Slayer Blowfish
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
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Posted - 2012.11.05 19:59:00 -
[1] - Quote
There are two important things people keep missing:
1) ECM, unlike most other e-wars, is chance based, and provokes the most negative reaction in a player on the receiving end because of it. No one likes to be punished randomly, with no way to control the outcome. The best example is ECM drones. You can potentially lose a fight to ECM drones even if your sensor strength is very high, because once you're locked out, you're locked out for the full duration of the 20s.
2) ECM, unlike most other e-wars, suffers less from stacking penalty. As an example, a non-specific e-war other than ECM is projected onto a ship with a 10% effect and applied with 6 stacks. The target receives cumulatively 31.7% of the e-war effect, or, 317% of the base effect. Now, consider the effect to be ECM, in which case the effect is a 10% chance to jam. Applying 6 provides a cumulative chance of 1 - (0.9^6) = 0.469, which is 469% of the base effect. Furthermore, there is no ceiling to this stacking in ECM - you can apply as many jammers to a ship as you like, and the chance based mechanic ensures that all are effective. This is also why ECM drones are such an issue, because you can simply throw as many as you have on one target, and gain benefit much beyond stacking any other kind of e-war.
The solution to both is rather simple: make ECM duration based instead of chance based. Not only are you making the effect easier to predict and thusly easier to counter-act, you can also solve the stacking penalty problem. By enforcing subsequent ECM on the same ship provide diminished duration effect, you will a) provide a ceiling to the max jam duration, subject to ECM resistance, and b) brought the actual ECM stacking penalty in line with all other e-wars and module stacking mechanics.
For the record, I also think the falloff mechanic for other e-wars (which is chance based AFAIK) also problematic. Changing them all to diminished effect based on range outside of optimal would be nice as well.
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