MotherMoon wrote:simple fix, the more people locking on to a target, the longer it takes everyone else after to get a lock.
BAM active tanking is fixed. your welcome.
If you stop to think about it, this (or some variant of this) is pretty much the ultimate solution to about half the problems Eve is commonly accused of having.
It was correctly pointed out that scalability is the issue, because there's no upper limit to how much incoming dps is possible. Active tanking works in small-scale engagements, but becomes useless as the fleet size grows. Large fleet engagements are fantastic though, and we don't want to do anything to dissuade them from happening. But the reason people like small-scale stuff is because the individuality of each pilot matters more. With 500 vs 500 ships, individuals don't count. It becomes a race between the fleets over calling targets, popping them, and calling the next one. The fight looks great, but it actually kind of sucks.
MotherMoon's suggestion fixes exactly that. I would expand on it thusly:
As the number of ships aggressing you increases, interference causes your ships' effective signature radius to decrease. Additional ships would have a harder and harder time trying to acquire a lock, and those that do have you locked cause less damage as they have a harder time hitting you. Note I said aggressing rather than targeting, since you don't want allies being able to give you a boost just by virtue of targeting you. I acknowledge that this last point may need some more careful coding, but think of the results if this (or something along these lines) were carefully balanced and implemented.
A few pages back someone pointed out that in the movies, large fleet battles are far more interesting because individuals matter. You have frigates in 1v1 or 1v2 dogfights, squadrons of cruisers facing off against rival squadrons, battleship wings focusing fire on dreadnaughts, etc. If there were a scaling penalty on focused fire, balanced so that dozens of frigates could still viably target 1 battleship, or 3-4 cruisers could target 1 cruiser with only a slight penalty, I think fleet fights would be far more interesting. Tactics and fleet doctrine become more important, solid communication and experience become that much more valuable, basically strategy becomes a much bigger part of a large battle because you can no longer just mass a thousand guys with no experience and say: "Shoot what I call."
Active tanking becomes a viable alternative in any fight of any size, and the choice between active and passive tanking becomes all about what works best for the ship you're flying.
Killmails become meaningful, because your kills are yours, not you and 500 other shooters.