2
Team HAWKEN would like to thank all of you for participating in our second Closed Beta Event (CBE2)!
An Educational Experience
Your diligent
Yo Dawg, We Heard You Like Muting…
We've all been victims of it, and most of us are guilty of it: leaving the mic on while playing. Everyone on your team gets to hear all the details of sensitive guy's lovely brunch with mom at the cafe, each and every smack, crunch, and slurp of hungry dude's dinner, or the furious torrent of violent keyboard clacks as fashion expert guy vehemently defends the artistic vision of elastic waistband jeans. As awesome as these moments are, sometimes we just want to play in peace and choose when we want to hear and engage with our fellow teammates.
To this end, we will be speeding up our implementation of the muting system so that you can choose when you want to hear a team member's diatribe on the social relevance of cat memes. By bringing up the scoreboard and clicking on a player's callsign, the “Mute” option will now silence their voice chat as well as text. Simply click it and enjoy your quiet time!
The “Insanity” Maps Were a Little Insane
During the second Closed Beta event, many of you saw the 32-player “Insanity” servers we had put up, and many more of you actually jumped in to try these servers out. We want to take a moment to clarify that these servers were experiments designed to test the strength of our game servers beyond their actual designed capacity. We are happy to report that they stand on their feet even when server population goes well beyond their intended capacity. Your testing helps us make sure that server performance is totally streamlined and that in a full 6v6 match, you can focus on good old-fashioned mayhem and destruction rather than lag spikes.
Showing Love to Older Gaming PCs
We here on Team HAWKEN know that everyone loves a pretty game that plays smoothly. I know I do! We also know that not everyone has a fire-breathing PC that was forged in the fires of Mordor and thrice-blessed by the High Priests of Ptah. We are continuing to optimize all aspects of HAWKEN so that it will run better on lower-end computers. In our third Closed Beta event, you will see even better performance across all levels of PCs and we will continue to optimize and tune HAWKEN until we feel it is fun and playable for the widest range of configurations possible.
Multiplayer games are all about playing together, whether it's with our friends, clan members, or that guy that keeps taking a full spread of your Flak Cannon and TOW Missile to the face (repeatedly). We want to make sure that as many players as possible can come and play HAWKEN and enjoy the experience. This is why we greatly appreciate your continued testing and feedback on how HAWKEN performs on all of your different machines. You guys are great!
Our Matchmaking System is Learning!
In this round of Closed Beta, you all provided even more testing for our Matchmaking system which has led to even more fixes that will make server placement faster and more accurate. Under the hood, Matchmaking is a complex and complicated system that requires serious attention to detail and many lines of code to get it right. That said, it should be a simple process of choosing game modes and clicking a button for our players. Making sure that a player is put in the right match is very important to us. We are all gamers too and want the experience to not only be seamless and fast, but fair in the way it chooses where you should be placed. In our third Closed Beta event, we are rolling out a number of changes that will make Matchmaking more consistent and fair in its placement of players, which brings us to our next major update.
The Server Browser Will Be on Vacation in CBE3
In order to make sure that Matchmaking is working as intended and accurate in funneling players to the right servers, we have removed the Server Browser for our third Closed Beta event. Before you write up an impulsive reply about this decision, let us explain the reason behind it. In any FPS game, the Server Browser is a community feature in that they allow you to see a list of servers that you can become familiar with and return to when you play in the future. This is because those Server Browsers list dedicated servers that are online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
These servers represent communities of players, and those communities are important and meaningful to the ecosystem of a game, especially an FPS. Because HAWKEN spins up servers and takes them down as needed and does not support dedicated servers yet, the Server Browser does not perform its intended function. Instead, it randomizes player balance in servers since joining through the Server Browser bypasses the Matchmaking system entirely. In order to make sure that Matchmaking has the best chance of getting you into the right game with players near your skill level, we need to make sure that it is the primary method used for entering a game. You will still be able to join a friend on a server they are playing on, or invite a friend to join your current server (new feature for CBE3, by the way). We aren't preventing you from playing with your friends! When we are ready to roll out dedicated servers as a feature, the Server Browser will make its triumphant return. We are excited to see the communities and clans that will be built around dedicated servers, but all in good time.
The XP and HC Rates Are Works-in-Progress
We are continuing to tweak and adjust the experience (XP) curve as well as the accrual rate of HAWKEN Credits (formerly HAWKEN Points). These are very important gameplay factors and we will continue to change and tune these rates until we feel a good equilibrium has been reached. Earning progress is fun and drives us to want to keep playing to get that next cool item, weapon, or level. We want to make sure that always remains true for you, the player. HAWKEN is a game, not a job, and it is very important to us that we maintain that feeling throughout the HAWKEN experience.
Two Down, One Last Closed Beta Event to Go!
All of Team HAWKEN is working at full speed as we prepare for the third and final Closed Beta event starting on November 20. We thank all of you for your help in testing HAWKEN during these events. Your efforts help us to further improve HAWKEN so we can deliver the best experience possible to all of you. We're warming up your mechs and getting them ready for battle! As before, Team HAWKEN will be popping in and out of servers to play with you so watch out for those [ADH] and [MTR] tags on our callsigns.
See you on the battlefield, pilots!
