EVE General Discussion

So what about all the bonused Minmatar hulls?

The problem with ECM is that it is… well… all kinds of ECM. It include all the effects you'd expect from an ECM system, whereas the other ECM-like ewar types (damps and TDs) only do certain parts of the collection of effects you see from ECM. They are subsets of ECM, whereas ECM is all of it at once.

Now, as much as I tend to bang on about “RL is irrelevant”, let's look at what Earthly ECM actually does to see what I mean with the above: it produces noise that makes it hard to locate and lock on to a target (scan res damping); it creates false signals and returns that means you can't get proper target separation until you get close enough to filter out those returns (lock range damping); the same false returns make it hard for weapons guidance systems to predict the motion of the target (tracking disruption). ECM in EVE generates massive versions of all of these things to the point where it's actually more a bit of directed EMP than “real” ECM.

I wouldn't really say that ECM Is good or bad, as mechanics go, but it supersedes the other forms in a way that isn't quite conducive to good “ability balancing” or “ability spread”, and that is a problem in and of itself (albeit a rather different one than the potential overpoweredness of ECM).

Personally, I've always been partial to ECM being more proper electronic warfare or communications jammer: disrupting things like drone bandwidth, or maximum target numbers, or messing with the overview and brackets. Or maybe something more akin to a virus: making weapons fire at the wrong thing, or having some random chance of turning on (or off) modules. Anything really, as long as it is not what damps or TDs offer.

I love ECM, think it's fairly balanced, I usually fit accordingly.

To understand how awful it is consider how it compares to other ewar. No other ewar can completely remove someone from a fight. No other ewar has a permajam. Ecm isn't the iwin button it used to be but it is still a sh!t mechanic.

What if we just make ECM jam its owner if he fails to jam, but only if the target has ECCM and this is also chance based.

Try (20 scorps + 80 tempest) vs 100 tempest and see who wins :)

I agree that it sucks to be jammed. It sucks enough that pretty much every other PvP game out there has all but done away with this as a mechanic.

However...

Right now Caldari pilots have the Drake, Tengu (if they have rich blood), and ECM boats. Further, ECM boats give up everything else to do what they do, including DPS and tanking. Where other recons, for example, are combat ships, the Falcon is exclusively a support ship.

I would be perfectly happy to see ECM removed from the game if it meant a complete reworking of the Caldari ship and weapon lineup. I doubt that will happen.

Quoting this to show just how much this is fail.

This!

For me, running in a titan with its doomsday and running in a falcon, scorp or even a griffin has the same effect, either I leave or I die. There is no reliable counter and no other single form of EW can make that same claim, so I'm asking CCP how is that a balanced mechanic?

The world of eve will be a better place when ECM is given a stacking penalty and affects only the maximum number targets the victim's ships can lock back. also give Caldari EW boats a secondary bonus to missile launcher disruption (Explosion velocity/Radius or such).

Its not very balanced for small scale warfare, like less than 5 people per side.

As gang sizes increases however, its just another interesting wrinkle as well as being the only true counter to enemy logistics.