umadbro?

Um, who doesn't have a falcon alt these days? Compare that number to the number of people who have an alt specifically for damping, painting, or tracking disrupting and you'll have your answer

I use ECM and like it. I think its fine as is. but as a broad spectrum gamer I have noticed that...

20 seconds is just to long for a crowd control/debuff effect that strong, don't believe me? Find a other mmorpg/mopvpg with a 20 second CC usable in pvp. Go look really you wont find one over 10 sec in a game with any sense of balance that is designed for 5-30 man fights (tho over 50 a 20 sec off one combatant is fair, just not fun). If you just cut the cycle and cap cost it gos from 2 success lock you out for the hole fight/you die, to making you have to do more/play harder to manage.

ECM has always been a bit of a garbage mechanic. It's not fun and is far too powerful in the context of really small fights. It also tends to act as a 'get out of jail free' card for people who make mistakes.

The new battlecruisers actually hurt ecm ships pretty badly, since they can pump out so much damage at long range. That kind of helps but it'd be nice to see the mechanic overhauled completely so that it's useful in gangs and fleets but not utterly devastating against 1 or 2 people.

I think what you fail to understand is that a chance based mechanic removes strategy elements from the game.

I'm with Tippia, Nehpilius and whoever else on this one.

There are far too many threads out there where people point to a problem that doesn't exist and then go on to suggest things that are either too shallow, overtly complicated or heavy-handed to blunt - leading to simply making things worse. There may be problems, but it's not necessarily those you talk about.

It's not that you can't do things with ECM - there are alot of decent suggestions out there. Some are even good. It's just so transparent that many recurring topics simply stem from pulling a problem out of a single context and then you get this endless loop of people whining on brittle ground because they lost to ECM and other people retorting on the same level. This thread is high complexity, low impact and only limitation-minded.

Understand that "fixing" should mean improvement and making something more enjoyable - not the kind of "fixing" you do to a dog. There's also the always useful detail of having experience flying- or at least being well versed enough in the ship you talk about to be able to make leveled description. Point out how your ideas affect both facing and flying the ship in question. Let that fill some room in your posts. That's what balance is about after all.

The only thing the OP got right is that from a design-perspective, ECM is a poor mechanic.

ECM being tied to the RNG is pretty much my major complaint with it. When such a powerful form of e-war is essentially luck-based, getting jammed is incredibly annoying. Throw out the RNG, bring in deterministic, predictable mechanics and ECM would be much more tolerable.

What if we don't need a change to ECM, but a buff to ECCM?

How about if when you are Jammed you can break the jam by activating your eccm module?

sort of like a reverse get out of jail free card. (or trinket from some other not to be mentioned game)

Well I started off the OP by saying that as a playerbase we could discuss potential solutions to the poor mechanic, and then started the discussion off with an idea.