Hello all good hunters,

Here are some bits and pieces from the EW team, heavily undermined by summer holidays:

• José received over 60 questions to his AMA, it took him a while to reply to all of them, but the answers are finally here: he has shared some animation tips and tricks, the portfolio video he used to apply for a job at EW and even a chat up line in Swedish 😉 In short – worth a read!

 

• The programmers have been busy fixing bugs (for more details check the game update from yesterday) and it looks like they finally (not to speak too soon) managed to resolve the persistent ”spinning camera” issue which was driving the community crazy and which we were not able to reproduce for more than a month. The breakthrough became possible thanks to your input, and in particular thanks to the discussion in this thread. Special kudos go to the community member Raptor02 who kindly provided his account for testing purposes and owing to this Andrés and Danny managed to get a lead on this bug.We know that there are still some bugs in the game and we continue working on locating and squashing them.

 

• We’d also like to thank our brilliant team of translators, we hope you know how much we appreciate what you’re doing for theHunter! Due to your hard work, the game is now fully localized into German, Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish and Norwegian and almost completely into Italian, Portuguese and French, with 22 more languages coming. Today our special gratitude is sent to MonacoSteve (German team), XandyBecas (Brazilian Portuguese), Sannas and Lapehunter (Finnish), Arnstein86 and Skogseide (Norwegian), Cireme and mmmick60 (French), lisarob (Italian) and JackRbbt (Romanian) for their consistent and active input, you’ve been doing a huge favour to your fellow countrymen hunters.
  If you want to join our translation team, we are always on the lookout for people who are native speakers of different languages and can keep secrets (all our translators work under an NDA, since they get access to information about yet unreleased stuff). Right now we especially need the help of people who speak Dutch, Danish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Hungarian, Czech and Slovak on a native level, but we’d love adding more flags to theHunter website, so even if your language is not supported yet, you are welcome to apply by sending Alena a message.

 

• Our Football Jamboree is moving into an exciting phase with quarter finals starting tomorrow and only 8 teams (and caps) left. If you haven’t made up your mind yet – it’s about the time to grab a cap or two to secure your ”golden” shotgun.

 

• Speaking about awesome shotguns, starting from today the much anticipated ‘12 GA Blaser F3 Game O/U Shotgun – Custom Grade V‘ is finally available in the store. Enjoy!

 
Good hunting all!

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Hello Hunters,

This update will be short again, since a part of the team is already enjoying their holidays and the office is unusually quiet. Herman has been updating our Help page with new guides, tutorials and local community sites, make sure to have a look. The rest of team continues their work on the new species, which has already started to resemble a real animal. It has been speculated in the community about the new-arrival-to-be and some people were spot on about who it is and what reserve it is going to live in here.

Steam reviews

A lot of you have raised concerns about the reviews that theHunter has received in a couple of weeks after we launched on Steam. The ratio of negative vs. positive ones is not that great indeed, however, it doesn’t reflect in our stats and a growing number of new and active players. We’ve of course been monitoring and evaluating all the reviews and it looks like people are mostly negative about the business model and the Free To Play label, whereas only a small percentage find the game itself bad or boring. Although it’s reassuring, we appreciate and take into consideration all the feedback we receive.

It is often the case, that people who like the game leave reviews less actively, whereas people who don’t like it are quicker to raise their voice. If you do like theHunter (and we assume you do, otherwise why would you be reading this ;)), we are asking you to support us by leaving a review, because right now it looks like the Steam reviews create a rather distorted picture of community’s feelings, when compared to the data we’ve received from the surveys and player stats.

Ask Me Anything with José

This week we’re hosting another Ask Me Anything session, this time with our lead animator José Diaz. Animal and weapon animations are brought up frequently, so here is your chance to ask something you’ve been wondering about.

Jose’s AMA thread will be unlocked for 48 hours, starting at 9:30 CEST on June 27th. All the questions will be moderated and supervised by the moderation team, the standard AMA rules apply.

UPDATE: Jose’s AMA thread is now unlocked. You’re welcome with your questions.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello Hunters,

There is a big Swedish holiday coming – Midsummer – during which the majority of Swedes (including the EW team) will retreat to the countryside to indulge themselves in pickled herring, strawberries and weird games and dancing in the midnight sun. The team will be off until the next week, so we’re taking the opportunity to wish you all a happy Midsummer (and summer)!

Pre-holiday update

As the holiday season begins, it’ll be less crowded and much calmer in the office in the next month or so, which will influence the speed of releasing new content. The team has been busy working on a new species, but it probably won’t be released until a couple of months from now, because of the summer doldrums. Plus, as you know, bringing in a new animal in theHunter requires months of full-time work from game designers, artists, animators, programmers and web-developers, following by weeks of testing. You may start to speculate what the newcomer might be, for now we can only say that it has been a popular community request for ages and it’ll be living in one of the most popular reserves.

Apart form this major project the backend staff has been fixing bugs and server related issues, such as messaging problems, friend requests and referrals, “members only” MP sessions and a bunch of minor ones.

Football Jamboree – Your favourites 

The first week of our Football Jamboree is over and the favourites of theHunter community have become clear. Judging by the amount of caps sold, most of you believe that Brazil or Germany will win the whole thing. The third most popular cap has been the Spanish one (which will probably change now), followed by the Argentinian, Dutch, Italian and French. You have another week to buy a cap of the team you root for  at a super discount and get a chance to win the cool shotgun with the gold engraving. Please note that the shotgun won’t have separate achievements, because it’s never going to be released in the store and we want to provide fair chances to all players to reach the maximum Hunter Score possible.

Trophy competition – Results

This event didn’t spark that much interest, compared to the previous design outfit competition; we only received a dozen submissions, so we had to tweak the rules. After having gone through the submitted concepts, we could only choose one living up to the standards we set for a theHunter trophy. Since the community voting has lost its sense in this case, it’s been decided to announce it the winner and use it as the idea for the new theHunter trophy.

Here is the winning concept created by CaptainMunch:

   
Thank you everyone who took time to create their concepts, even if they didn’t make it to the final your work is still very much appreciated. We’ll publish some interesting submissions in the competition thread.

That’s all from us for now.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy Hunters,

Today we’re announcing a new event –

theHunter Football Jamboree 2014

The world is, once again, succumbing to the football fever and in the next month the eyes of many will be closely following 32 national teams on their Brazilian hunt for the most longed-for reward in the football world – the golden trophy.

We could not resist celebrating this grandiose happening, so today we’re announcing our tribute to the event in Brazil in true theHunter style with our Football Jamboree, the winners of which will get a golden reward of their own.

From June 12th to July 14th, support your favourite team by proudly wearing their cap when hunting. You will find a cap for each of the 32 participating countries in theHunter Store. If you own the cap of the team that wins the event, you’ll receive a unique golden weapon and a golden medal. The runners-up will get silver and bronze medals. Please find the detailed information on how to participate in this F.A.Q.

We’ll keep you updated about the results of all matches here.

Some bits and pieces

The Steam roll out is moving along, yesterday we added Central and South Americas and are planning to launch in the remaining rest of the world in the next couple of days. The complete list of launched countries can be found here.

The trophy concept competition is now finished and in the next week we’ll be going through the received submissions, more details on this will be posted in our next status update.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello Hunters,

Welcome to our status update and the biggest news of this week is that, finally…

We’re rolling out on Steam!

Some of you will probably not notice any difference, whereas die-hard Steam fans will rejoice, but we are very happy to be able to bring theHunter to more people and excited to see what this milestone means for us. On Monday we started a ”soft launch”, it means that we’ve been gradually adding new countries while monitoring our servers to make sure they’re coping with the sudden player increase.

If you’re located in one of the countries where we’ve already launched (most European countries at this very moment, but the list grows as we speak, so we’d recommend you to check now and then), you can now find theHunter in the Steam store, add it to your Library and start playing. The first time you start the game in Steam, you will get an option to create a new theHunter account or connect using a pre-exisiting one. Once your Steam and theHunter accounts have been connected, you won’t need to enter your login details again (when starting from Steam).

There have been some concerns expressed about what this change would bring to the game and how the ”Steam” version of theHunter would integrate with the ”old school” one. To put everyone at ease, there won’t be two different versions, all your account information will be automatically available on Steam and vice versa. When you start the game via Steam, you’ll be able to play exactly like you’re used to via the new launcher.

We’ll really appreciate if you find some time to support us and leave a review on Steam. To be able to do it, you need to have theHunter in your library and have played it for at least 5 minutes.

Outage this morning

Today, from approximately 5:00 CEST till 10:00 CEST, all our web-services were down. The downtime was caused by a hardware problem experienced by our service provider and thus was not related to the Steam launch. We apologize for this inconvenience and will add 1 extra day to all active memberships.

Bug fixing

Andrés, Danny and Robin devoted this week solely to bugs fixing, so for the last three days they have been trying to locate, reproduce and resolve bugs in game. The plan is to run such bug fixing weeks on a regular basis. However, please keep in mind that it can take the programmers up to a couple of days to find and reproduce one single bug, as it is for example the case with the “spinning” issue, which has been discussed a lot recently.

That’s all from us for today, make sure to check our update next week, as we’re going to announce a new event.

Happy hunting!

Comments

Hello Hunters,

This week’s status update will be short, since we’ve been posting bits and pieces of news in-between: if you haven’t done it yet, make sure to check our product update about the release of the new launcher and the post regarding the incident with T-Rex banner images.

New policy regarding third party applications

Following the aforementioned incident, we’ve been taking additional steps to ensure our systems are completely secure. Security has become a top priority concern for Expansive Worlds. For this reason, we’re reinforcing our policy regarding third party applications that integrate in any way with, or pull data from our servers. From now on, all such apps, scripts and software (including forum signature widgets) must be pre-approved by Expansive Worlds. You can get in touch with us via support [at] thehunter [dot] com or send me a PM in the forum. If we discover an unauthorized app scraping our server data, we reserve the right to shut it down without prior warning.

Receiving official support

The developers have been receiving an increasing amount of support questions via private messages. Please understand that taking time to reply to them means the devs will spend less time on their immediate job responsibilities, which can be anything from designing a new reserve to troubleshooting a bug. For such issues we have an official support channel. If you need help or want to get in touch with us, please submit a ticket at support.thehunter.com or send an email to support [at] thehunter [dot] com. We do not provide support via forum private messages or social media channels, and we are kindly asking you to refrain from contacting developers or forum moderators with support queries.

Trophy competition

We’ve decided to extend the trophy competition for another week, since the amount of submissions was rather low this time. If for some reason you haven’t had a chance to get creative yet, you have time until June 5th, 23:58 CEST.

Until next week, happy hunting!

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