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 you're a NERD.

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.

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.

Edit:
ChanceToHit = 0.5 ^ ((((Transversal speed/(Range to target * Turret Tracking))*(Turret Signature Resolution / Target Signature Radius))^2) + ((max(0, Range To Target - Turret Optimal Range))/Turret Falloff)^2)

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?

Unless the formula has changed I'd say so. The way it works now basically treats it as a tracking modifier.

That said I'm not sure I'm fond of the ops idea if I understand it correctly. If you normalize tracking while removing sig radius concerns you nerf weapons with resolutions larger than the set number you normalized on. IE: a weapon with a sig res of 400 hits other ships with 400 sigs at it's stated tracking, where with the op's proposal and using the example number their tracking would be 25% of what it is now against same size targets.

It would also eliminate the ability to modify how much damage a hull takes with sig tanking without modifying it's base speed accordingly.

(snip)

That said I'm not sure I'm fond of the ops idea if I understand it correctly. If you normalize tracking while removing sig radius concerns you nerf weapons with resolutions larger than the set number you normalized on. IE: a weapon with a sig res of 400 hits other ships with 400 sigs at it's stated tracking, where with the op's proposal and using the example number their tracking would be 25% of what it is now against same size targets.

It would also eliminate the ability to modify how much damage a hull takes with sig tanking without modifying it's base speed accordingly.

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?

You do not understand it correctly. My proposal, as I stated several times in my OP, changes literally nothing about how damage is applied. It does not remove sig radius as a concern. All it does is simplify the underlying concepts to make them easier to understand.

(snip)

And the more I think about it, the more I start to believe it'd take a complete overhaul of every ship and module to rebalance this.

Turret sig res is a static value. Everything else in that formula is a variable that can be changed by the player. What you're asking would make the calculation easier for the player to understand, and make balancing much, much harder because the field of averages suddenly becomes far wider.

You do not understand it correctly. My proposal, as I stated several times in my OP, changes literally nothing about how damage is applied. It does not remove sig radius as a concern. All it does is simplify the underlying concepts to make them easier to understand.

what turret sig does it makes it sort of arbitrarily difficult for large weapons to hit small targets, and like wise makes small weapons hit large targets extremely well.

No, the target sig radius does that. My proposal has nothing to do with sig radiuses.. The turret sig resolution does not do that. My proposal does have something to do with turret sig resolutions.

The number of people telling me I'm wrong in this thread is simply more evidence that the vast majority of Eve players don't understand sig resolution.

no this does change how the game works. ur assuming the guns are only shooting at targets of their own size.

what turret sig does it makes it sort of arbitrarily difficult for large weapons to hit small targets, and like wise makes small weapons hit large targets extremely well.

So even if a frig is webbed to hell, a battleship is not gonna have an easy time of hitting it. and even if an inty is mwd'ing round a BS, its still going to make good hits.

This somewhat parallels how missiles behave, where small missiles make near perfect hits against larger targets, and large missiles cant hit small targets for **** even when painted and webbed.

TL:DR

-1

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.

The fact that there is an arbitrary number we call turret sig resolution in the numerator of that fraction is completely irrelevent to the effect sig radius has.

Sig radius does that by being included in the denominator of a fraction in the term to which 0.5 is raised in the chance-to-hit formula. The fact that there is an arbitrary number we call turret sig resolution in the numerator of that fraction is completely irrelevent to the effect sig radius has. Sig radius would still have exactly the same effect if my proposal was implemented as outlined in the OP.

Yes it would make understanding the system simpler, but it would not make the game better for it.

The number of people telling me I'm wrong in this thread is simply more evidence that the vast majority of Eve players don't understand sig resolution.

Turret Sig res is not the arbitrary number here. 0.5 is. There is still no way to address the static becoming a variable without a complete rebalance.

You are right, it would not make the game better, because it would make literally no difference to the game. Apart from making it easier to understand.

(snip)
And the op is unclear, are we normalizing sig res in the equation or removing it?