Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Prologue: I want to make it clear before getting into the post that what I am proposing here will have literally no effect on chance to hit or applied damage. It is purely a cosmetic change with no implications for game mechanics, though it will make game mechanics easier to understand.

Background: Turrets currently have four stats that affect damage application: optimal and falloff deal with range, while tracking and signature resolution deal with the target's movement. I am not interested in optimal and falloff today, and will ignore them. The turret chance-to-hit formula, for our purposes, looks like this:

Link

Most people understand the basic idea of tracking, but in my experience most people do not understand turret signature resolution. For example, let's suppose we double a turret's signature resolution. What happens?

Link

That is, doubling the turret's signature resolution is effectively identical to halving its tracking speed.

Here is the crux of the matter: tracking speed and signature resolution are two stats which affect exactly the same thing in exactly the same way. The effect of changing one in one direction is identical to the effect of changing the other in the other direction. Having two stats instead of one combined stat is confusing and serves no purpose whatsoever (other than to confuse). Indeed, based on my conversations with people, most Eve players are confused about the role of turret signature resolution.

Proposal: Because the turret signature resolution stat is useless, duplicative, and poorly understood by most EVE players, I suggest we do away with it entirely, adjust turret tracking speeds to keep each gun the same as it is currently, and stop confusing people. This does not even require any change in the Eve code base, just in the item database: pick a convenient number, for example 100, change all turret signature resolutions to 100, and multiply the tracking speed by 100/(old signature resolution). This can easily be accomplished with a database script and requires minimal programmer time to implement.

Summary: This will have literally no effect on how guns actually work in the game, on how often you hit or miss or on how much damage you apply. It will make the chance-to-hit formula easier to understand, allow easy comparison of tracking across guns of different sizes, and more natural comparison of your tracking speed to the angular velocity of targets.

What do you think?

Edit: fixed a typo.

I think turrets should rely MORE on signature radius than they do currently not less.
Remove it from the tracking formula, but add it as part of the dmg formula, so stationary targets dont take full dmg unless they are larger than the turret signature.

That's a question of game design and completely unrelated to my proposal. Feel free to start a thread about it, though.

Edit: To be clear, if someone has literature that shows otherwise please link it. It's been a while since I read what I think I've read and I didn't bookmark any of it.

From what I understand, Tracking speed and turret res don't affect damage the same way.

Tracking speed is tracking speed. Either your guns have the ability to track the target or they don't, and this reduces the applied damage by a degree relevant to how much faster your target's transversal is than your tracking speed.

Basically you're assuming that your turrets are always locked on the ships weak point and hammering away at it, and if you don't have sufficient tracking speed your turrets slip off into a less vulnerable area of the ship.

Turret resolution is different in that it is, as I understand it, a percentage chance to hit the target based upon the targets size as compared to the turrets size, and the distance to the target. Either you hit, or you don't, based upon the formula, it doesn't merely reduce the damage.

I may have it entirely wrong, but that's what I've picked up from various documents that went into fine detail on the subject. The bottom line is that Turret Resolution and Tracking speed are controlling two different mechanics for mitigating damage to the target. The names make it sound like they contradict each other, but from a nuts and bolts perspective they do two entirely different things.

Yeah, give me a moment to remember how math works, I only do this about once every 6 months thanks to everything in my life having nothing to do with it.

I saw this in his links, but my eyes just kind of glazed over and I referred back to what I've read before. This seems to be a less confusing way to represent it though.

Edit: And this is where the confusion comes in. The stuff that I read ages ago never showed a correlation between tracking speed and turret resolution, they were addressed as two different calculations. Same procedure if you were to take and mash the two together, but they were supposedly not.

Bad information?

Second edit: Also if you got rid of turret sig res wouldn't tracking computers have a disproportionate effect across turret sizes with the new base tracking speed? Right now there is no way to affect turret sig res that I'm aware of, which means all modules and ammunition with tracking bonuses or penalties wound need rebalancing, and in the case of tracking modules they'd likely have to introduce new versions categorized by size.

That was bothering me also. It's pretty easy to just break tracking utterly so you can't be touched as it is, wouldn't this make that extreme even more accessible by fitting with that goal in mind?

Depends on the number normalized on. Anything with a sig res below that number gets buffed, and above gets nerfed.

You obviously still don't understand. My proposal changes literally nothing about how damage is applied in any case. Every single ship with every single possible fit will perform exactly the same after the change as before. Since it changes exactly nothing, it does not cause any need for rebalancing.

Edit: typo

I guess I'm missing what you mean when you saw "I suggest we do away with it entirely." If we are still using it, just normalized it makes things more confusing as unintuitively, I can hit BS's with radial velocities several times my tracking speed (sig rad greater than normalized sig res), but can't hit frigates moving at even half of that well (sig rad less than normalized rig res). Either way the presented tracking number is still not what it appears. It also means more phantom numbers to deal with, a factor I only recently found out about in missile damage calculation.

Edit: It also doesn't simplify the formula at all, just transforms one factor into a constant.

Sig radius does that by directly comparing to sig resolution. It's not independent of it. If sig res goes away sig rad only affects lock time and has no effect on damage or chance to hit. Note that chance to hit directly affects hit quality as well.