Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Worth exploring some of these.

Rather than racial jams, what about jams with higher chance to jam certain systems over others. E.g. Weapon jammer. Drone scrambler. Remote assist jammer. E-war jams. Something that jams a ships ability to receive boosts? And then multi spectral which has a better chance of jamming multiple systems at once, but less chance of jamming the system you want.

Even if the ECM mechanics stayed the same, they really should have detrimental stacking effects, like most other modules

ECM might not be broken power wise.
It is broken mechanic wise though. A good 'debuff' mechanic is one that you feel you can counter as a pilot by taking an action.

Damps you can close with your target, Tracking disruptor's you can fly to reduce their orbit speed.
ECM you...... wait out the cycle and with most weapons can't do a thing. Then simply hope the RNG doesn't go against you and you get to do something next time.

That is why ECM's are 'broken'. Because there is nothing you can do once it's running but sit around and wait. Yes Damps are probably the most powerful Ewar especially combined with webs to stop you getting inside your lock range, but they still have a counter play, not just a counter fit.

Getting into falloff range is effectively disengaging from the fight though. The point of any discussion should be "How things can be changed so a pilot can engage ECM wielders strategically". Since Eve combat is largely dictated by range and angular control, one way of doing this would be to give ECM a tracking speed. This would mean that fast orbiting of either party would decrease jamming chance. But that is effectively a nerf to the mechanics so I don't expect that would work. (at least not on its own without modifying other things to keep it balanced)

In fact all of the racial warfare modules could have a tracking speed. This would allow their power to be increased a little, with the racial ships having tracking bonuses to it with a smaller bonus to power. Doing this would mean that equipping the modules onto non-bonused ships would be more effective than they currently are at range but less so in a brawl.

If your drones aren't out or were already engaging someone else you can't target them.
If you aren't flying one of the three launchers that have FOF variants you can't target them.

That was why I directly said counter fits are a thing. But no real counter play (Ok, maybe in large scale fleet fights where pulling 100k range isn't disengaging).

It's a terrible mechanic, based on a terrible premise, since 'ECM' isn't actually a real thing anyway, it's a generic umbrella term for a suite which includes systems which would sensor damp or tracking disrupt. But I don't have a better solution for it myself.

CCP has done an amazing job on ECM overall.

A)Without having a ship bonus to the strength, ECM is lackluster entirely.

B)All of the ships useful for ECM have built in weaknesses, be it speed, capacitor, tank, etc. Tengu is perhaps an exception, but that is more of a T3C thing than an ECM problem.

C)Griffin Navy is actually very balanced - the optimal on the jammer is so short that kiting it on the edge of scram range or using any of the fast point range kiting faction frigs will smoke it. Frigate fights, particularly 1v1s, are often a case of paper-rock-scissors with particular gimmicks - plenty of good and bad match-ups for it, as with any frigate.

There other thing of course is not usually considered by players.

1. When ECM first was imagined it was used either on the Scorpion or the Blackbird. That was over a decade ago. The BB was very fragile, the Scorpion was very expensive.

2. When ECM first was imagined fights were fairly long compared to today, frigate didn't do 800+ dps (like destroyers do) - 30 seconds then was not so bad, 30 seconds now you're pretty much dead.

Today there are a huge number of ECM boats, they are much more survivable either because they have better jam strength, much more HP or can sig / speed tank like crazy. A 30 second jam usually means you're more than half dead or dead by the time the jam completes. The ECM boats now are a lot more expensive than a Blackbird was back then and so is the Scorpion however when you consider how much quicker it is to get isk in game now (and out of game) theyre overall much cheaper time wise.

In short power creep and no real substantial modifications to ECM (it still completely nueters you for 30 seconds) have made it much more powerful than it was ever intended to be.



Thats true but theres always a counter isnt there. Home on jam technology is pretty old but for whatever reason the geniuses in EvE who can harness wormholes and create warp drive technology have really missed the boat on this one. Youd think after 13 years of pilots complaining that FoF missiles are terrible some of the engineers in new eden might have improved them from useless randomly select the nearest target to HoJ instead.

It would make a lot of sense for a module that could be fitted to a ship that would cause a sig bloom on an ECMíng ship. This is how anti-radiation missiles work, they use the jamming signal to home in on the jamming source. This is why you have anti-aircraft systems in RL doing the switch on track and fire thing and then quickly being switched off. There is no similiar downside to jamming in EvE.

Here is my proposal
ECM: Too much luck involved. iwin or ilose depends mostly on luck. More deterministic mechanic proposed with some luck still involved:
1) "Filling bucket" mechanic, for each lock separately. After enough points are gathered (ECM points >= sensor strength), the lock is broken and jamming continues with the next one. Broken lock = blackout of the target. The target is kind of locked, but you cannot use any module against it, as if you are jammed right now. Then you re-lock or unlock when the cycle ends. The order of *all possible locks* of a ship is randomized upon ECM module start on the target and persists for another cycle after jamming stops (to prevent quick off and on when the correct lock is jammed). Switching to different target makes new ECM order.
2) Ship locks in the current 1->N order and does not see which locks are broken. So, you can attempt locking a ship only to see this exact lock is blacked out. Unlocking one target and locking something unlocked with that sensor would work reliably though. (You cannot lock a blacked out target due to single lock per target mechanic and inability to unlock it during jam)
3) ECM modules operate independently and each individual module must break a lock completely - if 2 break the same lock to 50%, the thingy isn't down. Each ECM has its own random jamming order.
4) For multi-sensor structures, all different sensor types must be broken before lock is lost. You better use multi-spectral for these (and be willing to wait for a long time given their tons of sensor strength).
5) 10s cycle.

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Let's consider a few scenarios:
A) 1v1 fight. ECM turns off 1.5 locks of a 5 max targets frig per cycle, ECM order of 4,1,2,5,3. In the first cycle, frig wouldn't notice anything - 4th lock isn't used here. 2nd cycle: lock 1 (and 2) would go down - the frig loses lock. 3rd and 4th cycle would be irrelevant for the fight again and 5th cycle would see repeat of lock 1 broken. Etc.
B) 5v5 with same scenario as above: In the first cycle of ECM, the target 4 would be down for the frig. The next cycle, 1 and 2. Then 5. Etc. Frig always has a few ships locked, but maybe not the ones he wanted.
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ECM ship and target can be still somewhat lucky or unlucky depending on ECM order, but not nearly as much as now. Target is also way less helpless for the duration of ECM - you might not be able to fire on your primary target, but you can hit something else instead.

There area already no 100% jam already unless you manage to reduce your target sensor strength to 0. You can only load the dice so far but never can guarantee a jam.

glad to see you don't even understand the basics of ECM -.-


this is one of the things that makes FW so frustrating T1 frigs will always get jammed unless you fit a sebo you have NO chance


its also why carriers are such **** (fighters are permajamed by griffins)