Way Back When....(AW AHI Days)

[Dadano]

I've always wondered how different the gameplay was in AW and AHI.

Would people see a 3 on 1 and dive in?

Were Head-On shots as popular then as they are now?

Vulch/Shedkillers/Uneven #'s?

Just wondering:)

-Dano

[Rooster]

1) Generally not

2) Ask Torque...      yes

3) Vulching was an art form then not a way of life, Uneven numbers hmm remember days when Knights would have a hi number of 15 vs 30 Bish and 25 Rooks. Wernt no Sheds to keel.



JimBear

[Max]

Prior to the arena change-up in September, I recall AH1 being pretty close to what it is now. Things that were different...
* flight modelling was different - a bit more on the RR side
* 50 cal had a LOT more lethality...probebly pretty close to what Hispanos are now.
* the MA player community was smaller - 450/500 was a busy weekend night
* the furballer v toolshedder contingency was a lot less vocal and derisive
* one chess piece was always getting battered - usually Knights
* La7's and Spit 14's were unknown
* Niki drivers still took a lot of HO shots

[Rocket]

AH I


1. At times.  There are always those times when I would be in a fight and turn around and see 5 buddies trying to help me.  Look at it one of 2 ways.. a) They need the kill more than you and peel off.  b) You have taken far toooo long to dispatch this foe and you really do need help.   Once in a great while you can have an awesome 1v1 fight going and someone comes in and dusts the guy and you are like daaaaaaaaaaaang BUT if we are playing for the bigger picture then all is good anyway

2. Yes, always turn your guns to your opponent not your six.  (Go check the training forum for posts about defeating the HO attack.)

3. Yup always uneven.  I joined Nits early during beta and there were usually about 5-8 of us vs 30-60 of everyone else.  I call it a target rich environment  It was nice to be on the lower side even though most of the time I had to fly half way across the map to find someone to fight, when I got there it was usually the best of the best I would come up against.  Helps you hone your skills quickly.

Jimbear.. good to see ya! S!

[hubsonfire]

I even HOed people back in AW. Nothing has changed at all, except the game.

[Dadano]

Good deal...

Thought I missed out on something:)

-dano

[Damionte]

So in other words it's the same as it's always been, just with more people now.

The things in AHII we complain the most about can't be changed by coding. Only by changing thepeople.

[Tilt]

Vulching was very prevalent in AW you even had organised vulch missions to wind up your opponents.......... but you knew them and it was "all in the best possible taste"

Porking was very common............ although the effects differed

Cherry picking was common but not so much as AH.......... mainly because gunnery between the two is different...............

Daisy chains are longer in AH........always have been. Once a bogie is saddled its rare he gets away but he can still survive for a period longer (in AH than in AW) this gives cherry pickers a longer "window of opportunity" and so you end up with more of them.

[humble]

Game play in AW was much different (in the FR arena at least) primarily due to numbers. Simply alot more 1 on 1, 1 on 2 and small group "furballs"....as a general rule the 3rd guy came in but beyond a 1 on 2 things usually were let go.....but you always had pickers.

The HO did exist in AW and you'd really here the moaning (much more so then here)....but the game code eliminated most of the damage (95%??) so it was rare and normally considered a waste of ammo.

Fields were easy to deack and vulching was more common (Think I had a 100 in a vader once:))....the big trick there was to deack a field then land your vader (or 38) and park on the runway behind the spawn and wait for a guy to try and take off. The perfect one was to shoot a guy then throttle up and catch him as he respwaned from the other end before he could get the nose down on his takeoff roll....then up and vulch again....

Toolshedders have always been here (and there)...

The flight model in AH (pre 1.4) was much much better. Then to many complaints forced it to the current easy mode we have now.....but both light years ahead of AW....

[Masherbrum]

Originally posted by Dadano
I've always wondered how different the gameplay was in AW and AHI.

Would people see a 3 on 1 and dive in?

Were Head-On shots as popular then as they are now?

Vulch/Shedkillers/Uneven #'s?

Just wondering:)

-Dano

1.)  95% of the time when I see a 1 vs. 1, I'll ask if they need assistance.   If they say no, I'll still lurk around him, just in case it goes sour and he calls out.

2.)  Only when Niki's, La7's and 110's are in the air.   They have nothing else to bring to the table then a HO.   They cannot turn worth a *****, so why not.

3.)  Toolshedding began to stop RJO's when I started.   Now, I see Niki's padding Attack Ranks over cities no where near a fight.   Completely different set of circumstances.  

Uneven numbers threads only apply to Bish/Knit.   AFAIK, Atoon's post is the first Rook post on the subject.   But his holds more water because we're now aware of the point "Bish/Knight is trying to send HTC and the rest of us".   They've done NOTHING but piss and moan, whine and carry on in here about the balancing.   They are too arrogant to realize THEY are the problem.   I've switched to Knight and Bish without an issue since the change.  

Vultching has always been here.  If I get vulched once, shame on them, more than once, shame on me.   Spawncamping, is a little different.

[Max]

Originally posted by Damionte
So in other words it's the same as it's always been, just with more people now.

The things in AHII we complain the most about can't be changed by coding. Only by changing thepeople.

Hold the calls, we have a winner!

[Golfer]

When it came down to strictly comfort level with what was going on...AW3-AW4W were the kings.

By that time I'd been with AW1, AWII and then III/4W from AOL freebie days through Gamestorm and EA.

The arenas were set up based on theater of operations.  Perk points didn't exist.  Spitfires (AWs "dweeb" ride) were limited by factories that if you killed them they'd have either limited or no spitfires.

The maps didn't change...yet I don't ever recall complaining.

HOs were limited to a next to impossible shot by the hit bubble.  I don't know if I recall ever actually landing a Head-On shot.  As mentioned before they were considered a waste of ammo.

Bombers could be manned by as many people as it had guns.

Killshooter didn't exist...but if you killed more than two friendlies in a 24 hour period you went Persona Non Grata and didn't receive any ammuntion or ordnance for the next 24 hours.

Intersquad rivalries existed and were very very very fun.  Our squad (~U.S.M.C.~) and the MAWs had a next to legendary rivalry where we would find ourselves fighting it out every sunday squad night.

The players knew the other players.  Even in the other arenas (We spent most of our time in Relaxed Realism Big Pacific) you knew who was who.  The people were more than just a few letters for you to call a dweeb.  You got to know that guy.

Macros were sources of humor and appeared after an often well earned kill.

I don't really remember the numbers.  If the other guys had more you just fought that much harder.  If we had them you could expect a good fight in return.

I remember leaving 1v1's alone.  I remember helping out in a 2 on 1.  If you needed help you'd send 3 quick messages that looked like this on the country text channel:

*Gol-4:'
*Gol-4:'
*Gol-4:'

That was the signal you needed help.  If you didn't get that you usually stayed out of the fray and waited for the fight to conclude.

Calls for Bingo Fuel/Winchester went honored.  This was not abused as far as I could tell.

We had the A-26 and the B-25.  I'd love to have both of those here

[Oldman731]

Originally posted by Dadano
I've always wondered how different the gameplay was in AW

I flew AW FR from 10/96 through its ultimate demise on 12/07/01.  For about two of those five years there was a devoted FR fightertown arena, and that's where I stayed.  With that as background, here are my recollections:

There was bad behavior in AW, too, some of it worse than what we see now.  From my perspective, the most unpleasant was the small but irritating group of fraggers (there was no killshooter function like we have here).  While there were vulchers, I think they were fewer simply because there was neither the need nor the desire to cap a base (although, as someone above mentions, there were people who sat on runways with A26s just to amass vulch kills)(some of them were quite famous).  HOs were rare because the game codes deliberately neutered head-on shots (part of the reason AW people whine about HOs is that, in AW, a HO shot was a deliberate attempt to hit the 00 in roulette, and had nothing to do with skill).

I don't remember ganging on the scale that we often see it here, but I think that is because the numbers were so drastically different.  This is probably the main reason veterans complain.  The behavior existed before, but, because the numbers are so much greater in AH2, there are just a lot more bad eggs out there.  As many have said, irritating people are the basic cause of irritating behavior, and this has always been so.  

AW had no perk points, and didn't reward anyone for capturing all the bases on the map (caveat:  I have heard rumors that in the RR arenas this often happened anyway).  I personally think that AH's emphasis on base capture as the way to win the war magnifies ganging and vulching, and thereby detracts from good air-to-air combat.  But that's just me.  There are plainly many people - possibly even the majority of people -  who place the base capture goal above the quality of the air-to-air fights, and that's something that we just have to get used to.

- oldman

[Rash]

Originally posted by humble
)....the big trick there was to deack a field then land your vader (or 38) and park on the runway behind the spawn and wait for a guy to try and take off. The perfect one was to shoot a guy then throttle up and catch him as he respwaned from the other end before he could get the nose down on his takeoff roll....then up and vulch again....

Tiger in the grass trick

[humble]

You couldnt actually "win" in AW just take the nuetral bases. Most of the time the better sticks simply rolled and headed for the "pond"....calls of I'll meet you at 10k over the pond were common....and normally honored....none of the 20k lurkers as a general rule. The fragging was a small isuue....but also a benifit. I probably killed a few hundred countrymen over the years who refused to honor a 1 on 1 (wish you got your 2 a day here:)).

The "vulching" normally came down to various squads "marking turf". After all we were focused on the other guy (guys) not the digital dirt. This led to SIGNIFICANTLY different game play.

Probably my single favorite AW memory was a squad op (327th Steel Talons I believe) were we rolled vaders as a squad and went to the deepest B-land base (84??) and literally capped the heart of B-lands for about 40 minutes. Now the vader was a fine A to A plane (and actually had a better then 1 to 1 (air to air only) kill ratio in WW2) with almost unlimited ammo. We were a good squad with reasonable numbers so this was probably a 20 plane mission and if I recall we had over 300 kills (almost all A to A) for the mission before it was all over.

Back then Squads looked for the other squads....in my formative days in RR#2 we had vet (82nd something or other) in C-land....Lynx (forget the squad name) in Bland and JG26 (squad I flew with) in A land. Once I hit the "bigtime" you ran into the legendary squads Dammed, musketeers, shillegagh etc....it would take years to even get an invite to a premier squad back then. It wasnt just how good you were....it was WHO you were....character counted. Most of that has dissappeared.....