Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Yeah, I am talking more extreme / absolute effects.

Without a booster, or a ship whose sensor strength is effectively boosted already, you cannot be locked at all.
The ship using this also suffers the effects, but towards absolutely everything else in the game.

If you can get me a lock time equation I would be glad to do some more math in the GoogleDoc.

The unjammed time = 25 seconds - jam time. So technically the "total jam time" is jam time + relock time. Since BS take longer to lock and they are jammed for less time the idea is it averages out closely to a frigate which is jammed for longer but locks far quicker. It won't be perfect across the board, but it should be closer than 20 seconds + lock time that ECM does now. For a BS currently it could be upwards of 30-40 seconds. Whereas a frigate currently would be 23-25 seconds. If the math works right you could hit 15-20 seconds for both frigate and BS. Which would leave a few seconds to counter ECM ship before it jams you again.

There was discussion about a residual point. The objective would be that the residual point would keep the unbonused ECM using ship pointed until the target ship could relock and reestablish point. While I don't think it is the best possible solution, it happens to be the best solution proposed so far. This would negate the ability for Supers or caps to escape a point through ECM jams.

My attitude is snarky after training ECM taking for granted it would be effective to have and then ever more often watching the skills go from effective to less effective to now often requested removed. You'll forgive me if I choose to defend the choices I was offered in game and committed to achieving. I'm now forced to endure mountains of cry from people who can't be bothered to even equip 1 mod to defend against it.

I do not want more TANK. I do not want more DPS. I want to JAM your ships. Simple..

Just as advertised when it was month after month accepting my currency for the ability to train it.

You'll have to excuse me while I laugh out loud at your notion players "balance" the game. Players run games in to the ground.

There's an old expression, "Too many chef's spoil the soup".

I feel compelled to reply because CCP is never going to take a confrontational approach to a customer by telling them no. So unchecked any idea good or bad begins to snowball until often arbitrary changes are made.

I respect everyone's right to post an idea in the forums we all pay a subscription to access and I would hope they respect my right to disagree. If I do disagree unlike many i'm going to elaborately detail why. Many would simply tell you "no. biomass."

I haven't seen evidence it's bad game mechanics. I have seen people demonstrate its effective when they refuse to defend against it. ECM has been changed from consistent to random to less effective. Its time for the playerbase to HTFU.

There is counter play. You equip eccm/backup sensor arrays/ecm and I go down in flames. You don't equp eccm/backup sensor arrays/ecm you go down in flames. Just because a mini game doesn't pop up mid fight for us to spar it out with doesn't mean there aren't counters available.
EVE fights are won or lost, usually, before the first shot is fired.
ECM also has an effective range, so you can "play" around it.

How many losses do you have in 1v1s versus ECM ships?

Also, LOL at well respected source. Well respected in what?

Also, LOL at "skillful". At one time ECM was if jam strength equals sensor strength target is jammed. Then it was changed to if jam strength equals sensor strength target has a good probability to be jammed. Then everyone was given magically delicious resistance skills. Which further lowers the chance to be jammed. All of which comes into play before you even equip one module to defend against ECM.

htfu,l2p.l2notsuck, etc

There could be a significant psychological improvement to ECM if they removed the relock requirement and simultaneously dropped the cycle/effect time.

Minor side effects would be easier to shift tackle, but other than that....no net change except in people's minds which is where the problem mainly resides.

Actually, this makes sense.

Needing to manually retarget a hostile, despite the fact that you had them previously targeted, seems a bit over stated.

Your ship's computer should at least allow a checkbox option to auto-retarget in the event of jamming, and pop up a fail message saying target no longer present, or out of range, if it can't re-establish a lock.

The automatic aspect should at least shave off a second or two for targeting here.

(Optionally, you can have greyed out targeting windows showing who you were targeting, which you could manually drop if you decided not to worry about them after the fact.)

Clearly you misunderstand the idea of counterplay . . . Counterplay is a way to play around the ability once you find out they have it, EG they start using scouts to spot for their snipers and you start driving away their scouts. Note they did not say "get in your time machine and warn your earlier self to fit a counter module" counterplay and counters are different . . . but im going to assume you didnt even watch the video


Who said anything about a 1v1? a 4v4 where one ship is ECM which lands several jam cycles will cause you to lose and it wouldnt even be your fault, you just got unlucky.


Well respected in game design which is, you know, what we've been talking about this whole time.


And yet not one of the things you mentioned has anything to do with skill; perhaps you need an English lesson. What people mean when they say skillful is the ability to apply player skill to a situation in order to overcome it, such as spiraling in to a target to avoid 0 transversal, or properly lining up a bombing run, on the other hand, FITTING a bomb launcher is not skillful.

I understand what you are saying. This design is supposed to help counter that low scan res ships lock slower by using their typically higher sensor strength to make the jam time shorter. So jam time + lock time for a BS is approximately the same as jam time + lock time of a frigate. That design is supposed to not favor BS or frigates. The 25 or maybe even 30 second cycle time for the ECM mod should guarantee that even a single falcon would have difficulty perma-jamming a target without a lot of jammers.

While I agree that instantly relocking would be a potentially useful mechanic, I don't think it would be the right decision in this design. The main issue is unbonused jammers only jam for 1-2 seconds. Instantly relocking after that would make an unbonused jammer nearly useless. The only way around this would be to buff the base jam strength of the ECM mod to the point an unbonused jammer was viable. Then you have the nightmare of trying to balance bonused hulls using this super-strength jammer. It would get ugly very quickly IMO.

Edit: It you were to rework the proposal to factor in an instant relock that would be balanced I would love to see it.

As far as a bunch of griffins jamming out a Basi or Guardian chain: It would take 4 jammers on a falcon to jam out a single scimi. It would end up being 2 girffins to the logi if they wanted a perma jam. That is a huge sacrifice considering that could be 2X logi in potential DPS ships. There is nothing that says you can't bring your own falcons and jam out all the griffins. Guaranteed jams work both ways. In other words I think this change is more balanced than it would appear in the case of jamming logi, but I can't really hand you proof that it is in all "what if..." situations.

I really wish we could test server this and have two 30 man gangs fight each other a few times with logi, ECM and the whole 9 yards to see how effective this is. It is such a drastic change that I would be very interested to see exactly how the tactics change. It is kind of hard to predict how these changes would effect things and how balance/unbalanced these changes are from a forum.