Howdy Hunters,

Well, it’s not Wednesday but the closest thing, Thursday! For all of you sending us PM’s and asking about where the status update is, every now and then the update might be late and some weeks there might actually not be one at all. Our aim is to have something to say every week, but sometimes that’s not possible. This time the lateness was due to Pim being ridiculously jetlagged after visiting David in the US. Pim had a fantastic time and came back with loads of new ideas.

Today we’re kicking off the sweet event mentioned in last week’s update. It’s a countdown to Valentine’s Day. Every day up until the 14^th there will be a new challenge for you to take on. To get your hands on the fanciest Valentine’s trophy you need to complete all challenges. To complete most of the challenges you need to use the specially designed Cupid Arrows. Every player will get 15 arrows for free* (we’re giving away 19500000 arrows!), but if you run out of them you can either buy new ones from Doc’s or try to win them by being one of the top 10 completing the most offers through Matomy. You will still get Em$ for completing the offers, the chance of winning additional Cupid Arrows is just a bonus. Matomy’s competition ends Monday at 6:00am CET.

Please note that this arrow does not perform exactly as the regular arrows and that power, trajectories and zeroing varies from bow to bow. Make sure to practice at the Archery Addictions Range before heading out to hunt!

We’re busy arguing what contribution in the Video Tutorial Competition is actually best. Right now it’s a tie between all of them.  A winner will however be declared soon.

Peter and Tomas spent the morning out in the forest today to gather inspiration for the new reserve. It was snowing heavily here in Stockholm yesterday, so we’re not sure how much that’ll inspire them.

Happy hunting!

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* Each player will receive their 15 free cupid arrows when they log in for the first time during the event.

Wednesday means status update! So, even if it might feel quite weak compared to last weeks update, here it is.

We have been out of office all day today. We spent the day at Pim’s place for a day of planning and brainstorming. So our interns, Tomas and Erik, has been holding the fort while we’ve been away. We’ve been going through some of your suggestions and feedback and talking a lot about the game and tried to figure out what features to work on in the future. There were a lot of great ideas that got tossed around. Unfortunately we can’t reveal anything, since nothing is set in stone yet, but we can assure you that (more) good things are coming.

Pim’s house

Peter and Tomas’s been kept busy the past week working on the coming reserve. It’s looking better and better for every day, but it’s hard work and creating a reserve takes time. So even if the sneak peak we posted last week looked pretty done there’s still a long way to go.

We, especially Björn and Herman, are working on a new event. It’s kind of a sweet surprise, so we don’t want to ruin it. But stay tuned it’s not very far away.

We’d like to remind you all that it’s a good thing to like us on Facebook, since we, every now and then, have Facebook exclusive offers and competitions.

There’s still plenty of time to join our video competition. So don’t be shy, show off your bear hunting skills and have the chance to win a great prize!

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It’s Wednesday!

We know that many of you have been waiting a long time for the new bow, so we got some good news for you. It’s finally here! The wait has been long but we think it has been worth it. It’s a great bow and it looks stunning. We’ll kick off a new competition today where you’ll have the opportunity to explore the new bow extensively.

The new 3D archery range is also live now. We hope you’ll spend loads of time there to get to know the new bow and improve your archery skills.

A big congrats to the winners of the new Parker Python compound bow in last weekends multi-species competition:
MrEnzO
whiteox
Patrik6357
Trackingmaster
juagarzo

We got a delivery this week. Our new theHunter t-shirts arrived. Unfortunately no one wanted to pose as model so we had to take this picture of José, without his knowledge, while he was working. One of you might actually win one of these tees in a competition in the future.

We’ve started to investigate how to be more effective in preventing spawn mashing. We think we might have a solution, so we will investigate this further and will preform some testing on this over the coming weeks.

Peter and Thomas are working on the next reserve. It’s coming along nicely and we’re aiming at a release in March/April. All we can say about it at this stage is that it is pretty cool looking.

Sneak preview of the coming reserve

Robert and Herman are still working on the web framework. This will eventually mean that site and parts of the client will get a visual improvement. But since it’s a major task we can’t communicate a release date at this stage yet. More info will come at a later stage.

We’d like to thank all of you who filled out last week’s user survey. The information you provided well come in handy for us to make decisions for future development of theHunter. It was especially great to see that almost 80% of you are very likely to recommend our game to a friend! Please do so! The more new players we get in the more effort we can put into develop the game further.

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Another week has passed and it is Wednesday again. Snow has been pouring down here in Stockholm so it seems the winter is here to stay this year as well.

As mentioned in last week’s update we’re releasing a variation of an old favorite today: Scent eliminator mini. The reason for this is that we saw that there’s a need for this feature to be more accessible, price-wise, and this smaller, and cheaper, container means that you can get it by earning em$. So more players can take advantage of this helpful equipment.

We’ve gotten a lot of questions for when the new bow is out and we can tell you that it’ll be soon, but not this week. Sorry. We want to release it at the same time as the new archery range and we’re still making the final amends to that. We can however tell you that the new bow will be more silent, than its predecessors, and is equipped with a three pin sight.  And on top of that, it looks awesome!

In our work to improve theHunter we need your help. So we would greatly appreciate if you can help us fill out a survey. The survey contains questions about your computer setup and also some questions about you, as a community. Go to the survey

This weekend we’ll have another multi-species competition and the winner will get a pretty great prize on top of the usual prize. So prepare yourself for this 😉

We’d also like to remind you of the new video competition, this time we want you to create a bear tutorial.

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Hello Hunters,

So it’s Wednesday again and we’re all finally back at the office. All of us have had a nice, well-deserved, long break and we’re now working hard on upcoming features.

So what are we actually working on? Some of you have been digging around in our image files and seen the new bow. The bow is being tested right now and we’re aiming at having it in store later this month. Later today we’ll release a new lure: Moose urine. We’re also about to release a variation of an old favorite item fairly soon.

We’re, at this very moment, finalizing a 3D Archery Range. Peter has created it together with our art intern, Tomas, and it’s looking, to say the least, pretty great. We’re hoping to have it deployed within the coming 4 weeks. It just has to be properly tested and potentially adjusted.

Robert and Herman is continuing the work with re-vamping the web framework. As mentioned before, this isn’t something you’ll notice for a while but their work will improve your experience on the web site a lot in the future.

As many of you might know, the translations in theHunter is made by some of our fantastic community members. These guys are doing an incredible job and we just adore them for helping us out with this. A big thanks to all you translators out there, we hope you guys know how much we appreciate your help! We do however need more help. So if you’re interested in helping out, and know you’re good at keeping secrets (as a translator you will, every now and then, have to translate information not revealed to the public yet) feel free to contact David via email. We especially need help with the following languages: Dutch, Norwegian, Spanish, Hungarian, Portuguese, Croatian and Estonian. We would, of course, love if we could add other languages than we have today, so if your language isn’t supported today you can help to make theHunter accessible to your fellow countrymen.

We’d also like to thank the participants in our Mule Deer video competition. You all did a fantastic job and we’re going through the entries. If we can all agree on a single winner soon we might declare the winner before Monday. We’ll also kick of a new video tutorial competition this week. We haven’t decided for what animal yet though. What would you suggest?

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Howdy hunters,

Most of us are still not back at the office yet, but we thought it would be good to drop you a note wishing all of you a happy new year! We all hope you’ve had a fab x-mas and new years.

2012 was a great year for us at Expansive Worlds, and we are truly grateful that so many people, from all over the world, are enjoying the game we love so much. We have many new and exciting things cooking for 2013 and more info on these features will come later on.

We would like to remind you of the video competition. So far we have one contribution so it would be great to see some more. Deadline is 7th of January. You’ll find all the details here.

A more proper status update will come next week when we are all back up to speed at the office.

Happy hunting!

Christmas is getting closer and most of us are about to go on a well deserved Christmas break. Peter’s already taken off, but he manged to complete the new bow, and some other stuff, that he’s been working on. So there will be new stuff coming early next year!

Last Friday we were all invited to our BFF’s, Avalanche Studios, Christmas party. Food was amazing and we all had a fantastic time.

The team ready to party

We’d like to thank you awesome people who helped us by writing reviews and rating theHunter Chrome app. We got loads of new players through that channel. So thank you! It would be great if more of you can help out with this. Link to the app in Chrome Web Store

If you’re a good hunter/player don’t miss out on helping others by entering our video tutorial competition. You can read more about it here.

It’s been a great year for theHunter and we hope you have enjoyed it as much as we have. We’re aiming to make the game even better next year but we can’t do it without you!

Merry x-mas to all of you and Happy Holiday Hunting!

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Howdy hunters,

Due to the technical problems we experienced during the night we’ve decided to extend all memberships by two days. We want to stress that these problems did not occur because we were out having a few beers and we couldn’t have fixed things faster even if we hadn’t done that. We apologize for the inconvenience.

We’ve also gotten a lot of positive feedback on the tracer arrows, and a lot of you seems to want to buy them, so they will be back in store again, but this time for both types of bows. The arrows will have a 20% discount until 25th of December. There are also arrow bundles available in the store – 50 arrows at 40% discount!

Happy hunting!

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Hello Wednesday,

So another exciting week has passed and we’ve seen a lot of activity in-game and a lot of new users. This is the best gift we can get for Christmas!

We reached another milestone, we got our 10.000th like on Facebook this morning. We greatly appreciate you showing us that you like our game in forums outside theHunter.com. And remember that we every now and then have special Facebook and Twitter offers, so make sure to follow us in those channels.

We added theHunter to Chrome Web Store last week, so more people can find our game. We’d really appreciate if you, Chrome users, can help us out by giving us a positive review and rating there.

Tonight we will have our annual Christmas dinner, but unfortunately it seems as José can’t join us, so we have to have a few extra drinks for him as well. If you’re “lucky” we might post some photos of the event on Twitter and Facebook during the evening.

We decided to remove the tracer arrows from the store since the debate got a bit over heated in the forum. If, and in that case when, they’ll return isn’t decided yet. We were also about to release tracer arrows for the Recurve Bow, but decided against it due to the same reason. We’re sorry that some of you got upset by how we priced this new item and how they were released. The plan is to, every now and then, release premium items and these items will not be part of any membership bundle, as long as they don’t replace the basic inventory in the store, and they will be priced slightly higher than the basic inventory. We are well aware of the fact that this means that these premium items won’t be everyone’s cup of tea and suit all wallets, but this is because the purpose of these items is to add extra spice to the experience for those of you interested in doing so. We do however want to stress that these items will not give the user any game-play advantages, so they won’t make competitions unfair or the game unbalanced. Furthermore, the introduction of premium items will not change how memberships, reserves, animals, regular items and other game fundamentals work.

And we’d, once again, like to remind you all that the best Christmas gift to a loved one is a theHunter membership, so use the gifting option in the Hunter store to share the joy of hunting online!

Happy hunting!

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Howdy hunters!

The Hunting Bonanza has started and a lot of you seem to engage in the daily festive events. Make sure you collect all stars to win the highest grade trophy. We can assure you that the trophy looks great. And remember, you do not need to finish in the top three to get a star in the competitions, just submit a valid entry. You need to earn at least three stars to get a Holiday trophy.

We’re aiming to release the new features Erik told you about in last weeks status update tomorrow, but since Stockholm’s been attacked by masses of snow the last 12 hours no one knows if we will be able to get in to the office tomorrow. It took Pim 4 hours to get in to the office today. It usually takes him 40 minutes.

The subway in Stockholm today

Robert and Herman is working on a revamp of the web platform. This isn’t something you’ll notice for quite some time, but it’ll be a vast improvement of your experience on the website in the future.

Happy Hunting!

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