La Guillotine, on 10 December 2012 - 04:27 PM, said:
Nonetheless, I don't believe the solution is to have it do less, or weight more, or cost more. That would just make it useless, or just harder to get.
I believe the solution is to introduce a weakness to using ECM. A downside which, without taking away from the ECM's effectiveness, would give the opposing team some counter-play option to go with, even if none of their mechs have ECM themselves.
Making it do less would not make it "useless". Anti-missile systems do far less, but still get used. Beagles do one hell of a lot less, but still get (got) used.
There's a lot of room between the ECM we have now and the abilities it would have if it were an appropriate value for its tonnage.
abivard, on 10 December 2012 - 05:24 PM, said:
Trolls Must camp this board 24/7. they must have each other on spead dial too?they always seem to be there to back each other up with in a few minutes.
Easy to tell them apart from normal folk. they almost always open their posts with a direct personal insult disparaging the other persons opinion, then sanctimoniously pretend (out of a purely altruistic frame of mind) that they will now educate the ignorant masses as to what is PC by them.
Their names will appear in groups on almost every page of a post.
They will always claim the other person is lying, on drugs, stupid, uneducated, narrow minded used bad punctuation or grammar etc ad nausem.
Try reading this post again, and see how well it fits its own description.
The problem is that people are starting to run fewer and fewer mechs that don't have ECM. This should not be the case.
If ECM is doing something important that you feel should be in every game, then that sounds like a change that should be made to *every* mech, across the board, regardless of ECM.
If you feel that ECM is necessary because LRMs are too good, then the solution should not be ECM but rather less effective LRMs (I could support a drop to all the way to 1.4 damage each in the absence of ECM target-jamming nonsense).
If you feel that streak-cats are too good, the answer is not ECM but rather to make streaks less effective.
If you feel that sneaking around should be easier, then lobby for a reduction in overall targeting range down from 800m.
Don't cover the symptoms. Cure the ailment. Then you'll have a healthy game where ECM comes up sometimes, but not always.
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The game should have a noob-tube with a very good effectiveness/skill ratio. That's healthy.
Having a tool for new players to lean on as a crutch (to then be abandoned later in favor of more precise weaponry you can get more out of with enough skill) is a good piece of game design.
The problem comes about when a more skilled player can't do any better with other weapons, and that's where the noob-tube becomes a first-order optimal strategy (which is bad). I think that with a certain reduction in effectiveness for LRMs and streaks, they could work just fine as a tool for new players and players with poor frame rate or ping to still be effective while allowing the l33t players with their mad skillz to outperform them (or at least make good spotting necessary for fire support to do amazing things).
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