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Hello Everyone!
Welcome to another Development Update and thanks for joining us! We have a few bullet points that we want to cover this week so let's get right to it.
SUMMARY
Today is the last business day of development for the next major update. Monday at 10 a.m. is a content and feature lock with bug fixing and polish scheduled for all of next week. Monday the 21st is when we update our staging branch with our content, code and database for the patch and we then start testing release candidates!
TUESDAY MINOR UPDATE
We have a small minor update that we're putting the final touches on for a targeted release on Tuesday. The notes will be posted next week but ultimately will contain these three things:
[*]Team balancing: Players will no longer be forced to switch teams after 50% match completion. Only volunteers will be team switched after this point.
[*]Auto-balancing: Party members will only be forced to switch teams if there are no single, non-partied players eligible.
[*]Fixed a bug where sometimes players would spawn invisible after being team switched.
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The next major update is currently scheduled for a Tuesday 04/29 release and we will have notes for that posted the week prior. We will talk more about that update next week!
BOOSTING & WEAPON RAISING
We fixed a bug recently to prevent an exploit regarding the speed in which weapons raised back up after boosting. We did consider it an exploit and not something designed. Since then there have been requests made about making changes to weapon raising timing and we are definitely aware of those requests. To be clear we have no immediate plans to make an adjustment to this timing and don't want to make that type of change without further examination. We will keep eyes on that issue and will make changes if necessary.
THE MIRV
The last round of balance changes adjusted some aspects of the Corsair-KLA but didn't cover everything the community wanted. I know a change to rate of fire was something desired and we agree that it's needed. However, that change requires animation work to make the proper adjustment so it wasn't something we could roll out quickly. We're working on it now and will have more information soon.
PRIVATE SERVERS
We wanted to let everyone know that we've been testing alternative hosting methods in the hopes of improving network performance and providing private server options to you players. This takes legal, engineering, UI and testing resources so it's not something small for us but it is a high priority. I'm not in a place where I feel comfortable sharing a specific date for this since it's not all completely in our direct control but it's a feature in active development!
FUTURE THINGS
The priorities for us right now are about improving the player experience and providing plenty of reasons for current players to keep playing HAWKEN. This doesn't mean that other small features or pieces of content won't roll out however.
Here's some of what the coming development months look like for us:
[*]Performance Improvements to Server Hosting
[*]Private Server Options
[*]Steam Account Linking (allows for use use of other Steamworks development features for us)
[*]Improved Party/Squad Match Options and Functionality
[*]Ladder System
[*]...and of course more mechs
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Priorities are subject to change of course as there are many factors that can impact development of a live product.
Thanks for joining us for another Development Update and we hope you have some fun with HAWKEN this weekend. Don't forget to take advantage of our double XP / HC weekend so tell your friends and family!
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