Howdy hunters,

Time for our weekly status update. This week we’re presenting some results from the player survey, introducing a new weapon and a better version of Skippy (all as promised).

New stuff is here

We’ve just released a new rifle, the highly esteemed and requested by many a hunter .303 Bolt-Action rifle. It’s got that cool and robust looks and with its range of permitted animals it has all the chances to become your new favourite rifle. Check it out in the store.

Another nice thing packed in today’s patch is the improved kangaroo model. Sandra has delved deep into your feedback and did some subtle magic.

Alongside the “normal” kangaroo, there is a now a rare variation skipping over Bushrangers Run – go and find yourself one and don’t forget to take a nice trophy shot, the first rare kangaroo is highly to become the rare of the week.

Survey results

We closed our player survey on Monday. This year we’ve collected a record amount of replies – almost 9000, thank you everyone, the feedback and information you shared are extremely valuable! We spent the last two days digging into the data, some numbers were expected and some surprising.

Today we’d like to share some results with you. Although we can’t make all data public, we can assure you that every single response will be evaluated and all serious answers will be taken into consideration when we decide on our future roadmap of content and features.

Now, let’s dig into some data.

• The majority of all people (approximately 75%) who completed the survey play the game a couple of times per week or more often.

• You mostly play to enjoy the game experience (speaking about which, make sure to check this awesome video by our player HiFisch – theHunter game experience at its best). The second most popular answer was improving theHunter score and skills and the third is to have fun with friends.

• 95.78% of our players would recommend theHunter to a friend – thank you, this is an amazing number every game out there would be happy to get. As we would like to make it 100%, we’ve been checking a random selection of players who said they would not recommended the game, and found that they are some of the most hardcore and frequent players of the game, so despite the disappointing news that they would not recommend theHunter, we take comfort from the fact they clearly can’t get enough themselves.

• More pleasant numbers – 93.13% players who have made a purchase in the game would consider buying something again and about 89% think that the value for the money was either good or all right.

• Almost 89% of all respondents are satisfied, very satisfied or extremely satisfied with our communication; we’ll do our best to make this number even higher by implementing some of the ideas you suggested in the survey.

• 76.78% of players experience bugs in-game occasionally, seldom or never, whereas about 23.22% often or almost every session.

• Our efficiency at dealing with bugs was evaluated with 6.81 as the weighted average, on a scale from 1 to 10.

• The share of hunters vs. non-hunters in real life stays consistent with about 55% belonging to the first group.

• Players who are hunters in real life have evaluated the level of realism of theHunter as high as 6.84 on average on a scale from 1 to 10:

• And finally, here is the word cloud with the most popular words used in open responses to the question what three best things in theHunter are (the bigger the font of the word or phrase is, the more often it has been mentioned):

We’ve randomly chosen five players who have filled in the survey and added them 1000 em$ each: chexmexpandas3x, Geroldine, jakuba34, Grizmund and HobinRood –  spend them well!

That’s it from us for today, see you next week and happy hunting!

Discussion

PS The Easter Bunny has arrived at the Evergreen Hunting Reserves, and it is really excited. Check back on Monday for more news from it 😉

Hi there hunters,

Welcome to our weekly status update. Here is what’s been going on in theHunter.

Player survey

Last week we launched our player survey and since then we’ve been monitoring data from our players from all around the world – pretty exciting! This has been the most popular of our surveys, with about 5,000 hunters having submitted their replies so far. It will be open until the end of Monday, March 23rd, so if you haven’t already completed it yet, here’s your chance to be heard and influence  the future development of the game.

Complete the survey

St. Patrick’s Day Event results

Here is the final leaderboard of the event that ended on Tuesday, with players who collected the most amount of shamrock$ and finished top 10, congratulations guys!

1. trancebabe – 45351
2. zerohero555 – 45133
3. tkaya – 40821
4. SiiinysTer – 39193
5. TROPICIEL3 – 29831
6. corredorcorredor – 29829
7. IJRI – 28112
8. Paf_Paf – 27381
9. Wulf 67 – 26594
10. josepaco – 24119

We’ve also decided to give a special (surprise!) rainbow trophy to the hunters who have collected the highest number of pots of gold during the event but didn’t end up in top 10. Here are the most thorough gold collectors:

Agent441 – 434 pots of gold
Mrkurd – 298 pots of gold
jamesclavell – 222 pots of gold

CSS balancing

We received a fair amount of community critique during the St. Patrick’s Day event about CSS which is not accurately balanced. This results in waterfowl and rabbits disproportionately high CSS values. We hear you, appreciate this feedback and are looking to make adjustment to CSS system, so we can offer a properly balanced score system which will reflects the difficulty of harvesting quality animals within each category and rewards accordingly.

To make this happen, we’d like to ask you, our community, to help us collect data for us to analyze the existing holes in the CSS system and resolve them accordingly.

If you want to help us with that, here is what you should do:

1. Create a multiplayer game, but play by yourself (so that you can keep a track of your CSS values more easily).
2. (Important!) Only focus on hunting one animal.
3. Take notes of the hunt duration, amount of kills and the total CSS that you’ve gained.
4. Open the CSS Feedback form, choose the animal you’ve been hunting in the drop down menu and enter your data. Easy!

We’d really appreciate your input on this!

Say Hi to Paul

Meet another new team member – his name is Paul and he has recently joined our backend gang.

Hey all!

My name is Paul Kruitz, I have joined Expansive Worlds as a Systems Engineer. Which means I work on backend technology improvements for theHunter.

I hail from the Netherlands from a small town called Sittard. I went to the UK to get my uni degree to finally start my lifelong dream and make games. So far I have worked on CMR: DiRT2, DiRT3, DiRT Showdown, GRID 2 and Mad Max.

Outside of work I love to play games and travel to the far reaches of the planet and see how people live of there and experience new things

Kangaroo revamp

On a final note, a quick update regarding the red kangaroo model: we’ve collected some great feedback from our community members and our artists are now working hard to improve the model, based on your suggestions. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to see a better version of Skippy on Bushrangers Run!

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

It’s that time of the week again and here’s our weekly status update with a summary of what we’ve been up to in this corner of the world.

Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!

Tomorrow we’re kicking off a special event dedicated to St. Patrick’s Day which is celebrated on March 17th. Although this day has its roots in Ireland, it crossed the borders long time ago and has become truly international. This year, for the first time, we’ve decided to pay a tribute to the day of shamrock, so there will be hunting, nice trophies and, who knows, maybe even some gold at the end of rainbow if you’re lucky. You will hear more on this tomorrow, but whether Irish or not Irish – come and have some fun hunting!

Player Survey – Have your say!

It’s been exactly one year since our last big survey, in this period of time our community has grown like mushrooms under the rain and we want to learn more about you and hear what you have to say to us. Today we’re launching a new survey, the results of which will guide us in our work on developing the game. As always, please try not to make assumptions that certain features, reserves or animals will be introduced just because they were somehow mentioned.

The survey will be open for 10 days, until March 23rd midnight CET. It shouldn’t take you longer than 15 minutes to answer all of the questions, but you can only participate once. We will appreciate your honest and detailed replies. If you answer to all the questions and fill in your theHunter name at the end, you’ll be automatically enrolled into our em$ draw, where we will randomly choose three players and gift them 1000 em$. You can also choose to submit your answers anonymously. Please note that even if you let us know your name, the information you provide will not be stored with your account details, shared, sold, distributed or used in any other way that may harm you.

Complete the survey

Collectibles on Bushrangers Run

Some of you have already stumbled upon them – there are now three different types of Australian aboriginal knives from different time periods to be found and picked up in Bushrangers Run. They are not to be used for hunting – alas! – but finding one of them will for sure make your Australian hunting experience even more immersive (the Outback Outfit will help too).

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hi hunters,

A very short update from us regarding the upcoming reserve. We’ve considered all name ideas you suggested and after some internal debate we decided to call it Bushrangers Run. This was one of the anonymous suggestions we received by PM and the team really liked it. A Bushranger is an Australian outlaw/bandit, often held in high esteem and considered iconic to Australia, and a run is the path drovers take their cattle when migrating the herd. We thought it would be appropriate for the EHR.

To give you a sneak peek at Bushrangers Run, we are organizing a pre-release livestream. As previously with Val-des-Bois, the streamed hunts will take place on our beta server, it will still be WIP. The stream will be offered in English and German and will be organized completely by our community members Pratze, HooCairs, Killertut and our game design intern Pär.

Here is a cool announcement video by Pratze. You can find the dates and times of the livestreams below.

Times and dates of the pre-release livestreams:

English: Tuesday, 24th at 20:00 CET
Streamed by Pratze, joined by HooCairs and Pär
You can watch it on this channel

German: Tuesday, 24th at 22:00 CET
Streamed by Pratze, joined by HooCairs and Killertut
You can watch it on this channel

Hope you’ll be able to make it!

Discussion