Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I suggest to change the application of jams so that ECM loses effectiveness overtime; rather than encouraging players to bring jams onto the field and jam targets permanently the goal should be to encourage players to use their jams wisely, more tactically, waiting for an opportune time to jam the target like attempting to help an ally escape, making that ambush all the more effective.


Sensor strength in this scenario would play a less arbitrary or coin flip role of preventing jams. Instead ships would build up resistance to the jamming; which would allow them to overcome its effects entirely after enough time has elapsed. How much time it would take for a ship to resist the effect of the jam would correlate to its sensor strength with higher values breaking ECM faster.


After a ship has overcome the jamming it will remain invulnerable to further attempted jams from the same ship for a period of time of an inversely related to the strength of the ECM that was used on the targeted ship. For example, a larger, more powerful ECM would have the target jammed for longer, but leave it invulnerable to jamming longer once the ECM had been successfully resisted; however, a smaller ECM would be easier to break, but have an equally small cooldown before the ECM was of any use again.

I am not entirely sure on the mathematics of this, but the goal is to have ECM have a depreciating chance of success for every cycle that the target remains jammed until they eventually can not jam them anymore, for an allotted period of time.

Not exactly a solid proposal, but a theory that could encourage more interesting usage of ECM.

Deud you honestly have me beat every time you post something. Elaborate further on the max locked targets and separate chances to jam. The wording on those isn't too precisely conveying your meaning to me.

Ok, I can understand this, but aren't you essentially (with what you have described) reducing the maximum amount of target locks that the victim can have by 1? Of course with the potential to disrupt a lock that has already been obtained, but generally speaking.

The concern that I have with this is that, currently, "rainbow fitting" ECM is a meta necessity to the class of ECM. With this style of fitting wouldn't the number of locks available be sharply decreased form your projections? Seeing as the ECM ship is not always going to have the necessary racial jam for the appropriate ship all of the time at least not enough.

Hypothetically speaking, if the ECM ship (griffin) had 1 jammer of every racial variant, and a Svipul showed up, he would have less capability to jam the target than your projections since 3/4 of his jams would have a lower capacity to effect the Svipul?

Ok, I understand this more, my previous thought was that they would only be able to jam one target per ECM module which would have been horridly underwhelming.

That would relegate ECM ships almost entirely to solo usage, as they wouldn't provide any benefit to fleet members.

Alternatively--and perhaps this is what you meant--the jam could break any current target locks the ship has and prevent it from locking the same ships for 20s, while still allowing it to lock anything else it didn't have locked when it got jammed.

Mostly what I meant. It'll only have an effect on ships targeting the ship being ECM'ed.

In the solo-situation, it means ECM can't be used as a tank.

I can jam pretty successfully without heating most of the time, but on any tough target, overheating does make a huge difference. Another thing that could be done to change the way it works is to increase the margin of error by altering the calculation to produce a more even spread of chances of success.

It's the weakest because it causes the most annoyance and the least fun, and it affects everybody equally well.

I'm pushing for a way to make it more intuitive and less binary. Then we can talk about making it more powerful.
I'm trying to generate fun.

That is a really good idea. You should make a full post about that.

The second part sounds interesting but it would be a nightmare to program into the legacy code, so really really not likely something like that will ever be done in EVE.

You're right about ECM, but let's discuss what you can still do when you're neutralized:

Your capacitor doesn't stay at zero and in fact begins to crawl up almost instantly. Sometimes there is a brief (less than a second) pause before it starts. You can attempt to activate modules between neutralizer cycles. Hardeners can be a tough one to get in, especially on a smaller ship, but with enough flux coils it's not even that difficult. But cheaper modules like sensor boosters, tracking computers, stasis webifiers, etc. are much easier to turn on while neuted. Damage Control rarely turns off from neuts and is perhaps the easiest to turn back on.

It doesn't prevent you from warping at all, because you always have a smidge of capacitor, and that's always enough to leave grid and give yourself plenty of time to realign and get an actual warp...unless you're flying a capital ship. And hey, like you said about ECM: warp off and come back and your capacitor is ready to go again.

There is a lot more you can do to resist neutralizers, which is done in fitting, before combat:

You can fit resistance amplifiers or rigs instead of hardeners, or tracking enhancers and signal amplifiers instead of tracking computers and sensor boosters, to cut capacitor costs. You can fit capacitor recharge bonuses (especially flux coils) to improve the capacitor available between neutralizer bursts. You can fit a capacitor booster to give yourself a carefully-timed jolt of capacitor which you can then spend before it gets taken, and you can fit a capacitor battery to both increase max capacitor and provide resistance to neutralization.

You can fire missiles or projectile weapons just fine when neuted.

Now neuts can be very annoying because there's much less you can do while it's happening, but keep in mind that there are so many ways to resist it that a lot of ship fits will use at least one, and you can take advantage of these when in that situation. Furthermore, if you notice you are getting neuted a lot, you might begin to incorporate many of these into your fittings. Unlike other EWAR resistance options (especially ECCM), these resistance options are great to have even when you aren't getting neuted out. Build a fit that uses them, and you're more difficult to neut out even though you never really get all that much resistance to it.



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While jammed, you cannot target AT ALL. You cannot start targeting. You have to wait, or leave, or do something on your ship. But let's be honest, most of what happens in a fight involves targeting, unless you're firewalling or dropping a bomb.

ECM jammers are really annoying to the jammed victim, maybe we can change that. Let's not try to stifle the conversation with accusations that some other module is worse, maybe instead we should fix both.

While neuted, you can only activate things you have enough capacitor for. Some of your modules cannot be activated at all, sometimes you can't activate anything that costs capacitor. You can target ships but it won't do you much good if your weapons cost capacitor.

Neutralizers are really annoying to the capped out victim, maybe we can change that. Let's not try to stifle the conversation with accusations that some other module is worse, maybe instead we should fix both.


Let's make it so that when you're jammed, it's hard to target but there's still something you can do.
That's already the case with neutralizers but I'm open to other ideas to make them less annoying without nerfing them unreasonably--for instance, longer cycle times.