War Wednesday

War Wednesday (WW, for short) is a community event created by Hawken player ticklemyiguana that first took place in June 2014. It places emphasis on player skill, team communication, and good balance to present participants with the best gaming environment possible.

It takes place every Wednesday starting at 21:00 EST (9PM EST) and lasts approximately 2 hours. The gamemodes and maps played on these servers are left to the decision of the players that are present.

The event uses TeamSpeak channels for each team to ensure all teams have good and fast communication between each others to maximize teamwork.

The main WW forum thread can be found here (older version), and after the departure of ticklemyiguana, a notice on its continuation here (newer version).

History
The prototype event that would inspire the creation of War Wednesdays took place in the Summer of 2014. Three players from the clan TAW, ticklemyiguana, Merl61, and MenialLabor, all in the 2100-2200 MMR range at the time, were having trouble finding quality games to play in because of the scarcity of high MMR pilots.

They decided to occupy an empty server on a Wednesday and invited all skilled players for an evening of high level games. The event was a success, and produced some of the best games the participants had had up to that point.

They then sought permission with the admins of their clan, TAW, to use its teamspeak every Wednesday for this purpose. This took a lot of work as it was password protected and required the handing out of guest passwords to non-regulars.

After an initial forum post, around 50 people gathered for the first real iteration of WW. During the early days ticklemyiguana had to personally message all the would-be participants for their information and MMR so they could be sorted out into appropriate categories.

After the disbanding of the (HFC) clan, ticklemyiguana was given access to the clan's in game server, which eventually became the Hawken Teamspeak server.

Several weeks later, he was given access to the TPG, Omni, and VRs Hawken servers. The ability to run games across four servers at once was a big help to WW's management and growth.

Things continued at this rate for some time until The Silence, which led to the death of the old Hawken forums and a diminishing number of players. At this point ticklemyiguana, viewing the game as abandoned, took a break while Amidatelion and Merl61 stepped up to manage it.

When Reloaded Games started work on Hawken and brought the forums back online, they changed the name of the HFC server to the Hawken Teamspeak server and ticklemyiguana organised The Project Phoenix Initiation Celebration alongside Dr_Freeze001 who hosted the event's European counterpart. This led to War Wednesday's full revival, following The Silence.

As of July 2015, ticklemyiguana is on an indefinite hiatus from Hawken. The event is currently managed by Amidatelion.

Previous And Current War Wednesday Organisation
Up until The Silence, people would message ticklemyiguana their MMRs at 9PM EST and he would balance all teams by hand across the servers. While the calculations took place, he'd encourage players to warm up in Deathmatch or 24 player Missile Assault rounds. Each server had its own teamspeak channels for both teams.

When this process become too unwieldy due to an influx of new participants, all participants would be directed to a server based on their MMR range and autobalance would take care of the rest. This proved to be an easy and quick solution that didn't compromise the quality of the games.

ticklemyiguana, assisted by a group of Hawken teamspeak admins, would then hop from server to server, setting the gamemode and map to whatever the players wanted at the time.

Now, players must sign-up for the event in the days beforehand by filling an online sign-up sheet that includes their callsign, MMR, and internet speed.

Servers are also set aside for stragglers or people who showed up late, and teams sometimes have to be rebalanced based on people leaving or joining.

Rules
Low and mid tier MMR games only abide by the rules of Hawken, high tier MMR games (by consensus) tend to stick to TPG rules. Meaning no scanners, extractors, or repair kits, only 3 mechs of the same class per team and only 1 mech of each type allowed per team.