10 replies to this topic

[w0qj]

For those MWO veterans know-it-alls:

Rummaging through Alpha version of MechDB, I find there's non-purchasable mech:
Atlas AS7-D-DC-Escort
https://mwo.nav-alph...as7-d-dc-escort

What is this mech, and when was it available way back when?
Just curious.

[FupDup]

It was used as the VIP in the Escort gamemode.

Escort has been scuttled because it was horribad.

[1453 R]

The AS7-D-DC Escort was an Atlas with twenty times the armor of a regular Atlas, moving about three kilometers an hour. As Fup mentioned, it was an NPC/A.I.-driven critter that only existed in the Escort game mode, which everybody hated. primarily because it was poorly designed and enormously exploitable, secondarily because the MWO playerbase despises any game mode other than Skirmish.

[PocketYoda]

The mode was fun... but the AI was shocking as it was random and the people defending it had no way of knowing which way the stupid thing would go.. usually directly into the full enemy zerg..

Great brawling matches but the defenders 99% lost.

Edited by MechaGnome, 05 September 2021 - 05:26 PM.

[LordNothing]

load the stock loadout, the thing tops in at 144.5t. hax!

[Elizander]

It also had no weapons so it was just a slow-moving target dummy.

[w0qj]

Can I have one of those for Christmas, this AS7-D-DC-Escort?

At least with this I won't die as quickly, even if it has no weapons

[S 0 L E N Y A]

VIP Atlas was a classic example of "Probably Good Ideas"

[Teenage Mutant Ninja Urbie]

cmon.. the mode was a good idea..

it was just badly implemented. and instead of learning&improving they just scrapped it completely.
as they do oh so often..

[JC Daxion]

MechaGnome, on 05 September 2021 - 05:25 PM, said:

The mode was fun... but the AI was shocking as it was random and the people defending it had no way of knowing which way the stupid thing would go.. usually directly into the full enemy zerg..

Great brawling matches but the defenders 99% lost.

Yea, i actually liked the mode but it needed changes, specifically it needed a driver. I also would of made it a 6 track crawler, each track you take out it slowed it. The idea would be to stop it.

another thing it needed was while a pre-set path could be used, the players need to know the path or be in control of the path.

It really could of been a fun mode with some changes, but i will say a few of my favorite game types was a specific path on a certain map. aka across the top on polar was just awesome. There were a few others that were great too. Through the city on crimson was also pretty fun.

I was sad to see it pulled, i rarely played it, but after playing 100 matches on mining and HPG for me a polar escort was a welcome site.

[LordNothing]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Urbie, on 06 September 2021 - 09:13 AM, said:

cmon.. the mode was a good idea..

it was just badly implemented. and instead of learning&improving they just scrapped it completely.
as they do oh so often..

pgi does this. has an idea for a great mode, and then drops the ball in implementation. escort, scouting, incursion, solaris, etc.

in escort the branch points are known and so it becomes easy to predict where the atlas will be. too hard to win defense. easy for one guy to kill the atlas if the team is otherwise distracted. giving the atlas some light armament would have fixed the issue (could have used the aimbot from training). so games where a single srm squirrel can kill it would be rarer.

scouting has a similar issue where intel points are in fixed locations but points are enabled randomly. eventually you work out a collection strategy that makes it easy to get the requisite points. dustoff mechanics are kind of bad, encourages light mech smoke diving. to fix this the dust off zone should have been treated as a cap where you need to show up hold without being shot at or with enemies in the zone for a period of time. if enemies got to the zone first, the drop ship would move to an alternate dust off. more than 4 alternate dustoff positions should have been available so that the defending team could not predict where it would land nor could you hold all possible lzs.

the problem with incursion is that the bases themselves served no role in the match. unless a team nascared for a cap win, and then wouldn't get anything in the way of score to do that. usually its just skirmish, and if a squirrel fetches a battery its benefits were marginal compared to having that squirrel fight. one would think this mode would work well in a respawn environment, but even in fp there is little base interaction. the teaser videos made it look like you would have to cut through walls to get to the enemy base, but the walls themselves didnt really play much role and a couple 50 point alphas is all you need to break them enough to get through. failure to put enough emphasis on base destruction doomed the mode, even then look at demolition in mw5 and you have a match that is pretty boring with little actual combat.

in solaris the biggest issue was that nobody wanted it the way it was implemented. dueling gets very old very fast, and while it does a great job at putting an emphasis on brawling, the fights themselves tend to be short. the 2v2 mode while significantly more interesting failed due to lack of match making, as most players dont want to go through the trouble of teaming up on their own. the way you join the game is actually the biggest failure. as you frequently have to jump queues to find one with people in it. should have just been one big queue where you pick the modes you want to play, and search for a match then have the game try and fill as many matches as possible. ffa and 4v4 would be good here, and generally make matches more mw4-like.

modes that work well are fp-conquest, siege, skirmish (hard to screw up the default), and qp domination (fp version has a terrible wait time to play time ratio). anything else is a waste of space. solaris can be recovered if you redux the match joining, pug matchmaking for team modes, reduce the divisions, and add the 4v4 mode.

Edited by LordNothing, 06 September 2021 - 11:44 AM.