0
ECM is not the problem. People would like you to think that but people also want you to think that homeopathy works and that the moon landings didn’t happen. The reason people are blaming ECM is that they are unwilling or unable to actually dissect what is going wrong when they are playing their LRM boats. People blame ECM because it is there and visible. None the less, I took out a stock mech, equipped it with some LRMs and went to play in the small-time leagues. Here is what I found by objectively looking at how things went:
At first, I found ECM annoying it was just easiest to blame it for not being able to use my primary source of damage…. No viable targets – it must be ECM’s fault! My damage and hit rate was horrible and the games were just frustration. In reality it wasn’t ECM that was causing all my anger it worked out to be:
- My team-mates were not able/willing to hold, or didn’t hold locks/swapped locked targets .
- Slow lock-on times that seemed to get even slower on some mechs for no reason.
- 50/50 chance that your launch will plow into the ground or go off into the sky. Missiles miss
- Slow missile flight time.
- Non-level missile flight path for dumb-fire (non-locked) shots. Shooting without a lock was only reliable ~5% of the time.
- BAP serves no real purpose for LRM users, meaning that if I close distance where BAP becomes useful my missiles do no damage. Lock-on timers seem to fluctuate with the time of day and rag-doll damage picture doesn’t help my LRM aiming. If I get too close, I quickly become a locking-sharing target and die a horrible death.
Why were these issues for me?
- Well, first, I was using the LRM as my main damage weapon, not as a supporting weapon. In many load outs I see that this is where you are kind of forced to go. It was quite frustrating to have to revert to using a medium laser as my only weapon. It made me angry and I can see how people are mistakenly saying that ECM negates an entire weapon class. In reality, moving into position and negating an ECM was challenging but not in, and of, itself difficult it was that the LRM issues made that one, hard-won, chance to use my primary weapons usually a failure! To put it into numbers, ECM would reduce my chances of getting a good target to 50%, the LRM issues would then reduce the chances of a successful hit from that lock to 10% -- that would translate to a 5% chance to successfully use my primary weapons. It wasn’t ECM, it was LRM bugs and poor design.
- Often when I would peek my head up and try to actively engage the enemy I would get a lock but my missiles would go flying off somewhere else or into the ground or I would be forced to loose the lock and dive for cover as the shared-target missile swarm came flying in.
- When mechs would emerge from the ECM bubble the time to lock onto them, often, was much much higher than it feels like It should have been. It was like some ECM slime stuck to the mech I was targeting slowing down the lock-on time.
- If I dumb-fired my missiles they would have these nice parabolic arcs then land nowhere near the spot that I was aiming at. Just seems to me that if I were dumb-firing my missiles should just fly in a straight (non parabolic) arc until the reach their maximum range (just like srms do)
- AMS encourages boating of LRMs. For example, LRM5 was a useless weapon when someone had an AMS even worse when a group had several AMS. Everyone who is crying about ECM is bringing up the hard-counter issue – well Isn’t AMS a hard-counter for LRMS? (granted there is an ammo constraint but the weight and hard points are pretty steep, specially in lighter mechs)
- First off, ECM doesn’t need to be changed. There are too many major game mechanic issues that make it necessary and it is limited to a few mechs.
- BAP should have a larger range, at least 200m, but 250 would be better.
- Lock times need to be reduced much, much more when you have a BAP on-board.
- Dumb-fired missiles should have a straight LOS flight path not the curving arc.
- There should be NO dud missile fire. Having an entire launch of missiles go off into la-la land or the ground because you can’t sync the actual target lock with what the player sees is not good.
- SSRMs should act as BOTH SRM and SSRM, meaning if you fire them without a lock they go straight out and detonate like a regular SRM
- LRMs should be fire and forget. Once I get a lock and fire them my lock should go away and my missiles fly regardless of what I do, auto-tracking the target. My lock should be reset and I should have to re lock a target to fire again. That means I no longer have to stand still and hold my cross hair in the little box waiting the eternity for my missiles to land. It means that the choice between choosing to chain fire or group fire is even more important. It means that when I fire I loose my target and my lock and have to reacquire both.
What I did notice, was how quickly the other team would drop if we had a lot of missile boats and they had no ECM. Everyone would lock-onto the first available target and fire a hellish barrage of missiles and all but the biggest mech would crumple.
That mechanic needs to be fixed before anything else – its not ECM that’s the problem.
Now, if your argument is just around TT lore -- this game isn't TT, get over it.
Edited by nehebkau, 17 September 2014 - 06:09 AM.
