Player Features and Ideas Discussion

As a pilot that uses all races of ships equally, I'm not looking forward to ~60 days of skill training to gain some resistance against ECM. Please consider reducing the rank on these skills to 2, which is much more in line with other ship attribute skills, which tend to be on the rank 1-2 level.

Those new compensation skills would probably do better rolled into a single generic sensor strength skill that applies to every ship you ever fly if it's going to be left at rank 3 (consistent at least with energy/shield management skills).

If not this then make them rank 2 like the other compensation skills where you have to train four of them. Four rank 3 skills to help stop ECM is punitive and punishes the people on the wrong side of the problem.

How can anyone call introducing a skill that makes your ship perform better in two ways a punishment :D same arguments posted here could be used to complain about every skill in EVE. I mean why are we punished by forcing us to train 4 racial carrier Vs? Why not combine them and make them rank 2.

It helps if you are able to separate your own wants from your needs and external pressures.

I'll take that +25% sensor strength, thank you. Combined with ECCM and Info links, that will make my ships very resistant to jamming. If you like your ships more jammable, don't train it, don't use ECCM and laugh at info links. Simple.

Also, I +1 this:

These changes are not a big deal for most skilled ECM pilots. In fact, overall the changes in Retribution actually hurt new ECM pilots the most. I expect to see less "bro birds" and more Celestis from new players in fleets (someone will come up with a good name for them).

The issues as I see them:

1) This does not address ECM scaling problems. Frigates and Destroyers are still completely nullified by ECM, while medium and large ships are inherently stronger to them (although still get jammed more often then not).

2) Why have 4 separate sensor strength skills? There is a skill for targeting range, a skill for scan res, and a skill for tracking. Why require players to train four individual skills just for ECM? This is silly and an obvious attempt to just give older players more crap to train.

Overall I think these changes don't really solve anything.

A few thoughts:

1. I believe that the proposed sensor compensation skills will cause more balancing problems in the future, inasmuch as they affect separate game mechanics - ie. ECM and ship scanning.

Balancing ECM by just tweaking ECM strength on modules is a cleaner and better approach.

2. I'm not in favor of nerfing EW modules and compensating by buffing dedicated EW ships. Fitting EW modules on non-bonused ships should always be a viable option, rather than considered solely as part of a fail fit.

Dedicated EW ships, if any, should have a slight advantage over non-bonused ships, but not so much that they can completely overwhelm any ship which is not specifically fit to counter it. Bonuses to strength need to be (re)considered carefully - it doesn't take much to be too much. It might even be better to opt for range or cap usage bonuses rather than strength bonuses.

3. How about a tweak for FOF (sorry, I meant auto-targeting) missiles? In practice, they should be a counter to both ECM and damps. Reducing the time required to switch from regular missiles to FOF missiles would help, and a slight buff to damage and/or explosion velocity/radius would be welcome, as well.

didn't CCP changed that so that now it's impossible to have an unprobable ship and instead just made them really hard to probe down?



that said, overhauling ECM is something that might be a tad too hard, maybe too hard for the results one can expect. Nerfing them into oblivion isn't the answer either. Tiny nerf/boosts, like the one proposed on this thread are better, specially when you consider damps as a counter-measure for ECM, but one must be careful not to overnerf nor overboost. ECM mechanics puts the modules always on a razor's edge as balance is concerned, specially because of how they work (yes/no) make it too strong, works too often. make it too weak, becomes useless.

I second this.

What do you expect to achieve with these changes?

People who complain about ECM (on the Tech II platforms) do not do it because of their range. Some people will cheer at any punitive approach, but at the end of the day their solo ships will still be "permajammed" (by someone who fit multiple slots specificly to counter their one setup) after these changes and they will continue to whine and whimper.

Why are you pushing them through? Temporary solutions that create disparities are dangerous, as they either force you to do twice the work when you can allocate enough resources to give it proper attention, or they are left festering and causing further balance issues until enough resources can be diverted to dealing with them a second time. CCP sadly have a poor track record with the latter.

If you still wanted a simple temporary solution in line with what the playerbase have requested for ECM you could have simply limited racial ECM modules to one per ship or something like that. That can't take more resources than the current design as you already have such modifiers in code. Will save you alot of trouble and net you better balance.

Letting that transition over to "one ECM effect per ship" code (assuming you have no such pre-coded modifiers, and need time to script the functions) and racial scripts would later have made alot of sense. The community have suggested that solution to deal with "the core issues" (ie., the mechanics) of ECM and ECCM for several years now.



You are also continously shafting Tech II in favour of Tech I, is there an ulterior motive behind that? We'd like to know.

Is it a silent approach to deal with the unfair distribution of Tech II BPO, or is it the "more explosions" principle? Maybe a little bit of both? Something else entirely? Motivate it.

I'd rather contend with 1 Falcon than 10 Blackbirds, any day of the week.

Also, ECM seem to be the only system recieving this Tech-to-tech treatment as you are very careful not having the other races ships overlap each other within race (eg., i'm referring to things like Fozzies comments about web- and point bonuses on Tech I hulls). ECM already have a balance between Tech I reach and Tech II strength that does not set Tech II apart in every situation (ie., a Blackbird is much better relative a Falcon, than a Bellicose is compared to a Rapier). So why are you compensating the Tech I hulls with range modifiers?

The fabled Rook has not seen the light of day since Crucible. Are you nerfing it's ECM reach to match it's upcomming HML reach?

Kings of doing something for the sake of doing something - instead of fixing the problem(s) .

Going to say this again, but the fact that sensor strength has any effect on the probing system is beyond ******** and it always has been. It needs to be removed asap and replaced with a system not cooked up by idiots.

lol all the serious pvp'ers are happy to nerf e war out of game. to bloody lazy to fit ships to counter it as it may effect my dps which does not allow me to kill as many people! ecm is chanced based I have max skills and i dont get of jams every cycle and if you fit your ships to minimise effect I can hardly jam you at all well done in dumbing down the game. As people have said just take it out and reimberse me my skill points and falcon costs. i LOVE HEARING PEOPLE CRY WHEN i JAM EM UP but they still manage to kill me every now and again. can someone tell me the point for even flying recons anymore as my rook and falcon are now looking bad against a BLACKBIRD

The ECM changes seem infective. I think what most people object to in regards to ECM is the fact that it renders them totally defenseless and in the setting of Falcons, Scorps, etc, can do so for a huge fraction of the time.

Right now ECM is a largely offensive module. You could change it to a purely defensive module by changing the Jam to only prevent target locking on the ship that it projecting the ECM. Instead of the target being totally and utterly jammed, the target will instead be able to lock other targets, just not the ship that is jamming it.

The changes would result in reducing ECM to a supplement not a mainstay of tatics. Ships would field ECM modules in 1 or 2 modules per ship, much like target painters and tracking distruptors, instead of the overloaded 7-8 modules that they are doing right now.

What will then need to be done is to rethink the role and bonuses of the current ECM ships (falcons, scorps, widows) to something that makes more sense. Right now they are so powerful with the current ECM mechanics that they alone swing battles and are almost *always* primary and first to be popped.


yk