I heard about Hawken from someone a couple of days ago. I wasn't aware of MWO. Last title I actually played (excluding the MechAssaults for XBOX) was the Multiplayer Battletech: Solaris beta waaaaaayyy back on AOL, and is pretty much the origin of my console gamertags today. I had also played MW2/3 and any expansions my system could actually handle sans upgrading, and I LOVED Mech Commander in spite of being essentially the "Halo Wars" of the series. Could never play any of the MWs online though. I could never configure settings for Battlenet properly.
The gameplay graphics of MPBT were utter shit, but 100% tolerable given that you could potentially play 8 players a drop lag-free over 28.8 modem connections... provided it wasn't a peak hour. I still remember that Catapults and Marauders had an exploitable 1-TIC kill point right behind the cockpit, if you could pilot and aim skillfully enough to not actually SHOOT the cockpit. Headshots were possible, but there was an unwritten code of honor about not doing so, since, if it were severely damaged but not destroyed, you were blinded to any in-game action or text, and since you were still active, you wouldn't return to the lobby... malicious headshots done on purpose by someone made aware of this fact were met with merciless jumping/teamkilling of the offending person until they left the game. Hard to believe how far online gaming has come in almost 15 years. Hard to believe how much I REMEMBER about that 15 years later. Talking about this was how Hawken came up.
I should check both of these out...