
Hello Everyone!
It’s another week and another update but this time I’ll be keeping the report a bit on the shorter side. We’ve been really busy taking care of everything needed to release the Invasion update and continuing to put the final touches on the next update which is tentatively scheduled to release around the end of November.
The response to Co-Op Bot Destruction (COBD) seems quite positive and we’re glad that people are having a great time with the mode. As you may recall, it was something we originally intended to have out with the Ascension update but we decided to hold it back to make a few more improvements and I believe that extra work paid off. The COBD team really pushed themselves and accomplished a rather large amount of work in a rather short amount of time. We have more in the works for the mode including new maps and new features, so what you’re experiencing right now is essentially only the base version of COBD and we hope to have the next update available to the mode in January. It was also fun to see the response to the Predator. Yes, it’s a mech that will take some getting used to since it plays rather differently than the others we have in HAWKEN, but we do want to continue branching out with our ideas for what a mech can be in the game and we hope you like what’s on the horizon.
We did have some road bumps this week and I’d like to take a moment to speak about what happened.
The first road bump relates to a couple of bugs that surfaced once the patch went live. We had an issue with the Predator not unlocking for players who had maxed out Scouts, and an issue with mech upgrades in COBD missing keybindings. We were able to fix the Predator bug in a few hours and quickly generate a new build, but we didn’t have a fix for the keybinding issue until Wednesday night. Since there’s a workaround for the keybinding issue (reset your default keybindings in the options menu) we didn’t want to hold pack the Predator fix just because of that bug so we rolled out the Predator fix as soon as possible.
These bugs didn’t present themselves during the 4 weeks of testing we had on the update and they decided to pop up in our face to say hello right after we opened up the update to everyone. We essentially run 3 environments of the game at the same time (4 when HAB is live) and the only true test of the live environment is live. As a result, what may have worked fine in one environment, sometimes may not work fine in another.
The second road bump showed itself primarily in the form of being unable to join matches. That issue was a result of backend changes to services, and those changes were essentially reverted today while more investigation takes place to figure out exactly what the issue is. Hopefully it’ll be much smoother sailing this weekend and we do thank you for your patience with that issue. It was frustrating for you…us…everyone!
I also wanted to provide an update on an open question that was left in the patch notes from this week about removing the ability for parties to join through friends. It was something we needed to do but we also know that it was a feature our more competitive players used to organize matches. While I don’t have specifics to share here at this time, we’ve already begun reaching out to members of the community to discuss getting their help on testing out a new feature that would make parties joining through friends a workaround no longer needed.
That’s it for this week, so have fun with the Invasion update and I’ll see you all online soon.
Thanks Everyone!
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