EVE General Discussion

ECM Jams, a source of both frustration and triumph for many of us, I'm sure. As most of you know, ECM Jams are tools employed by pilots to hamper or even disable a target's ability to lock onto any ship that they are trying to burn down. Lower-end setups break a ships lock and temporarily disable the ability to lock again and Higher-end setups allow to keep an enemy ship jammed up indefinitely. While this is a very effective tactic, I feel it is too effective. It works, to the point of being over-powered.

Truth is, nobody really likes Jams (I'm expecting comments like "that's not true brah" but whatevs), not even the ones doing the jamming, yeah you get a kill, but the whole "victory" just seems...empty. For a good setup, those who fly as a jammer get to contribute very little dps if any at all and although they appear on the mail they more often than not feel kinda left out of the kill club.

So here is my "what if" idea for ECM Jamming.

ECM plays with your ship's computer to make it difficult to lock on to a point in space or even impossible. As I said already, I have issues with the overpowered nature of this tactic but there is also a logic issue; you're still able to select a planet/stargate/moon/station/yourmomshous/etc. and get the insert fav profanity here out. In my humple opinion, I believe ECM should also disallow this. "But Puhnk, if ECM is already overpowered, how the hell is this better? Well, you haven't read my idea yet

So the idea is, what if ECM jams didn't have a game-mechanical effect? What if the effect was a visual one?

The overview is what most pilots use to select their targets and navigation points, sure you can click the icon as it appears in space and use right-click, the radial menu, or what-have-you and that's all well and good for stationary entities like stations or stargates but trying to do this with a moving target like ships is a *****-and-a-half as they are objects in motion. So if we wanted ECM jams to have a visual effect in the game instead of the current, the overview would make a prime candidate as it's target due to high pilot dependency on it.

You still with me? Good, enough of the background, here's the idea:

When jammed, you are still able to lock onto targets, it would still break your current lock, but that just means you have to re-lock your target, however, now your overview is jumping around. Not the whole overview window, but the entities listed there are constantly rearranging themselves in a random order. Lower-strength ECM would have a slower effect, the arrangement of the overview would be slow but just fast enough to make clicking on your desired target difficult. Higher-strength ECM would cycle the overview's arrangement so fast that it's impossible to lock onto the target that you are trying to get, requiring you to either initiate "weapons free" on the first enemy ship you can lock or waste valuable time trying to locate that pesky Falcon. Not only would this eliminate the stupidly op effect of not being to target at all and replace it with a challenge instead, but also, if you're not pointed (because the enemy fleet is obviously comprised of idiots) and you want to run away, well now you're gonna have a hard time finding a warpout vector because even they are jumping around in your overview.

Oh and for you guys capable of using the force and ninja-clicks, not only would the overview items be changing order at varying speeds, what if even the names and details (pilot name, ship type, distance, velocity, angular, etc.) are corrupted, cycling trough unrecognizable letters and other characters.

Ex.

Without ECM-
Name: Bob Bobby
With ECM-
Name: *&% K?^+`

I'm not very good with post closings so I'll just say this is my idea and will leave it up for discussion

I have never heard of this "ECM" contraption that you are mentioning, nor do I want anything to do with it!

There are two simple solutions to FALCON

Auto-targetting missiles

Bombs

This

and

--> Features & Ideas Discussion

And in a thousand years from now,
*Snip* Please refrain from personal attacks. ISD Ezwal.

ECM prevails!

ECM is not OP. Like many other things in the game, it can be countered. Training sensor compensation for the race your flying, along with fitting ECCM mods will lower your susceptibility to being jammed. Yes, this means your going to have to modify your fitting, but there it is.

So the solution is for you to adapt, not for the entire game to change because you dont want to fit ECCM mods.

Drones also.

Working as intended, you have access to the exact same tools everyone else has...

While we are at it, why not implement mechanic that would allow us hack piloted ships, and after successful hack attempt would grant unrestricted access to wallet of owner of ship being hacked?

Oh. Sorry. I thought it was 'bad ideas' thread.

Step 1) Hit approach
Step 2) Fire Weapon
Step 3) ???
Step 4) Collect 10 bil from someone with a limited imagination