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Everyone keeps talking about Ascension as if it was end of the world. What did the patch really do? I'm completely aware that Ascension was not a popular patch but can someone explain why? And did the casual, low skill masses have any input on how the patch went? Or are we only talking about the people who spoke up on the forums?
Let me see if I can sum this up...
Adhesive (ADH) put into place something called the Hawken Advanced Battalion (HAB) when they were 'testing' the Ascension patch. There were two rounds of HAB.
HAB 1 (these were the people that played Hawken the most) told ADH in no uncertain terms that it was bad and should not be used.
HAB 2, (these were the people that played Hawken not as much as the first round, but more than most) from what I am told, was similar in response.
ADH pushed it out anyway.
Later it came to light that Meteor (MTR), the publisher, basically 'forced' ADH to roll out the patch in an attempt to grab the player base of 'more established franchises', such as Call Of Duty, as the player base and income from said player base was not reaching the levels MTR had claimed it would.
There has been scattered posts across reddit and other places from people that claim that MTR 'forced' ADH to put in various things for monizitation purposes, things that ADH did not originally want to do. I have talked to former MTR employees as well, face to face, and the common theme is that MTR had a bad problem with feature creep, never really letting ADH finish things in the game, which is part of the reason why Reloaded is taking so long to get everything up to speed, there is a lot of bad code decisions and shortcuts in place due to MTR and their 'meddling'.
Theory
The Steam patch was ADH trying to bring Hawken 'back to it's roots', doing so with minimal resources to 'fix' the mess that was Ascension.
This is why most longer term players vilify the Ascension patch. It's when Hawken 'lost it's soul'
Edited by bacon_avenger, 09 December 2015 - 01:06 AM.