Player Features and Ideas Discussion

ECM drones, especially the light and medium versions, have become a stable for all lowsec combat and they feel way too powerful. In my corp's fleets its a regular sight to have a guardian with 2 remote sensor boosters on it being jammed by a cloud of ECM drones. Unlike all other EWAR, ECM does not suffer from a stacking penalty and you can make the argument theyre in fact better the more you bring, because your chance to land a critical chain of say 2 jams on a guardian increases linearly. Yes there is counter play, but the amount of remote sensor boosters and smart bombs you need to organize and pilot against a very specific and easy to use threat is riddiculous, and even after having all that its too common for a fleets to get beaten by them.

So I come with a suggestion: turn around the way ECM works and make it suffer from diminishing returns. Instead of each jammer having a chance to completely freeze your sensors, make it a stacking effect for your locks to fail. It would work like a web: the effect will stack onto the target and be turned into a single percentage chance.

Then I wish the timing would also change, instead of all your locks being dropped once a jam lands, make it a chance for each completing targetting cycle to fail at the end. This way you could also allow the percentage to stack a little higher than the chance for all locks to drop and fail. I consider this preferable for two reason. First it makes being jammed not feel like you should abandon all hope and never undock again. Second it provides a chance for more interesting play: for example rolling around damps to make a logistics cruiser drop their long range locks and then changing the jams over. The interaction between jams and damps is there in the currrent system but this model feels more rewarding to me. It allows a jammed player to ”keep playing the game” by spamming out those locking commands.


For clarity here is an example:
Scythe lands on grid to repair his 2 friendly caracals. Hostile fleet has a griffin and 2 enyos with jam drones. The griffin's jam chance for being higher will be applied first, then the drones one after another following normal stacking penalties. The scythe starts to lock up his friendly caracals, and has the combined chance to fail each lock at the end of the locking cycle.

TLDR; stacking penalty for ECM, ECM makes locking cycles fail.

Chaiz

Well, that's one way to make ECM into worse sensor damps.

They are DIFFERENT THINGS. I'm not sure you're aware of that.

Your new system completely prevent anyone from ever breaking a cap chain as the locks would never need to be re-done and thus never roll against the ECM chance ever...

I do not mind the all or nothing nature of ECM, and its randomness. Dampening is an even stronger E-War within certain parameters.

What I do not like for ECM (drones and modules) is that it takes someone out of a fight entirely when it hits. At least, with dampeners, you can move closer to re-establish a lock quickly.

I would prefer if ECM only affected other E-WAR effects. Now that we have icons for all effects on our ships, targeting our ECM on either the scram of the web affecting us could shut it down for the duration, if the ECM works (with the calculations still based on the current parameters, distance of the ship applying the E-WAR from our ship, and so forth).
So rather than shutting down the whole targeting of the enemy ship, it would only render one of their module useless.

ECM drones would have an ECM effect that can be optimally projected farther than regular ECM mods, and possibly be the only one able to target E-War that is not targeted at our ship, ECM burst keeping the same AOE lock break, as locks can be re-established quickly.

Translation:

I like blobb, cannot fight without logi and were are group of bad pvp. Please help us stay bad.

Ive been playing an incredibly long time and the ops post just made it sound like they are taking on the same people with the same fits and ships and are expecting a different result... to be frank ive not seen ecm drones used like that in a long time either really.. why don't you simply try using some form of smartbomb firewall type ship to kill ecm drones? or better yet... keep your damn logi out of drone range where they should be... I mean for most ships that's only around 50k or so.. not really that difficult is it?