it is effective at nullifying one ship with a very cheap one.
It does not require any personal skill
the principle is the opposite of pew pew.
Effect modification
I propose that a successful jam does not remove every target. Instead, a random target slot is chosen and deactivated.
example :
My raven with auto-targeting modules has 10 targets maximum, and has locked 4 targets
A griffin successfully lands an ECM on it.
The game choses one of the 10 target slots [1… 10].
Let’s say it rolls a 2. The slot was active(because I had 4 targets). Thus a random target is unlocked, and my raven can only lock 9 targets untill the ecm cycle end.
A second jam lands. This time, the game rolls a slot on the 9 possible.
Let’s say it rolls a 9. it only results in one less target possible for my raven.
Basically, this means that solo ECM is much less overpowered. if you want to completely shut down a raven, you need 7 ECM landed on it (10 if it has 3 auto targeting units fitted)
Success Formula Modification
I propose to make ECM work on falloff. Additionally, I propose ECM to be affected by angular speed. Make bigger ships more resilient
Those two modifications would make ECM work like auto-canons : 0 optimal and chance to hit reduced by the angular speed of the target. Note the sig radius is NOT taken into.
This is, to address the issue that this mechanism does not require any piloting skill. Using ECM ship to its full potential will now require to fly the ship correctly.
Also, I personally think that bigger ships should be less likely to get jammed. This is already present in the previous modification (Effect modification)
you are totally right. Still, mwd would require cap usage AND makes your ship less agile. So I think the effect would be less important.
I want to avoid bigger ship from being too much penalized by this. eg battleships are slower AND have bigger sig so they would suffer more from that modification (unless they were given better sensor str).
Maybe you’re right and sig radius should be used too. in that case, the existing ships’ sensor str should be rescaled up with their base sig radius.
YAY down with cancer and oppressive game play, up with tactics and skill! Unfortunately in this state it would be a bit under powered so I would suggest it removes a few lockable targets in an aoe around the target, so its better for group and less effective at oppressing 1 target and it can be countered with positioning which doesn’t require specific ships or equipment pure skill based gameplay.
Sensor str can be whatever we need it to be it’s uses are ecm and probe resistance. OR we increase or decrease the weight sensor str has in the ecm calculation.
I think it will be fairly straightforward to compensate.
Sensor strength is only useful against ECM and combat probes, if it had more uses such as reduction to all types of e-war then it would be worth using but atm its a big hit to a ship to have to use ECCM, it being integrated with sensor boost’s and amps was a step in the right direction but its no where near strong enough or useful enough to fit more than 1 module per ship.
From experience 1 ECCM mid with script is not enough for frig/desi/cruiser, BC (+t2/t3 cruiser) and up it becomes quite a bit better thou.
I think you’re going in the right direction here, but the random chance is part of what makes ECM suck. So, just riffing on your idea here, using tracking. I’d say to not just write off sig radius. Take it all the way, make ECM work just like turrets, except they damage the target’s sensors. Get enough points of damage to the sensors and they lose a targetting slot. Sensor health would recharge like shields.
The matter with those modifications (AOE, or another kind of damage) is that they increase the complexity of a combat. This in turn increases TiDi when ecm are used.
AoE weapons need to compute for each target, the list of people on grid which are in distance . It basically adds o( number_ecm*grid_entities) to the server load, i.e o(players²)
in the same sense, adding a damage notion would add o(players²) (just like damage do ATM)
Sure calls to the random() can also add quite a lag, but modern pseudorandom are good enough to be of low impact.
I personally think the “damage to sensor” idea, but this would require much more modifications (you need to add sensor_health to the ships, sensor_health_regen, etc.). I guess mine would too …
Technically true. But, is there/would there be enough ECM on the field to have a significant impact? I guess those would be numbers CCP would have to supply, and they haven’t shared a performance analysis in years.
EWAR wings completely locking some enemy ships with not even RNG to give them locks once in a while isn’t all that much more fun tbh. Throwing cheap griffins at enemy logi to “alpha” their sensor and then keep them at 0 lock slot will be fun. Well for one side at least I guess…
Three fleets of ~200 ppl we were, two were full so at least 512 ppl. And we will be tonight, inch’Allah.
It was not a whore fleet, but a fighter support fleet : we were to jam the air superiority, while super’s fighter would kill them and normal fighter would aggress heavy bombers. I think it was the most cost-effective subcap fleet for this role.
If they bring a full ewar wing, then yeah, they should succeed. Right now, it really only takes 1 boat to perma-jam someone. The difference, with a sensor health system, there are more levers to balance. What if logis had the fastest recharge rate, but mediocre sensor health? A single logi could tie up a whole ECM wing, whereas for example another ship might be harder to jam but when it gets jammed it stays jammed for longer. Still just spitballing of course, my take on it might be a terrible idea, but it feels like there are more options and more skill.
Re: lag
I’m not sure how much load it would put on the server. no idea. I was under the impression most of the load came from movement. That missiles and drones represented huge amounts of movement and load, moving ships huge amounts, turrets not that much. I might be wrong. It would be CCP’s job to analyze the performance cost of a change and decide if it’s worth it, assuming the change sounds worthwhile from a gameplay perspective.
The nice thing about your idea is its much more easily balanced, with sensor health and recovery time, it can be fine tuned, the current setup can reach perma jam with ease which is completely broken in comparison.
On a side note when you tackle someone they can’t just release jam drones and then wam they get away, it would have to slowly eat away at your sensor strength making it more difficult to keep the ship and all drones targeted while you kill them off, which is more skill based and less broken.
Also ECCM would give you more time to deal with ecm so the module still remains useful, but not 100% needed all the time.
Why not just cause the ecm module to cause a target lock loss of x modified by skills and ship hull on a target per cycle? Then again that may be even stonger because it would not be effected by rng as much. Alot of modules dont take skill. They just work. ECM doesnt just work it may work or has a high chance of working. If your using ecm you swear its not working and if your fighting it, Ecm always works. This version you lose locks all the time but you can keep relocking the target manually … maybe more irritating… hmm
what happens if the jammed has more sensor recovery than the jammer ?
what happens if the jammed has too low sensor ?
The way I understand your feature, in the first case the jam is useless, in the second case the jam is 100% active. This would make ecm drones useless and ecm wings even better than they are now .
Unfortunately in this state it would be a bit under powered so I would suggest it removes a few lockable targets in an aoe around the target, so its better for group and less effective at oppressing 1 target and it can be countered with positioning which doesn’t require specific ships or equipment 
pure skill based gameplay.