very strongly affected by this type of ECM.

Here is an example, using a Guardian with sensor strength 22.8 and we'll fly a Blackbird with jam strength 10.0. The Blackbird is in a POS defense fleet and the Guardian is on the aggressor side, so the Guardian never gets a rest from repairing ships. Our job is to reduce the amount of reps going out from the Guardian so the attacking fleet falls faster.

The jamming effectiveness value is 10/(10+22.8) = 30.49%. The Guardian can lock 10 targets at a time and is trying to maintain at least 3 target locks at any given moment--2 for cap chain and 1 for rep target. It has a targeting range of 81.25km and is positioned about 50km from the attack fleet, so it has about 40-60km to the average rep target, or 5-10km to other logistics ships. Its scan resolution is 481.3mm, so it can lock:
1.) Guardian - 3.4s
2.) Oracle - 2.3s
3.) Abaddon - 1.8s

Lets start by applying one jammer to the Guardian. We'll do this for 1 minute (3 cycles) and review the effects:
(I'm using a random number generator selecting values from 1 to 10,000 to determine successes/failures.)
Cycle 1:

No primary target locks broken

Max targets reduced to 7

Targeting Range reduced by 15.52% (to 68.64km) - no locks broken

Scan resolution reduced by 11.77% (to 424.7mm) - irrelevant

Cycle 2:

No primary target locks broken

Max targets reduced to 7

Targeting Range reduced by 9.81% (to 73.28km) - no locks broken

Scan resolution reduced by 30.26% (to 335.7mm) - irrelevant

Cycle 3:

No primary target locks broken

Max targets reduced to 8

Targeting Range reduced by 1.64% (to 79.92km) - no locks broken

Scan resolution reduced by 28.67% (to 343.3mm) - irrelevant

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WE MUST STEP UP OUR EFFORTS IF WE ARE GOING TO GET ANYWHERE
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Let's apply two jammers at once this time. We will do this for one minute (3 cycles) and review:

Cycle 1:

Guardian loses targeting with both cap chain buddies but not rep target. Other Guardians may run short on capacitor if it cannot get them locked soon enough!

Max targets reduced to 8

Targeting Range reduced by 33.16% (to 54.31km) - cannot target most distant fleet members

Scan resolution reduced by 23.62% (to 367.6mm) - 4.5s to re-lock other Guardians, plus a second or more in human response time plus server lag. 6 seconds of cap lost isn't too bad for them and the cap chain remains unbroken.

Cycle 2:

Guardian loses targeting with up chain buddy and rep target. Success!

Max targets reduced to 4. Now the Guardian cannot maintain more than 1 extra target, and thus will have to target fleet members in response to incoming damage rather than having several already targeted.

Targeting Range reduced by 20.54% (to 64.56km) - Guardian can once again target the most distant fleet members

Scan resolution reduced by 46.92% (to 255.5mm) - 6.4s time to re-lock the up-chain buddy! But the Guardian pilot must untarget something before being able to re-target that other Guardian, so that wastes even more time. For now, he focuses on repping and will re-target the cap buddy in a short while (he is temporarily overwhelmed). The rep target was an Oracle, which takes 4.3s to retarget - probably 6.5-7s when you count the time it takes for the pilot to react and untarget something to make room. Then there is another 4.5s while the remote armor repairer cycles before any repair is delivered. The Oracle dies. Too late! The Guardian pilot scrambles to target a dying Abaddon (3.3s) and catch up with the repairs! He decides to get the cap chain buddy targeted again as well, but time wears thin and cycle 3 is coming up:

Cycle 3:

Guardian loses targeting with down chain buddy but not rep target. Up chain buddy had lost a significant amount of cap and had to quit repairing briefly, maybe the same will happen to down chain buddy!

Max targets reduced to 5. Still unable to maintain a lot of target locks!

Targeting Range reduced by 15.27% (to 68.84km) - no locks broken from range reduction

Scan resolution reduced by 41.72% (to 280.5mm) - 5.8s to re-lock cap chain buddy--maybe 7s including lag and reaction time. Not too much this time and the Guardian pilot recovers and goes back to work.

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So what I showed here with the numbers is about how effective a single jammer or two jammers would be against a Guardian. 10 ECM jammer strength is approximate for a Blackbird using racial jammer with skill 5 and a lot of ECM strength boosts. The Guardian pilot had max skills but no ECCM or other sensory equipment. In practice, almost every Guardian will have both an ECCM and a sensor booster or signal amplifier. But then again, we got pretty unlucky with the targeting range jammming. If we had cut it by over 40% like with the scan res jamming, the Guardian's targeting range would have been reduced far enough to be unable to target most fleet members. But if we focused 3 or 4 jammers on the Guardian, we could sieze it down real tight, and it would be almost completely ineffective.