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!

Comments

Hello Hunters,

Today’s status update is longer than usual, but brimming with news, enjoy!

Trailer competition – Winners

All team members watched and evaluated the trailers submitted to the community competition and picked their favourites. The race for the first place was neck-to-neck, and the point difference was really tiny.  And the winners are:

1st place and 5000 em$ or a Pathfinder membership bundle go to Aruvyel for this luminous trailer:

2nd place and 3000 em$ or a Wayfarer membership bundle go to this epic creation by Nuubialainen:

3rd place and 1000 em$ go to ColoradoKid, he is also the winner in the nomination “The coolest ending”:

We want to thank everyone who had taken time to create their trailers but didn’t make it to the victory stand, you’ve done a very impressive job: Rantanrave, jummpy, shotty420, fape19888, Chanelyn, Faran, The-Lakota

Another community competition for the best trophy concept is still ongoing, it might be your chance to win bushels of fame and glory alongside some em$.

New member of the art team

This week we welcomed a new intern on board. His name is Marcus and he will be working with Peter, Tomas and Oskar on the graphical side of theHunter. Read his intro below and give him a nice welcome.

In 2011 I was accepted to a super fun gamedev school in Falun, Sweden, as a graphic artist. Two years later I moved to Stockholm to work for DICE as a 3D intern at Battlefield 4. Shooters have always been a big part of my gaming life and, since I am also fond of nature, I think I will enjoy my time here at Expansive Worlds, helping the team to develop already fantastic hunting experience!

Björn’s answers

Our game designer Björn has posted replies to the questions in his AMA, in which he revealed some hints about the future of theHunter, the most frustrating aspect of his work, which language the theHunter code is commented in, and lots of other curious things. If you want to get a better insight at the very bottom of the theHunter iceberg, give Björn’s post a read – it’s totally worth it.

“Be vewy, vewy quiet, I’m hunting wabbits!”

… you’ll be able to say very soon. As most of you correctly deduced from our “sneak peek” picture in the last week’s status update, the18th and by far the cutest species in theHunter yet will be the rabbit, and namely the Cottontail Rabbit. Probably the biggest cottontail novelty is that it is going to be the second species you can hunt for free, alongside the Mule Deer. The release will be announced soon, until then here are some screenshots to bring you into the “wabbit” frame of mind:

Happy hunting!

Comments

Hello Hunters,

We’re in spring mood here in the office, like Hemmeldal bears coming out of hibernation, so don’t mind the short update (the sun is shining, holidays are coming, you know…). Here’s what’s new at the EW office:

”New” team members

One of the highlights of the week has become the transition of our interns Daniel, Oskar and Robin into fully fledged team members and joining us as Designer, 3D Artist and Game programmer respectively. You mostly know Daniel’s work by our competitions, missions and witty names to them, Oskar is the mastermind (and the ”masterhand”) behind most of the weapons (including the latest community crush – K98k), and Robin was the one who created the popular trophy shot mode with a player in it, emotes, and other game features.

Peter about animals in game, night hunting and how he got to be so tall

Our Main Artist in Charge Peter has spent some fun hours yesterday coming up with answers to the questions you posted in his Ask Me Anything thread. Check out his exhaustive replies to get a better understanding of how things work in the art production here, as well as learn about the past, present and future of theHunter from the art director’s perspective.

Happy Easter celebrations!

Last but not least, we’d like to wish a happy Easter to those of you who celebrate and nice Easter holidays to everyone (because a couple of days off in spring are always a win!). Our Easter competitions will be running up until Sunday, hope you’ll get a chance to join.

Today our whole team is going on vacations, we’ll be back on Tuesday, ready to continue serving you with more of theHunter magic.

Good hunting all!

Comments

Howdy Hunters!

Here is our weekly status update with snippets of this and that:

Easter on theHunter

On Monday we’re launching our one week-long Easter event, with 7 daily competitions for any taste and liking, some special challenges and, of course, dainty trophies and prizes. Don’t miss our Monday update!

AMA with Peter

As the survey results have shown, you’ve found our first ‘Ask Me Anything’ useful and asked for more of those, so we thought it was time to do it again. Now it’s our art director Peter who will stand up to the interrogation, and you must know that ‘eloquent’ is his second name, so it’s time to start pondering over some interesting questions for him 😉

Peter’s AMA thread will be unlocked for 48 hours, starting at 12 p.m. CET on April 11th. All the questions will be moderated and supervised by the moderation team, the standard AMA rules apply.

The thread is live

Account theft warning

Lately we’ve been receiving reports of stolen accounts, with dishonest people contacting players via private messages and announcing that they allegedly have won free em$, offer free em$ or weapons; and in order to add those to player’s account they’d need their login details. After gaining access to an account, they often use game hacks and cheats, which leads to a permanent ban of the account. It’s sad when such things happen, especially if a player has ivested time and money in the account. So, we are asking you to be highly suspicious when it comes to any ”free” stuff and never give your login details to anyone.

Terms of Service reminder

Since we’ve recently had an incident of sexual harassment on the forums, which resulted into a permanent ban of user’s game and forum accounts, we’d like to remind that we do not tolerate such behavior, regardless whether it comes from a guest or a paying member, and that applies to all communication tools on thehunter.com, including chat, private messages and forum.

According to our Terms of Service, ”you may not post, upload or link to any sexually explicit, harmful, threatening, abusive, defamatory, obscene, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive imagery or content.”

Happy birthday & holidays to Pim!

On a more joyous note, today we’re sending Pim away on vacations to sunny Florida (why yes, we’ve sworn not to break anything while he’s away) and having a Swedish ”fika” to celebrate his departure and, by the merest accident, also his birthday – Pim turns 40 this Sunday!

See you around and happy hunting!

Comments