Hello hunters,

It’s status update time!

It’s a birdie!

As we revealed during last week’s Lock&Learn, the new species coming to theHunter are Ptarmigans. Rock Ptarmigan will inhabit Val-des-Bois and Willow Ptarmigan will inhabit Hemmeldal. The two viewers who first guessed the species and subspecies during the livestream have been awarded their em$. Work on the birds is already in the final phase as we iron out some rough edges and polish a few minor things. We hope to be able to release these wonderful sounding critters on their respective habitats very soon. Until then, enjoy this sneak peek on these cool birdies.

Rock ptarmigan

Willow ptarmigan

Two-person tripod

Yesterday we released another great piece of large equipment for players who love hunting with their friends. The two-person tripod. Perfect to call in an animal, get on top and pass the time chatting with your buddy while the animal makes its way to you. There is also a super crazy bundle in the store which features this new tripod. Check it out, it’s probably the biggest discount we’ve ever offered on relatively new stuff.

Bugs

Here’s an update on the recent bugs – disappearing climbing gear, messed up sounds and calls as well as reduced weapon steadiness on towers. We are aiming to patch fixes for all those locusts in the next game update, hopefully next week (subject to change). As always, stay tuned and follow our updates!

Summer Fiesta

What’s for sure happening next week is the return of our traditional and probably most loved summer event. That’s right, it’s time for another summer fiesta! This time we’ve come up with a slightly different format, and I think that everyone will find something that appeals. Check back at the beginning of next week to learn the details!

Killing season

In case you’ve missed this thread on the forum – check out this epic competition by community member caledonianblues, which starts August 22nd. Sign up now and use this time to hone your skills, devise your strategies and plan how you’re going to walk away with some of the enormous 100,000 em$ prize pool!

On a final note, due to the summer doldrums, our weekly stream Lock&Learn is going on vacations together with Johanna and will be back in a couple of weeks.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

It’s time for our weekly status update.

About these status updates

Traditionally, the main purpose of our status updates has been to share with you news and insights about what’s going on with the game, the team and the company. Status updates have never been game-specific and we have no plans to change this. Our game updates are exclusively for game-specific updates. Some people have been asking for more behind-the-scenes information in our status updates, with regard to what the team is working on. Additionally, people have raised concerns that nothing “big” seems to be happening with theHunter recently, given the fact nothing has been communicated. Our old-time players know that even if we don’t say much, this doesn’t necessarily mean that nothing is cooking in the EW kitchen 😉 The reason we choose not to share information in advance is because we don’t want to plant seeds prematurely and give any promises until we’re 100% sure that we can deliver. There have been cases in the past when we announced that we were working on something early on, then for some reason the production got wrapped up, and people got frustrated because they already set their minds on having that weapon, animal or a feature. So, it is a conscious decision our part not to over-communicate beforehand, simply to avoid creating frustration within the community. After all, we believe that pleasant surprises are better than unfulfilled promises.

Having said that, here is a small sneak peek into the culprit that has been keeping us busy since the release of Bushrangers Run – in the last month the whole EW team has been working on a new, big and tasty feature. It has been one of the most popular community requests since probably forever. A lot of hard work and love has been poured into it so far but there is much more that needs to be done, we hope we’ll be able to tell you more soon. Until then, feel free to speculate but don’t go too crazy (hint – it’s not bigfoot) 😉

Best community reserve set-ups

The competition for the best community reserve set-up is over. The engagement in this one was really great, with over 60 entries and almost 500 votes cast.

The following 5 entries have received the most amount of community votes (click on the images to open in full resolution):

1. JackRbbt’s Whitehart Island set-up

2. \m/’s Hirschfelden set-up

3. MonacoSteve’s Hirschfelden set-up

4. Pretty_Boy’s Bushrangers Run set-up

5. Cireme’s Val-des-Bois set-up

Winners will receive a new Alpine Camo tent and an additional award of their choice. Their set-ups will also be featured in the store as special equipment bundles, so you can get the everything featured in their set-ups at a great price.

As promised, we’ll make an e-book featuring all qualifying set-ups that will be shared with everyone in the community.

Thank you to everyone who participated, your set-ups have become a great inspiration for many hunters!

The competition is over – let’s do another one!

This time we’d like you to share your favourite reserve-specific load-outs (a set of weapons, equipment and clothing). The winning load-outs will be featured in our store as permanent bundles and credit to their creators will of course be given. We’ve decided to change the format of the competition this time, to make it a bit more anonymous and fairer. Please read the rules carefully and good luck!

Happy hunting!
Discussion

Hello hunters,

Here comes a usual status update from us.

Ballistics Tweaks

Following our yesterday’s game update, lots of you asked for more details on the ballistics tweaks that had been introduced for a number of weapons. As promised, Björn wrote down some information for you explaining what had been changed and what those changes would mean for the gameplay. Please read it in a separate post.

Summer Fiesta

To make the rest of your summer hunting a bit jollier and to help you savour the waiting for new species and reserve, we’ll be throwing a small event with a bunch of special challenges from Max the Taxidermist, Doc’s madcap buddy. The announcement and rules of the Fiesta event will be posted in the forums on Friday, so stay tuned.

German forum

German forum huntertalk.de is currently being inaccessible due to an update error. We’re working on bringing it back, our apologies for this inconvenience to the German community!

Twitter milestone and #thehunterart

We’ve recently reached a milestone of 4000 followers on Twitter, so we ran a small screenshot competition called #thehunterart to thank you for your support.

Here are the 4 winning shots, senders of which received some em$ from us, plus the fifth (the lowest one) which got a special token award for the funniest screenshot:

@AndySedyGaming

@RynDaniel

@Tactical_Mango

@FunnySquirrelTH

@jonnyk420x

Make sure to follow us on Twitter to learn about upcoming competitions and prize draws.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

There was no status update last week, since we were busy with the beta test, so we’ve packed the news from the last two weeks together. And here you go:

Stress test on beta: Heads up and thanks

Last week we ran a stress test of our new server environment on Google App Engine, which many of you joined. Huge thanks to everyone who found time to participate, we really appreciate your help! In general, the test went well, the server managed to cope with the load. We’ve found some bugs and issues, which are being worked on right now. To release fixes for those, we’ll be doing server maintenance in the next couple of weeks, the exact date and time will be communicated well in advance.

New video competition: theHunter video trailer

It’s has been a while since our last video competition, so let’s do it again. This time we’d like you to create a short video trailer of the game. The trailer has to highlight the hallmarks of theHunter: stunning scenery, the tension of shooting an animal, action-packed gameplay. The winner will receive 5000 em$ or a ‘Pathfinder’ membership bundle, not to mention all the fame and glory. You can read the competition rules here.

Introducing changes in the bug handling process

Lately there has been growing frustration within the community regarding the way in which bugs and bug reports are handled. We appreciate your willingness to help us find and resolve bugs and we do acknowledge that there were some annoying issues that fell between the cracks in the past, so we’ve evaluated and revamped our process for collecting and documenting information about bugs.

There is a lot of internal work going on, but for you the most significant change is the new rules that apply to reporting bugs in the forum. From now on all submitted posts will undergo thorough pre-moderation, to ensure that only real issues with sufficient and relevant information find their way onto the development agenda, allowing the team to address bugs in a more efficient manner, without having to trawl through loads of often unrelated discussions. You can learn more about the changes in this announcement. We’ll also try to provide timely feedback in bug forum threads on the status of the issue, so the whole bug fixing process will hopefully become more open and transparent.

Like with any new process, there might be some bumps in the beginning, so we’re asking for your patience.

German forum volunteers wanted

As the highly valued admins of our German community forum MonacoSteve and Welsch are leaving their posts in favour of other duties, we are looking for volunteers who would be willing to step in and help us manage huntertalk.de. We are looking for Admins / Mods who speak fluent German and good English, are keen theHunter players and preferably have some experience with phpBB forum platforms.

If you’re interested or have any questions please send me a PM on the English or German forum.

That’s it for now, good hunting all!

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