Hello Hunters,

It’s Wednesday and it’s time for that weekly dose of tidbits from the EW headquarters.

Server move next week: Planned downtime

Our backend wizards are approaching the finishing line of their more than month long work; that means that next week we’ll be finally moving our server to the Google App Engine, which will hopefully significantly improve players’ experience. Inevitably, there will be a couple of hours downtime related to the move, and we will make sure to announce the exact date and time well in advance, for you to be able to plan accordingly. Our apologies for any inconveniences!

Design theHunter Outfit Competition: Results

The voting is finished and the winners are chosen by you. The community was unambiguous about the winning design – 50% of all votes went to the ”3D Leaf Camo” Ghillie Suit by GostWind. Our art team will pick it up and evaluate how we can incorporate the idea in the game. We can not tell the exact date when it’ll be released in the store, but you probably can expect it within next couple of months.

According to the voting results, the second place and 2000 em$ went to Gooseman81 for his Outdoors Man set (53 votes), and the third one to Ruuster12 for his variant of the ghillie suit (50 votes). However and sadly, we had to disqualify Ruuster12’s design, since we received confirmed reports that the creator attempted to solicit votes by sending private messages to other players. Our goal is a fair and square competition, that’s why we’ve decided to give the third place and 1000 em$ to Hiijinx for his Gamekeeper Attire design, which finished 4th with 37 votes.

Here are the winning designs:

1st place: GostWind

2nd place: Gooseman81

3d place: Hiijinx

We also liked some ideas from other designs, especially the second and third places, so we do not exclude the possibility that they will also get incorporated in theHunter in the future. We’ll keep you posted!

Thank you everyone who’ve participated in this competition, either by creating a design or by voting and commenting!

International Women’s Day in theHunter

After our Manly Man competition dedicated to Men’s Day, we’ve been receiving a lot of feedback asking whether there’d be a female day equivalent. And yes, we’ve prepared a special event to celebrate the International Women’s Day on March 8th. The details will be announced on Saturday.

On the matter of bugs

Following the release of the Army Cap with a Brazilian flag last week, there was a heated forum discussion which, as it sometimes happens in our community, resulted into the “new items vs. old bugs” flame war. I thought it might help if we give an official response on the matter. For starters, I’d like to clarify that creating new items has nothing to do with fixing bugs, we have two different teams dedicated to those tasks and those are two parallel and independent processes. That’s why arguments like: ”Instead of making new clothes you’d better fix one-year-old bugs,” don’t hold water and do nothing but bring frustration to the community and the dev team, because we, like everyone, also need appreciation for the work we do.

Another thing I’d like to bring up with you is that it is our goal and ambition to fix all the bugs. If we receive a detailed report and can reproduce the bug (like it was with the recent Mallard issues), we usually release the fix for it in the next game patch. If the information in the bug report is not sufficient enough, or we are not able to reproduce the issue ourselves, it would take a developer a long time to find and fix the problem, which would of course disrupt the development process and cause delays in releasing new features. If a bug has been reported and is not fixed yet, most likely it’s because we were not able to reproduce it on our side. That’s why we always ask you, when reporting bugs, to post detailed step-by-step descriptions in the bug section of the forum.

Speaking of which, as you might have seen, our awesome moderators have started to bring some order into that section by creating user-friendly indices (Animals and Miscellaneous are already done), with reference numbers to our official bug tracking system, where applicable. Please refer to those before posting a new bug report.

Happy hunting!

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Hello Hunters,

This week our status update comes a bit later, and here’s why:

EW Go-karting race

Yesterday we went to blow off some steam and did go-kart racing. Despite a couple of nasty scuffles, we are happy to let you know that all the devs are still safe and sound enough to continue working on bugs fixes and new features. Although Pim was rather unequivocal about his winner’s preferences, it was Herman, Emil and Robin who made it to the victory stand. The fact that the two of the team’s fastest and most technical racers are the ones working on our server migration, is quite comforting, right? 😉

Gift codes scam continues

Sadly, we still have problems with people selling our gift codes bought with stolen credit card details. We want to alert everyone that if you’ve purchased such a code on a third-party site, per Skype, or anywhere else but our official homepage, we will remove all em$, items and memberships acquired with this code, and it’s only the scammer you paid your money to will benefit from it. If you find out that someone is selling theHunter gift codes cheaper than our official price, it is a sure sign there’s something fishy and we’d really appreciate if you let us know about such incidents.

Ask Me Anything

Today we’re introducing a new community feature – Ask Me Anything. For starters, it will be me who you will be able to put your questions to, and if it is a success, we’ll be hosting AMA sessions with other team members as well.

Here is your unique chance to ask something you’ve always wondered, but please respect the rules:

• Our Code of Conduct applies

• No tech support and bugs related questions, as these usually require a thorough personal investigation and we have specific channels for those type of queries (customer support and Bug Reports forum)

• Try to avoid opinionated questions, eg. ”Why does the new gun suck?”

• Do not repost your question multiple times

• All questions may be asked, but not all questions may be answered, although I’ll do my best to reply to everything I can. If I the answer is unknown or can’t be revealed, I’ll let you know. Questions will be answered not necessarily in the order in which they’re posted.

The AMA thread will be unlocked for 48 hours, starting at 12 p.m. CET on February 28. All the questions will be moderated and supervised by me and the moderation team. I’ll do my best to reply to all the questions within a week after the AMA session is over.

UPDATE: The AMA Thread is now unlocked for questions.

Design competition – vote now

The poll for the community design competition closes in 3 days, please make sure to vote for the design you want to be implemented in theHunter.

Aimpoint sights

Yesterday we released two Aimpoint sights that seemed to become quite a hit, sweet! Some of you have pointed out that the original definition ”scopes” was not quite accurate, since they are in fact sights. The point taken and the descriptions are updated accordingly, we are happy to admit our mistakes.

Happy hunting!

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Hello Hunters,

This status update is quite packed with goodies, so grab your coffee, sit back and enjoy 😉

New semi-automatic shotgun and a new challenge

Tomorrow we’re releasing a weapon, which a lot of you have been eagerly waiting for – 20 GA semi-automatic shotgun. Since it has been a hot community topic literally for years, we’ve decided to do something special this time to celebrate the launch, so today we’re running a unique challenge, 5 lucky winners of which will get the new shotgun for free! Read the details and join here.

Please note that, for now, the new shotgun will be released with birdshot ammo only.

An eventful rest of the week

To pay tribute to the Olympic Games in Sochi, we’ve created our own version of the Olympics – theHunter Quadrennial Bird Games 2014, during which you’ll be able to put a new “semi-awesomatic” shotgun to test. The challenge will launch tomorrow, so keep an eye on our updates.

Another event we’ll be celebrating this week is February 23, which is the Men’s Day in Russia and other Russian speaking countries. We’ll be throwing a proper hunting party on that day, make sure to check the forums on Sunday for details.

Design theHunter Outfit – the voting starts today

We’ve received 30 submissions for the Design theHunter Outfit competition, and we were pleasantly surprised by the overall quality level, thanks to everyone who took their time to participate! The team put their heads together and picked 7 to go through to the final voting round. When choosing designs for voting we were taking into consideration a number of criteria: how well a specific outfit would fit into the theHunter world and gameplay, how much resources its incorporation would require, as well as the general idea and implementation.

Cast your vote here

A piece on theHunter

Pim has recently been interviewed by the video gaming website Polygon, alongside the CEO of Avalanche Studios. It has been talked about the future of Avalanche in general and theHunter in particular. You can read the whole article here.

Happy hunting everyone!

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Hello hunters,

Here is what we’ve been up to at theHunter HQ:

Valentine’s Day is looming

In tribute to Valentine’s Day, we’ll be kicking off a three-day-long event on Friday, with tricky challenges and sweet prizes. The details will be published in the blog on Friday morning.

Server migration news

The project of moving our server into a cloud environment is closing to its end. We’re working to make sure that the migration doesn’t cause any downtimes, but we can not rule out the possibility that there might be some, so we’ll make sure to let you know in advance when the Big Move is going to happen.

Ducks bug fixes

Tomorrow we’re releasing a game patch with a bunch of bug fixes, one of which a lot of you have complained about and which is known as ”ducks breaking and spooking bug”. We want to thank the community and especially Mickey415 for providing very thorough and valuable information when reporting the bug, it was of great help for Danny and Andrés!

On the topic of theHunter T-Shirt

Following all your great feedback we’ve received during the Spot a Dev event, we’ve decided to release our special T-Shirt in the store for a limited time only. The real T-Shirts we were wearing on the picture seemed to be even a bigger hit, so we’re looking into the possibility to open up a merchandise section to sell those.

Design competition deadline

Today at midnight CET is the deadline for the Design theHunter Outfit competition, so hurry up if you haven’t sent your contribution yet. We’ve received some very cool designs, can’t wait to get the voting going 😉

New Nosler missions

For those of you who are done with the Blaser missions and hungry for more, Daniel have baked a new bundle, this time featuring Nosler products.

Happy hunting!

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Hi there and welcome to our weekly status update!

We’re starting with the sweetest piece of news…

Community competition – Design theHunter outfit

We’re inviting you to take part in co-creation of theHunter and we’ve chosen clothing as the area where we can allow some freedom, without running a risk of disturbing the game balance. So, today we are announcing a community competition to create a theHunter outfit. The winning design will get incorporated by the art team into a game outfit and afterwards released in the store. Please find the competition details here and let your creativity go wild.

What’s up with Steam…

…some of you have wondered. We continue working on it, and our plan is to fix the server issues first, so the Steam launch won’t create unpleasant surprises for all of us. We’ll keep you updated how the work in this direction is going.

Translation help wanted

We are looking for volunteers to help us localize theHunter into all languages. To join the localization team, you need to be a native speaker of the language you apply to translate into and a hunter in real life. If you are interested to become a part of our localization team, send me a PM with your details and I’ll get back to you.

News from Andrés’s corner

As we announced yesterday, some bug fixes were released, alongside new player emotes.

And finally…

Next week we’re announcing a fun event, involving the whole dev team, so make sure to read our status update on Wednesday.

Good hunting all!

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Hello Hunters,

Here comes the update with the bits and pieces of what we’ve been up to at Expansive Worlds.

Russian avalanche

Last Thursday our registrations suddenly skyrocketed. The amount of new players went so high in such a short time, that our server couldn’t cope with the overload and we were forced to close down the registration for a couple of hours. Several ongoing games were also affected, our sincere apologies for that! We’ve detected the reason of the crash and made a fix, so it won’t happen again.

As we found out, this avalanche of new players mostly came from Russia and Russian speaking countries and was induced by the viral theHunter video made by two our players from Saint Petersburg.

No bad without good, we are happy to welcome all the new hunters – добро пожаловать!

Heads up from Herman

Speaking about server, we have started looking through the inventory code and some other parts of the in-game UI. Right now we are in the process of introducing big changes to the way we load the inventory, which will significantly cut load times. Hopefully, within a few weeks we’ll have a lightning fast inventory in place.

New shotgun and competitons

Today we stocked up the store with the brand new 12 GA Single Shot Shotgun, suitable for hunting all species, that are currently present in the game. You can buy it with gm$.

A new set of Mallard competitions got released on Monday. You can join via the Competitions page, if you haven’t done it yet.

Hit animal issue

Andrés has discovered another in-game issue that mostly affects players who hunt mallards.  A bit of technical background, to make it clear: Every animal in the game is assigned a ragdoll, which is a prerequisite for players to be able to hit an animal. Once you hit an animal, it reserves a ragdoll, which is freed when you confirm the killed animal with your huntermate or when you move farther than 220 meters away from the dead animal.

Right now there is a limit to the number of ragdolls of a type we can have active at the same time. Thus, if a player kills a lot of animals without confirming them, the game might run out of ragdolls, which basically means that the player will not be able to hit any more animals of that type again, until they confirm the animals that are dead.

That’s all for now, happy hunting!

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