137 replies to this topic

[comic_sans]

BurnsHot, on September 15 2014 - 07:31 PM, said:

With the recent infusion of Money from the Chinese

Sorry if I'm getting this wrong, but every post I've seen about chinese money is at least a year old if not two.  Could you link me to the correct article_

[BurnsHot]

comic_sans, on September 16 2014 - 10:38 AM, said:

BurnsHot, on September 15 2014 - 07:31 PM, said:

With the recent infusion of Money from the Chinese

Sorry if I'm getting this wrong, but every post I've seen about chinese money is at least a year old if not two.  Could you link me to the correct article_

You are right about the dates.  I didn't go back and check dates when I was typing that post and used the word "recent" because my main point was that I don't think they are under pressure from lack of money on the investment side.

IMO: The pressure revolves around the lack of a strong and growing player base and the potential revenue generated from  that player base.  Seems like currently, there are just not enough players that join and want to stick around to make Hawken Profitable(sellable to bigger investor).

If this lack of players/money continues then the investors just might Revamp the game completely, kind of like what happened with Firefall.  Firefall experienced their own Dev silence and then without warning came back to announce that they were suspending PVP from their game.  Not saying that this will happen here but I feel something BIG is about to happen.  Whatever it is, it will be geared towards mass appeal (sheep) and less towards Wolves (small group of competitive players).

I mentioned the Technician.  When it was introduced most of us couldn't understand why.  Well its obvious to me now.  We need more Sheep to fall in love with Hawken and stick around.  That was their attempt at it without completely changing the game.  A year later and the player numbers are still not where they want it to be.  The company goes silent to decide what direction they want to go and then come back and drop the Bomb on us.

I'm not trying to spread doom and gloom here.  Maybe the bomb is just more expansion in to the PVE while leaving the current PVP in place.  I can live with that.  We just don't know.


The article has already been listed but here it is again so you don't have to search:
http://www.polygon.c...ound-of-funding

"Meteor Entertainment raised $18 million in its second round of funding for free-to-play multiplayer online mech battler Hawken, bringing the company's total funding for the title to $28.5 million."

Edited by BurnsHot, September 16 2014 - 11:29 AM.

[Skitzo1d]

isnt that funding of 28 million before they sold license to china_ So wudnt it be higher than that_ Or is that included in the 28 mil_

[BurnsHot]

Skitzo1d, on September 16 2014 - 11:16 AM, said:

isnt that funding of 28 million before they sold license to china_ So wudnt it be higher than that_ Or is that included in the 28 mil_

The 18 million is from the Chinese to my knowledge is part of the 28 million.

Full article here: http://www.polygon.c...ound-of-funding

Meteor Entertainment raised $18 million in its second round of funding for free-to-play multiplayer online mech battler Hawken, bringing the company's total funding for the title to $28.5 million, reports VentureBeat.

Rustic Canyon Ventures technology investors and Chinese mobile games company KongZhong, publisher for Hawken in China, have joined FirstMark Capital and Benchmark Capital as the game's backers. Meteor CEO Mark Long told VentureBeat that the company is "gathering a war chest" to make another game on-par with Hawken's quality level.

"It's clear from this investment that we do not believe the game industry as an investment category is going down," managing partner at Rustic Canyon Nate Redmond told VentureBeat. "From watching disruption in multiple industries and seeing it come to games, that is appealing to me as an investor and a gamer.

"We look at a lot of possible game investments," Redmond added. "[Publishing games directly on the web] continues to be one of the most interesting sectors of digital media. [Hawken] is the first important one that we've seen in the last few years. It comes down to whether they have built great game play. The core mechanics are pretty amazing. The team is very technical and they really understood their engine and how to squeeze performance out of it."

[Skitzo1d]

BurnsHot, on September 16 2014 - 11:27 AM, said:

Meteor CEO Mark Long told VentureBeat that the company is "gathering a war chest" to make another game on-par with Hawken's quality level.

So does this mean they bought the license to hawken to simple use assets and the core aspects to create a different game altogether _

[Hijinks_The_Turtle]

Skitzo1d, on September 16 2014 - 12:26 PM, said:

BurnsHot, on September 16 2014 - 11:27 AM, said:

Meteor CEO Mark Long told VentureBeat that the company is "gathering a war chest" to make another game on-par with Hawken's quality level.

So does this mean they bought the license to hawken to simple use assets and the core aspects to create a different game altogether _

This could be a bit far off, but what if it's this game called Outrise (link: http://outrisegame.com/)_  It says on the team page that some of the employees have worked on Hawken.

Edited by Hijinks_The_Turtle, September 16 2014 - 12:34 PM.

[SS396]

BurnsHot, on September 16 2014 - 11:27 AM, said:

The 18 million is from the Chinese to my knowledge is part of the 28 million.

I don't really know about that.

I said it before but I think the license for Hawken is separate from the investment.  So I think they did both and spent more money that what we are seeing.  I haven't seen an article that says how much that license is costing that company.

[Dawn_of_Ash]

Hijinks_The_Turtle, on September 16 2014 - 12:33 PM, said:

Skitzo1d, on September 16 2014 - 12:26 PM, said:

BurnsHot, on September 16 2014 - 11:27 AM, said:

Meteor CEO Mark Long told VentureBeat that the company is "gathering a war chest" to make another game on-par with Hawken's quality level.

So does this mean they bought the license to hawken to simple use assets and the core aspects to create a different game altogether _

This could be a bit far off, but what if it's this game called Outrise (link: http://outrisegame.com/)_  It says on the team page that some of the employees have worked on Hawken.

Oh crud, you're right. It also shows that in thier latest update that they have got new team member but they cannot say their names yet.

[Skitzo1d]

Dawn_of_Ash, on September 18 2014 - 04:19 AM, said:

Hijinks_The_Turtle, on September 16 2014 - 12:33 PM, said:

Skitzo1d, on September 16 2014 - 12:26 PM, said:

BurnsHot, on September 16 2014 - 11:27 AM, said:

Meteor CEO Mark Long told VentureBeat that the company is "gathering a war chest" to make another game on-par with Hawken's quality level.

So does this mean they bought the license to hawken to simple use assets and the core aspects to create a different game altogether _

This could be a bit far off, but what if it's this game called Outrise (link: http://outrisegame.com/)_  It says on the team page that some of the employees have worked on Hawken.

Oh crud, you're right. It also shows that in thier latest update that they have got new team member but they cannot say their names yet.

So far fetched its unbelievable.  It would be kind of cool, if they were to release the beta tag and go in renamed under a different title, with a far vaster gaming experience (that that one is claiming, than just arena shooter).  But in all honesty that game as far as it is reading looks like a very very different game all together and would require so much rework and stuff redone to create what their vision is that it would take  a couple years to do.  Ive already claimed what would be cool for hawken is a more open world feel to it, but dont see it happening.

[BurnsHot]

Skitzo1d, on September 16 2014 - 12:26 PM, said:

BurnsHot, on September 16 2014 - 11:27 AM, said:

Meteor CEO Mark Long told VentureBeat that the company is "gathering a war chest" to make another game on-par with Hawken's quality level.

So does this mean they bought the license to hawken to simple use assets and the core aspects to create a different game altogether _

I don't think so.  Not according to this:  Full Article here: http://www.shacknews...onal-18-million

"The funding was largely garnered from impressive looks at the free-to-play game Hawken, but Meteor isn't pouring all its resources into one project. CEO Mark Long told VentureBeat that the company has put another title in the pipe, and has its eyes on using the money for an acquisition. He says the funding could be used as a war chest "to acquire another title that could be on the same quality level as Hawken."

Chances are those who "left" the Hawken project to pursue other interest might be working on this other game that Meteor has invested in, but Mark Long is no long CEO, so its anyone's guess.

This seems appropriate to the conversation:

[HWK]Vanashinkaku, on September 16 2014 - 05:48 PM, said:

AsianJoyKiller, on September 16 2014 - 01:23 PM, said:

EliteShooter, on September 16 2014 - 07:35 AM, said:

I know the Doom n' Gloom is tiring, but in this particular case it makes sense.

It was just confirmed a Co-founder is working on a different project, which likely means he isn't working on Hawken any more. It's one thing when a minor dev like Vanu jumps ship, but another entirely when a co-founder leaves.

Wait a second here,  I am working with Dave (Vitquay) on my side project, using him as he's a fantastic designer and he's been nice enough to help me on his free time.  However, Dave HAS NOT and DID NOT jump ship on HAWKEN or ADHESIVE. Let's not go throwing peoples names through the dirt off of partial knowledge.

[HWK]Vanashinkaku, on September 16 2014 - 11:04 PM, said:

No, and I didn't confirm anything other than that Dave and I are working together on a side project.  When it comes to any other matters, consider that unconfirmed.  I'm not one who is to talk for others, I just wanted to simply state that Vitquay did not leave / jump ship, that does not necessarily mean that he is currently working on it, nor does it mean that he is not working on it.   I intended to leave that completely open ended and will continue to do so, that is not my place to speak for anyone or the company on that.  

TL;DR - Until you hear anything from an OFFICIAL source, most likely anything you hear is hearsay.

Could this be the game_ I don't know, but they have an Artist and a Programmer that they are not identifying and just list them as undisclosed.

Hijinks_The_Turtle, on September 16 2014 - 12:33 PM, said:

This could be a bit far off, but what if it's this game called Outrise (link: http://outrisegame.com/)_  It says on the team page that some of the employees have worked on Hawken.

Edited by BurnsHot, September 18 2014 - 07:47 PM.

[Wasabi_Wei]

That outrise game looks like the Deus Ex:HR interface theme was applied to Hawken's universe.

[DreamedArtist]

OUTRISE OMG ITS STILL ALIVE___ YES!

[BurnsHot]

I found more Info about the Technical Debt buried in the forums.  I added them to the OP.

Posted April 11, 2014, https://community.pl...post__p__495831,  [HWK]HUGHES said, "Rather than spend additional time on the feature itself, work to fix issues with the scaling of the platform was prioritized. You may recall us mentioning this in the past (the weeks prior to the Steam launch) where we needed to make sure the platform would be able to scale to the number of users desired and for those of you who have been with us for a while, the difference is indeed noticeable despite the roughness for a while that was a "necessary evil".

For a while after that, tool fixing and bug fixing was a priority for the platform team until work shifted to removing our dependency on AWS; transitioning to a completely new database. This is no small project but is a requirement for cost consideration, performance and for regions of the world where AWS is not an available solution. This work is in progress."


Posted April 22, 2014,/hawken/forums/mtr-era/topic/54728-development-update-4222014/#entry504660, [HWK]HUGHES said, "Our team has made great strides in our migration away from AWS dependencies and we now have a separate build of the game running in a completely isolated environment with a new database and that was no small task to accomplish. It's still a significant amount of work to migrate the live version of HAWKEN to a new database, but we plan on making that a smooth transition that won't negatively effect players. Hopefully in an upcoming Development Update we'll be able to announce the completion of this work and you will have never even known it took place."

AWS stands for Amazon Web Services.  It's Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) mentioned above.

[Hell_Diguner]

Why was/is migrating away from AWS dependency considered highly important_

[AsianJoyKiller]

Hell_Diguner, on September 19 2014 - 10:21 PM, said:

Why was/is migrating away from AWS dependency considered highly important_

Expensive to do maintenance/patching, which meant less frequent updates. Not great quality.

I remember those being problems.

[Odinous]

"It's still a significant amount of work to migrate the live version of HAWKEN to a new database"
Nothin else should be mentioned,its a massive task to accomplish.

[MechFighter5e3bf9]

wish they would open a door for help some of us could certainly relieve some of these problems i for one love unraveling monolithic game code into modular pieces

sharing a flowchart for us to collaborate on at least

Edited by MechFighter5e3bf9, September 20 2014 - 06:04 AM.

[LONEDEADWOLF]

BurnsHot, on September 14 2014 - 08:42 AM, said:

I wanted to pull as many sources I could find to help explain the "Technical Debt" that everyone keeps talking about.  A lot of information flows through the forum, but if you are not keeping up on it, then it can easy get buried and you will never know it was there.

So for anyone who wants a better idea on what the "Technical Debt" is all about please read.  Also if I missed any sources, feel free to mention them.  Enjoy!


Posted October 29, 2012, taken from a news article, VB GamesBeat, the then chief executive of Seattle-based Meteor Entertainment, Mark Long said, “Trying to run dedicated servers on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon’s data center outsourcing service) was something nobody had tried before. Early on, we tested it to see if it would work. As we move into it, it works better than we could have hoped for” as it can handle 10,000 players in simultaneous gaming without any hiccups. The latency, or delays in interaction, is so low that the service quality is good in beta testing, Long said. That saves a lot of money on data center costs, he said. (read full article here: http://venturebeat.c...nch-draws-near/)

Posted November 30, 2012, (http://www.forbes.co...onal-marketing/), Mark Long said, "Our server technology has panned out much better than we had hoped. We have dedicated servers on virtual machines. We’re using the cloud as a virtual OS on different cores of a server, which provides greater efficiency. Those machine copies can do anything. We didn’t know if latency would be a problem, but it turns out it’s not an issue at all. We have servers on the East and West Coasts of the U.S., in the UK, Japan and Australia. We get such good pings that we can play on a Japanese or Australian server like it’s downtown Seattle from our Seattle studio. Things work so well that we advanced our plans to go global on Day One. The only territory we aren’t going to be in is China. We’re excited to see what happens as the markets emerge naturally."

Posted April 11, 2014, https://community.pl...post__p__495831,  [HWK]HUGHES said, "Rather than spend additional time on the feature itself, work to fix issues with the scaling of the platform was prioritized. You may recall us mentioning this in the past (the weeks prior to the Steam launch) where we needed to make sure the platform would be able to scale to the number of users desired and for those of you who have been with us for a while, the difference is indeed noticeable despite the roughness for a while that was a "necessary evil".

For a while after that, tool fixing and bug fixing was a priority for the platform team until work shifted to removing our dependency on AWS; transitioning to a completely new database. This is no small project but is a requirement for cost consideration, performance and for regions of the world where AWS is not an available solution. This work is in progress."


Posted April 22, 2014,/hawken/forums/mtr-era/topic/54728-development-update-4222014/#entry504660, [HWK]HUGHES said, "Our team has made great strides in our migration away from AWS dependencies and we now have a separate build of the game running in a completely isolated environment with a new database and that was no small task to accomplish. It's still a significant amount of work to migrate the live version of HAWKEN to a new database, but we plan on making that a smooth transition that won't negatively effect players. Hopefully in an upcoming Development Update we'll be able to announce the completion of this work and you will have never even known it took place."

AWS stands for Amazon Web Services.  It's Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) mentioned above.

Posted June 03, 2014, (https://community.pl..._40#entry535365), [HWK]HUGHES said, "Some aspects of the game needed more tuning than originally planned and some platform decisions made months and months and months ago proved to be less than ideal and making changes then has ripple effects across the company. Some bumps surfaced during open beta that were in ways not expected so yeah... that helped to contribute to a longer than intended beta duration."

Posted June 27, 2014, (https://community.pl..._40#entry544702), [HWK]HUGHES said,"I'm not going to discuss the realities of our bandwidth or technical debt incurred from decisions made years ago...

Posted June 29, 2014, (https://community.pl...14/#entry545084),[HWK]HUGHES said,"Something that's happening with the project right now is a bit of incurred technical debt that continues to surface and impacts the goals of the company as a whole, not just HAWKEN. We have contracted an external strike team to resolve some of this technical debt and even for them, it takes time. I'll dive into a little more detail on what's going on with this in a below section but it won't change the fact that you, the dedicated players want to know what's coming up.
....
MIGRATION STATUS / STABILITY
As discussed in the last Development Update, we are in the process of migrating databases which includes new software and new hardware. This is still ongoing but has also continued to cause some hiccups in services recently. We had a failing on the new database hardware on Monday and that took HAWKEN down for a while as a more recent example. The further down the rabbit hole we go with this migration, the more issues that tend to surface. It impacts stability in live without question, sometimes taking the service down completely for small chunks of time. It goes without saying this isn't a desired result but the strike team is working on this every day. We have a room in our company wide IM service that's an ongoing conversation on the status of services, servers and automated alarms. I assure you it's a non-stop topic. We are however starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and we're really looking forward to that time!"

So the above is what I've been able to piece together.  Can anyone here make sense of the "Technical Debt" and how it relates to the Company going silent_

Could it simply be that they told us as much as they can already, that they asked us to be patient, but we keep begged for more updates/information, that they are past the point of being annoyed at us and are now just ignoring us.  

With that idea already mentioned, lets try to have a serious discussion on this topic.

Thanks!

TY i for one did not see these... It has me thinking i have been a bit harsh on the DEV's and makes me feel a bit bad....
Thanks again because this is a great source of why we need to just chill....

[SS396]

BurnsHot, on September 19 2014 - 08:36 PM, said:

I found more Info about the Technical Debt buried in the forums.  I added them to the OP.

Posted April 11, 2014, https://community.pl...post__p__495831,  [HWK]HUGHES said, "Rather than spend additional time on the feature itself, work to fix issues with the scaling of the platform was prioritized. You may recall us mentioning this in the past (the weeks prior to the Steam launch) where we needed to make sure the platform would be able to scale to the number of users desired and for those of you who have been with us for a while, the difference is indeed noticeable despite the roughness for a while that was a "necessary evil".

For a while after that, tool fixing and bug fixing was a priority for the platform team until work shifted to removing our dependency on AWS; transitioning to a completely new database. This is no small project but is a requirement for cost consideration, performance and for regions of the world where AWS is not an available solution. This work is in progress."


Posted April 22, 2014,/hawken/forums/mtr-era/topic/54728-development-update-4222014/#entry504660, [HWK]HUGHES said, "Our team has made great strides in our migration away from AWS dependencies and we now have a separate build of the game running in a completely isolated environment with a new database and that was no small task to accomplish. It's still a significant amount of work to migrate the live version of HAWKEN to a new database, but we plan on making that a smooth transition that won't negatively effect players. Hopefully in an upcoming Development Update we'll be able to announce the completion of this work and you will have never even known it took place."

AWS stands for Amazon Web Services.  It's Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) mentioned above.

Or "AWS dependencies" could mean DynamoDB.  

Take a look here:  https://fauna.org/community/customers

My take from that page is that the migration happened well before steam, and was completed along time ago.

[PepeKenobi]

According to what I have seen during my games, I have not had any problem besides a couple of time in which I have experienced som kind of User Interface odd lag. Other than that I have not experienced any lag nor problems playing in USAe nor EU servers.

IIRC those UI problems happened in EU servers in case that helps somehow.

Back on topic I think it is all about some more of balancing ((not much at the end)) beytter immersion and one or two more maps in the game. Other than that... oh my........ one game like this must go on........ !!!!really