Hi there hunters,

Here comes our weekly status update with a bunch of small and a bit bigger news.

The Mule Deer scoring glitch that was introduced together with the release of non-typical antlers has now been fixed and will be deployed in our next game patch (probably next week).

Right now we are in the process of testing non-typical antlers for another species, many of you have already figured out what it will be. If you haven’t yet, check the store description for any weapon for its permitted species 😉 If the testing goes well and no bugs jump in we’ll be able to release them soonish.

The newly introduced .22 “Plinkington” Semi-Automatic Rifle has been quite a hit. After its release a lot of people commented on the spook radius which was unrealistically low for this kind of rifle. This was an oversight on our part which we missed during the testing, our apologies! The community divided into two camps, one wanted us to leave it as it is while the other suggested some tweaking to make it more realistic. We’ve decided to go for a compromise and stay true to the theHunter’s realism, so the spook radius of “Plinkington” will be increased but it won’t be as high as for large calibre rifles in theHunter. The change will go live in the next game patch as well.

Yesterday we released a much missed and long overdue addition to our spray scent portfolio – the “Fatal Desire” for Red Deer. Like other scents, it is available for both em$ and gm$ and will be included into our Mega Mix Scent pack in the near future.

Now to the last tidbit for today, which is a bit sad but still heart-warming. With a heavy heart our 3D artist Oskar has said goodbye to EW and theHunter to move on to his new adventure, which is closer to his hometown than Stockholm. Some of you may know Oskar by occasional posts in the forum but all of you know the fine dashes of his art in theHunter – Reindeer and Ibex models, the beautiful K98k Bolt-Action Rifle, the trophies for Valentine’s event 2014, an odd tree in Bushrangers’ Run and Val-des-Bois and much. much more. Oskar has left you the last piece of his craft which will reveal itself a bit further down the line.

Here’s Oskar’s goodbye picture for the theHunter community whom he really appreciated:

We of course are very sad to see Oskar leave and wish him all the best in his adventures. On the bright side, we have a bunch of talented artists here in house who are continuing to work their magic to make sure that theHunter continues as an absolutely stunning game.

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Welcome to another weekly status update from theHunter headquarters.

Please welcome a new member of the non-typical family

We’ve been teasing you with non-typical antlers for yet another theHunter species for a while now, and the word is already out there as to who is coming next. So, here you go – we’ve just released non-typical Mule Deer into the Logger’s Point hunting reserve. They will be as rare as their “special” Whitetail brothers, but still not as rare as in real life, since we want to give every player a chance to bag one.

Some of you were a bit critical regarding non-typical Whitetails, which we might as well address here while we’re on the subject. Some people commented that non-typicals in the game look “farmed” or, as some of you call them, “freaks”, and also pointed out that there is far less likelihood of meeting one in real life than there is in the EHR. Peter already touched on this in his release notes for non-typicals: “The antler system is one of the most complicated features in theHunter. In order to improve the production value (how much time and money something costs to implement) we’ve made an effort to slightly simplify the system that we use for handling non-typical antlers and have come up with a solution that made all this possible.“ So, to reiterate, we had to make a simpler type of antler for the non-typical variation, to make non-typicals a reality in theHunter. If we were to make a completely randomized (and TruRacs-based) system for them, it would have taken us a year or so to implement and most likely, it would never have become a reality for that particular reason. This is pretty extensive work for a feature that few players will ever see. So, the non-typical racks are a compromise but we think it’s better this than nothing.

We’ve also consulted Larry Weishuhn, a.k.a. “Mr. Whitetail”, who is a friend of our support manager David Lucas (NAOutdoors), regarding the non-typicals for Whitetails and he approved them, which is a good sign 😉

Now coming back to our Mule Deer, today we’re also releasing a special pack of missions, two focused on typical and one for non-typical Mulies. Since the latter is more difficult to come across, you’ll get a longer time to complete the set. And yes, those missions will be rewarded with special trophies, typical and non-typical – classy!

Help us pick the best reserve set-up

Before you head off to Logger’s Point in search of a non-typical Mule Deer, please swing by the forum and cast your vote in our best reserve set-up voting to make sure that the best of the best win.

On the photo – the notorious “hopping bear set-up” (outside of competition).

Looking for more translators

We’re once again throwing a call out there for volunteer translators to come aboard our 28-people strong localization team. Right now we are specifically seeking people with native levels of Danish, Spanish, Russian, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, but if you would like to help us bring theHunter in any other language – get in touch! Our translators receive a specially designed T-Shirt (the one our Finnish translator Lapehunter and Polish translator Makaan are rocking in their trophy shots below) along with other perks.

And the last but not least, our backend guy Emil has made some speed improvements for the skills and achievement pages, so they should load faster now, and the skills are now arranged in alphabetical order (which you may have probably noticed).

See you in the woods of the EHR!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hey hunters,

Welcome to our weekly status update, this time unusually real life focused.

On the matter of cheaters

Starting with a murky piece of news, we’ve recently been receiving quite a lot of reports about players who have been cheating by using hacks and other non-permitted practices. Each case was investigated individually and thoroughly and the player accounts that were found guilty have since been suspended. All banned players will be removed from leaderboards, so if you notice any change there, you’ll know why. It’s quite sad when people who have invested considerable amounts of time and money into the game, ruin it for themselves just to bag more animals or to win a competition. As you know, we have a zero-tolerance policy towards cheaters and think it’s unfair to players who have been playing honestly to leave culprits unpunished. If you notice someone whose hunt info looks suspicious (e.g. a lot of animals harvested in an extremely short time frame) please do not accuse people publicly in the forum or on social media channels, but instead contact our support manager David at support.thehunter.com and each case will be investigated. Thank you for your help on this!

German community meet-up

Now moving onto a cool real life event. Since the beginning of theHunter, our German-speaking community has been very active and passionate, and last weekend they took it a step farther by organizing the very first real life gathering. Twenty-two out of 79 members of the theHunter-Community “Die Jagdfreunde” (hunting friends) came from all over Germany, Switzerland and Austria to the small town of Rosenthal near Kassel, Germany, to meet each other IRL for the first time. One of the meet-up participants Pratze says: “It was just amazing to see all the faces of people we usually only know by their voice on TeamSpeak. We had lots of fun together, there was a lot of talking, laughing, barbecuing, drinking and, of course, anecdotes about theHunter.”

It’s been a big success, and Jagdfreunde are planning to have at least one gathering per year from now on. If you are a German player who wants to join this great community – get in touch with the them!

Here you see the picture of this fine crowd, the combined HS of all participants was 25383 and average 1208.7 – theHunter force is strong with German hunters in Rosenthal 😉

I can add that we were thrilled to hear that theHunter brought them together and we made a small contribution to the event by sending them over some T-Shirts and em$ codes as a hi from EW!

EW gone shooting

Now onto another real life gathering, this time here, In Stockholm. Yesterday our significantly grown team (29 people right now, whoa!) went to shoot some guns. Although we were handling lethal weapons, surprisingly, everyone came back in one piece. The team had tons of fun (not as much as shooting guns in theHunter though, obviously).  As our producer Hannes nostalgically said afterwards, shooting the .454 Casull was the closest to inner peace he have ever been.

We know that there are lot of fans of guns in our community, so we took some pictures for you (click to enlarge):

Hannes is reaching his peace…

… and the result of his efforts

.44 Magnum

.38 Special

Instructor is showing the 9mm special rifle, the only one in Sweden

José on the firing line

We’re in the Movember Platinum Club!

In case you’ve already forgotten our Movember campaign, back in November we made a bunch of moustaches and donated 2$ for every sold piece to Movember foundation. Together with theHunter community we raised $3248 which not only made us top 5 contributors in Sweden but also, as we found out today, got us the entrance ticket to the Movember Platinum club. As a reward we’ll be receiving a coveted official Movember Soup Guard which is a special moustache spoon to protect a man’s moustache while eating soup.

This achievement belongs to you, our community, thank you once again! Unfortunately, we can not share the Soup Guard with everyone who helped us raise funds, but once it arrives at the office we’ll hang it up on theHunter trophy wall, and if you are by any chance in Stockholm, come by our office and we promise to borrow it to you for some classy soup eating 😉

Finally, hopefully you haven’t missed our latest competition for the best reserve set-ups? You have a bit less than a day to take part in it to win some nice prizes and, which is even more important, to write your name into our first ever community e-book.

That’s if for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Welcome to this week’s short status update.

Non-Typical Rabbit

Yesterday we announced the release of a Non-Typical rabbit. This was, of course, our traditional April Fool’s joke (if you are new to the game – make sure to check the ones from previous years, the ultimate Goose Hat and the Pit of Doom, those were pretty hilarious too). If you thought that the unicorn/bunny with feral goat inspired ears was released for real and might actually went to search for one – our apologies for this innocent joke, but hopefully it brightened up your day just a tiny bit. For those who got worried that theHunter was moving into a totally non-realistic direction, we can put your worries to sleep – there’s a much higher chance that we’ll implement non-typical variations of Mule and Blacktail Deer before that of a Rabbit 😉

Happy Easter celebrations!

The community seems to have loved the Easter event with the missions from the eloquent rhymer Easter Bunny. If you haven’t had a chance to get on with them – you’ll have another 4 days to get those pretty trophies.

The EW team is wishing you a happy Easter, if you celebrate, and nice Easter holidays to everyone. Today the team is leaving for a short break, we’ll be back on Tuesday 7th. Please note that due to the Easter vacations there will be no newsletter this week, but there is a lot of good stuff scheduled for the months to come, stay tuned fore more!

Happy hunting!

Discussion