TruePoindexter, on 05 December 2012 - 11:56 AM, said:
As I said in that case I would always equip ECM since it is viable more often than ECCM. You would just be eliminating ECCM. ECCM is only useful when ECM is on the field. ECM is always useful even when you yourself are being jammed.
Right now it is a tactical decision to switch which is an interesting gameplay choice. I gave an example about this but to reiterate you get into situations where you can counter enemy ECM but in doing so give away your positioning and open yourself up to enemy missile fire. Conversely you can maintain your own jamming but then cannot share targeting information with your team and in turn cannot receive missile support.
TAG, NARC, and AMS were only useful when LRM's were out on the field, but people still ran those. And I would always equip ECCM because I know people will always equip ECM, just as you pointed out. How can you say that ECCM would be useless if there's no ECM, so everyone would take ECM? =P
And my changes offer the same exact gameplay choice. You either provide ECM support, or you counter it. However, instead of immediately switching in the midst of combat, it's instead a long-term choice you make when building your mech. The difference here is between short-term and long-term choice. It's my belief that a long-term choice would have more of a strategic impact upon the game. Rather than allowing players to make that choice in the midst of a fight, they have to plan ahead.
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I keep saying this - given the choice between ECM and ECCM you will only select ECM since it is useful more often than ECCM. If we do as Fleix suggests and allow ECCM on all mechs then ECM becomes almost irrelevant as ECCM gets equipped often on mechs like AMS.
And if they only select ECM, it provides plenty of targets for ECCM, meaning it's very useful. There's a bit of a logical loop going on here.
And I certainly don't believe ECCM should be on all mechs. Both ECM and ECCM should be relegated to the current variants of light mechs that already have them, if not just the Raven alone, though that's debatable. The DDC Atlas should just be right out.
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It's called flavor of the month for a reason. A lot of people are trying out ECM to see how it works and many of them are leveling a Commando/Raven/Cicada for the first time. Just like all the new releases before lots of people will run it and it will eventually die down. I will say that ECM's power is skewing this and we will likely continue to see every match have at least one Commando/Raven/Cicada but will become less likely to run into games like I did last night where there were 4 Ravens on one team.
This is part of the reason, sure. Not everyone likes to pilot light mechs or DDC's, so the numbers will decrease a bit over time. I don't think they'll decrease as much as FoTM mechs, though. ECM is currently too important not to have and is absolutely essential for your team. There will never be an 8-man without ECM, for example. Even in PUGs you'll likely always have a couple, as long as anyone is running a light mech. And as long as DDC's hare capable of carrying them, you're going to see quite a few Steiner scout lances in pre-mades which is just plain ridiculous. Its power-level needs to be adjusted in some manner, and I'm not an advocate of just straight nerfs. I think my changes offer a better solution, which is to keep the ECM functions as they are, but split them apart.