A little late to the game, and not reading through other's posts, I'll just post my feels.
**Note: WALL OF TEXT. Rather then being 100% opinion, I... kinda wrote a timeline from my perspective, and it got quite large... so... Enjoy? [edit: it took me over an hour to type this out XD]
Closed beta was a ton of fun. There's two things that have to knock the opinion of closed beta out though. #1, it was new, and worked quite well, so it's hard to give honest opinion of the game. It's like asking someone how they felt the first day they got a new zelda or mario game. You aren't likely to get an accurate answer from it, especially when it's been 2-3 years after the fact. #2, there was a very small player base that was actually in game, so you pretty much knew everyone at the time, so it was more like always playing with friends then just a normal match like today.
Past that, I'll try to convey my opinion of the changes through til now.
Pre-release (closed beta/alpha, up until launch)
Quite fun, though skewed through the points above, but there were still problems. Sahara (now bazaar) was the worst if you were on one side, and the best if you were on the other. There was only one way into the side point in siege, and the base from above had a literal cliff edge to get into the aa. Siege was also quite different. Instead of the current ticket system, it was 3 points per side, and the ship rather then shooting the base, just... plowed into it and exploded XD. Kind of a waste of resources. Honestly though, I like this siege much more then the current. There was a sense of urgency about stopping the ship, rather then "Oh no.... I loose a few points." The ship launching was an immediate call to attention to both sides, rather then the now lax "I'll get there when I feel like it".
There were other quirks to be fix, like if you wanted to use an alternate gun as your primary, then you had to switch it ever time you started a match. Some things were massively op (hellfires did literal path finding, and would magically fly around walls to hit you... like even if they aimed at the wall and you went behind it before they fired, but they still had a lock on, it would completely avoid the wall. Fun times)
Public Release (12/12/2012, from launch until tech)
This period was an odd time. Guilds were just getting set up, the dev team was trying new things, etc. Hawken was quite stable, and to my memory, there weren't a ton of balancing issues. Sharp shooters were a pain, but I think that's more people just weren't use to them... and.... they did a ton of damage per shot if I recall right (like 300+ points). This is around the time that bubbling people started happening regularly and every week there was a different mech marked as the op mech. (I think there was even a time where the CRT was claimed to be op) There was a lot more visual and audio appeal at this time too. Explosions were louder and had an amazing thud to it, you could hear every little thing going on and what direction it came from. This was even true for bullets hitting the side of your mech (which now is just basically a tap sound that's hardly audible). The tow spiraled about in a larger way that made it feel like you could hit around corners (Though, Hughes or Vana... don't remember which let out the secret that tows even though they visually went all over, their hit boxes actually only ever traveled in a straight line, so it was impossible to actually shoot around corners... I'm not sure to the validity of this, cause I'm fairly certain I hit people around corners, but I could be wrong).
The HE grenade actually did more damage then a normal grenade, though most people didn't know that you could hold the fire he grenade button to actually shoot it further then a few feet. Near the end of this period, (again, if I recall right) a new item was added. The detonator was similar to an he grenade in damage, but shot in a straight line instead of being a grenade. Comparison is very similar to tow vs grenade. Anyway, when the detonator came out, people found out about the alpha strike tactic (still fairly valid today). This is where you get a high burst damage mech (say a scout), you rush in, and fire your primary (flak), secondary (tow) and item (detonator/he grenade) and pretty much kill nearly any mech out there in one shot. This tactic isn't used very much anymore, cause people have gotten adequate enough to dodge when people get that close. Also, because of the alpha strikes, later down the line (don't know when) damage in general was lowered to account for the alpha strike.
Lastly, during this time period, the internals of today was a point system. Similar to how an rpg game has. You could put points into armor to raise your health, boosters to increase your boost speed, fuel tanks to add more fuel, etc. I don't know if the stats are still as easy to change but it'd be nice if we get to the point of renting our hosting our own server, it'd be nice to change the stats of mechs in a similar fashion or a config file or something.
Tech Time
Ask anyone that knows me in hawken, and they can tell you I've been against the tech since before it was released. (I've been against it since it was just a murmur of an idea in alpha) When the tech was added, everything changed in the game for me at least, and a lot of other people. While I can appreciate support mechs and such, the tech was a bad move IMO. I do agree now that it could be viable, but it needs change even today, but I also still feel that games were much more fun before the tech was added. There was less of the death ball situation, and to keep a position, you had to actually be good. Before the tech appeared, it was easily possible for a good player to take on 2-3 other good players at the same time. It's still possible today to get into those types of fights and come up on top, but there is literally no way to do this if there is a tech in that group of 2-3 mechs.
You can't take points in MA, and attacking the AA is really hard, even for a good team fighting only a decent team, unless said good team also had a tech. In my opinion, if there is a mech added that requires both teams to have that mech to be on equal footing, it's a bad mech to add to the game. The tech also replaces the need for repairing. This added a lot of tactics to the game when you had to repair. Just repairing willy nilly wasn't smart. You had to find cover. This isn't true with the tech being there.
Anyway, I can go on and on about the tech, but I'll stop myself (as much as I can) for now. When the tech was added, they also did a slew of changes to pretty much everything. They tweaked tows and grenades to have a much smaller splash radius (I think the tow was lowered by like 40%, possibly more), some items were lowered in damage (detonator and he grenade), and some mechs had speed changes (pretty sure, scouts actually had a buff... they were insane... and Xacius was extremely happy... literally giddy when streaming with the scout).
This was also the time period where match making was implemented (again, if I recall right). Before this, it was random. You didn't have a way to "find" a server, you just joined one that had an open slot. Now you could find a match, but it was not very well implemented and was near random still. This just had to do with how they were calculating mmr (which btw, was publicly visible without the use of scrimbot. It was just a number above your profile) and was slowly, over time fixed to where it worked decently like it does today.
Though I didn't like the tech, and personally too much had been changing too quickly, it still felt like hawken. If memory serves, this was also the time that voice chat was going down hill.
Ascension (the dreaded day)
I have to say that I was in the first round of beta (HAB is the official term. Don't remember what it stood for). There were two rounds. The first filled mostly with "elite" players (a lot of BSB members, and members that became BSB), and the second with lower ranked players, but still players that played a lot. The first day in hab... pretty much everyone hated it... or at least a fair amount of it. We were under NDA, (I think technically we still are, but screw it. I don't think I'll be pressed about it at this point, just like closed alpha stuff), so we couldn't talk about it on the forums, so there wasn't a great way to discuss stuff. But it was a massive change. Armor dropped 200-300 points for all mechs, speeds were reduced, damage was lowered, graphics/audio quality was lowered, internals became internals, items changed from a mk3 turret just having a ton of health to you get 3 turrets, etc. This meant TTK (Time to kill) was lowered considerably. The lowered attack damage wasn't offset as much as the lowered armor. I think in hab, the scout had less then 300 health. That mean that a sharpshooter with it's ability to do more damage could one shot the scout.
It seemed no one like it. As one of the lead members of BSB (and the guy doing the web stuffs), this is where hawken started to die. And when I say started to, I mean it crashed. We went from around 400ish active members to 120ish in around 3 months after the release of ascension, at least on our site (active members means members that at least logged in once every two weeks, bsb was the largest guild for a long time). By time we hit the new year (around 6 months after ascension) BSB was pretty much ded. There were still the core members hanging around, but nothing was happening really. I say all this without knowing how other guilds faired or how the userbase daily players changed, but for BSB, in less then a year, it was pretty much a full loss of users.
This was definitely the worst period for me in hawken. Both sides of HAB (elites and non-elites) said it was a bad change, overwhelmingly. They still pushed it out thinking we were over reacting. This is also the period where devs stopped listening, and some of our favorite devs disappeared.
Steam Launch
This was a sudden thing that happened. To my knowledge, only a couple people got to try the changes before steam launch, and it was only like a month from being announced to being launched completely. The changes hadn't been tested by even a decent size group, and from what I heard, any feedback was pretty much shunned from the people that actually did get to test it. It was a no going back situation. To me, I feel this is right before the bankrupt point (around a year ago at this point). I felt that something had gone wrong in the company cause as soon as the steam launch, there was pretty much 0 communication. A few devs would talk, like Vana or Defter, but they wouldn't ever want to talk about the game (or couldn't). Defter did talk with me and a few other people about the private server stuff, but beyond that, there was extremely little talk.
Private servers did come out in a beta like fashion. Only a few people had access to them (elite players or promenent players like Saturnine, Houruck (I think), and Xacius), but they did work. But after hearing about those servers working, nothing. Only a month or two after steam release, hawken was what most would call ded. Still a trickle of players, but no new content, the forums were in chaos, bugs didn't get fixed or even read, then the forums went down, came back up, then went down again for the final time. I was sad to leave, but in my mind, Hawken (the game I had sunk around 400 hours of my life into over 2 years) was utterly and completely ded. To me, the steam launch was the last ditch effort to try and get hawken back on it's feet, but too much had been done to break it.
Rising from the Ashes
There were a few rumbles at the beginning of this year. There was news that servers were going on and offline. There was a dev update according to steam, and then silence again for a few months. This is probably when CapnJosh was just starting to get things sorted out. I was hopeful something was happening, but I wasn't getting my hopes up. Then there was the facebook post, and all the stuff now happening. CapnJosh sounds like the devs did way back in closed beta. Fresh, new, excited, wanting to explore this vast new world that he can literally change with his own fingers, yet, seems like he doesn't want to destroy all that's there, and would rather build upon it then start from scratch.
I've been able to talk with him some on team speak a few times now, and he seems like he's on the right track. And better then that, he's actually listening to the people that have stuck around, and held out. The people that love the game so much they just couldn't leave. It's only been a shot time, but it seems like things are going in a good way. We'll have to wait and see, but I'm yet again hopeful.
Edited by CaliberMengsk, 28 March 2015 - 08:58 AM.