Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I recently found out that falloff on electronic warfare works with a "hit or miss" mechanic instead of scaling their effect.

I understand why guns use this mechanic, but E-war should not be binary.

at optimal + falloff e-war effects like tracking disruptors and sensor dampeners are 100% effective half the time and 0% effective half the time.

This should not be the case as it introduces an unnecessary and nonsensical randomization mechanic into an otherwise competitive game.

It would make much more sense if at optimal + falloff the ewar was 50% effective all the time.

Randomization is bad for competition. To be highly competitive, games need to be completely deterministic otherwise the computer ends up deciding the match. This is why people turn off random crits in TF2, and why starcraft has no randomization in it at all.

I also share the vision that would be best to avoid as much randomness as possible, so I support your idea. In a related note, this is the same reason why I don't like ECM as it exists right now.

by that logic throwing a die is not random because I know that over 1,000,000,000 samples 1/6 of them will be a 5 . . .

Random as in it is practically impossible to predict the outcome of the next event.

Say im in an arazu warp disrupting you at 80 km and youre in a tornado. I throw a sensor dampener on you. 75% of the time my dampener works and i hold you until my fleet lands and kills you. 25% of the time my dampener doesnt work due to no fault of my own and you blow me up in one hit because you were fitting 1400s

The computer just decided that engagement not anything you or I did.

Im not disagreeing that there should be a penalty for engaging outside of my optimal range. I just dont think that penalty should be completely random and unpredictable.

Definitely, penalize me, but penalize me in a way i can play around; in a way that has to do with my knowledge of the game and informed decisions, not by some role of the dice.

partial effects would be nice. target painters only blowing up your sig 10%, ecm ships only jamming you for 5 seconds, td's at 75% effects, this would all be nice. i DO however appreciate the randomness of some of it. maybe in your falloff, theres a 25% chance of it working 100%, 25% chance of fail, and 50% "partial" effect. also, ecm should allow you to still target the ecming ship, maybe even having an effect on targeting speed, so that you can target them faster.

Indeed. An independent probability event like a dice is indeed not very random, its evenly distributed over a known statistical probability. If however the dice had an unknown shape and number of sides, it would be random. Hence the understandable day to day misunderstanding of the concept, random.

I agree that falloff should mean something all the time you're in it rather than only sometimes or whats the point of it?

Random is a difficult concept, it is not merely what the majority thinks the word means. I wonder why so few mathematicians ever try to explain it. Perhaps because people use dictionaries as authorities on mathematics and then construct an argument from authority from it.
I will save us the threadnought, if anyone here wishes to understand the concept of randomness, PM me. "Random" is in day-to-day terms used as shorthand for various probability events, but that is not the actual concept of randomness.

To add something on-topic to the thread: The ewar modules function as a swing or a miss above optimal, knowing this you must use them within optimal. Past optimal there's a chance that it fails to hit every time, deal with it.