Howdy hunters

The summer and all its vacations and other distractions is finally over, so we can now focus on the stuff that really matters. Like bobcats. Which also means that our status updates are back to their regular weekly schedule, sharing with you all the good, the bad and the ugly happenings at theHunter Classic headquarters.

Bob the cat is coming!

Probably the main thing on everyone’s minds right now, our glorious felines, are being thoroughly tested as we speak. It’s going well and we will be ready to give you a sneak peek of the upcoming bobcats in our exclusive dev pre-release livestream tomorrow, during the usual Lock&Learn session at 16:00 CEST, on our official Twitch channel. A team of theHunter devs will be going after some bobcats, and if they are lucky you might actually see one. Those guys are not so easy to hunt, so I hope you are ready for a challenge!

There have been a lot of questions and musings about means of hunting bobcats. Our Motion predator decoys and Predator “Jackrabbit” Caller will work, but they won’t be as effective as what you are used to seeing with foxes and coyotes, as bobcats are exceptionally intelligent and, hence, cautious animals. We will be introducing a powerful electronic caller at the release which will lure them far more efficiently. You will learn more about this on the release day.

Also, to help you gear up for the upcoming bobcats, this weekend we will be running special sales and campaigns, so keep your eyes peeled for our announcements at the end of the week!

Farewell to Summer Fiesta

Our glorious Summer Fiesta event is – alas – over. It’s been a huge amount of fun, we hope that you all got a chance to participate and at least complete a mission or two. On Monday we awarded a total of 57 Doc’s Hunting Champion trophies to all the skillful hunters who managed to complete all three challenging mission packs, which makes this trophy even rarer than the famous crystal stag of 2014. Congratulations to all the owners, you can be truly proud of yourself! If you didn’t get yours this time, don’t fret, there will be more events and more rewards. The autumn and holidays seasons are (almost) upon us and as always, we promise you four months packed with events, trophies, sales, awesome releases and many more things to keep you loving theHunter Classic.

Team changes

You might have seen a new face lurking in the forums. Our new community manager Graham, who has recently joined the team. You can catch his introduction and welcome him properly in this thread. From next week onwards, Graham will be taking over these status updates and I am sure he will do an excellent job keeping you up to date with everything going on with theHunter Classic. I will continue talking to you in the forums, as per usual.

On another note, our community manager Stefan is leaving us this month to move on to new adventures. Thank you very much for everything Stefan, it’s been a true pleasure to have you at the steering wheel of our community, good luck to wherever life takes you next.

Game design competition winners

We have gone through the entries received for the last game design competition with a fine-tooth comb, and we are ready to announce the results! There were some fantastic entries, and we want to extend our gratitude to everyone who took the time to write up missions and competitions. We are extremely grateful for your input, and hope nobody will be discouraged if their entries are not chosen. Unfortunately, as with every competition, there can only be so many winners.

So, here are the results (the winning entries will be posted in the competition thread shortly). If there are more than one winners, the prize pool is shared, the Contributor title and the Almost DEV Jacket is awarded to all:

• Feral Goats missions – Tanngnjostr (was chosen to design this mission pack out of the competition as we decided it’d be difficult to find a better goat aficionado in theHunter community)
• Feral Goats competitions (our by far most popular category!) – 1) the number of the goat by Madrugo; 2) the Ultimate Stalker by TheSheWolf; 3) Mini Goat by Pittie; 4) Shepherd by TR_GorkemCanakcili; 5) Meat Mates by KingOmar.
• Dall Sheep missions – xOEDragonx
• Dall Sheep competitions – Ash1302
• WT ptarmigans competitions – Andhii
• Rock ptarmigan competitions – FR_Bugs (not complete set)
• Willow ptarmigan competitions – Hifisch

We couldn’t pick the winner for ptarmigan missions as, same with the Grey Wolf missions in the last competition, we felt that the quality of submissions was slightly below the standards we want to meet at theHunter, so we will be designing those in house.

Red dot handgun scope

Last week we released a new and highly requested red-dot handgun scope, an excellent accessory for four of our side firearms, including the latest addition, the 10mm Semi-Automatic handgun. It’s been appreciated, judging by your feedback, which is sweet! Some of you have asked why it’s not possible to adjust the brightness of the red dot, as you can with the Aimpoint sights. The reason is that it is mounted in a slightly different way and provides a much more dynamic experience (Aimpoint sights open onto the whole screen when yielding a weapon and the handgun scope does not), and due to some technical limitations we have in our weapon and sight set-up, we had to make this compromise to make it work without jeopardizing the handgun functionality, allowing you to shoot fast.

Grizzly competitions

Today we added a new pack of community designed competitions. Grizzly bear ones created by our community member BuiuRei. They are now a part of our regular competitions schedule, enjoy!

That’s it from us for today, happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Here is a short status update from us.

Bobcat sneak peek #2

Work continues on the bobcat, including tweaks to the animations, sounds, model, AI and gameplay dynamics. We’re getting closer to being able to show you this magnificent feline in all its glory, but in the meantime, I wanted to share a couple more screenshots to help whet your collective appetites.

For those who missed previous updates, our aim is to make the bobcat a fairly unique species in terms of gameplay (how the animal will be hunted and lured) and also make it highly elusive with heightened senses. Hopefully this will make for a unique hunting experience. After all, these are pretty tough to hunt in real life.

Bear roaming bug update

Roberto and Martin have now pinpointed the source of the roaming bug. As many of you have already speculated, the bug not only affects bears, but other species too, with bears having a higher chance “catching” it due to their gameplay specifics. Without going into too much detail, the problem was caused by an error triggered by animal state changes. The fix is already being tested and once we’ve satisfied that it is successful, it will be rolled out in a game patch. In the meantime, we apologize for the continued inconvenience this bug is causing so many of you. It was extremely tough to identify the underlying cause, but we got there in the end.

Stutzen the rifle

Last week we released the .30-06 Stutzen bolt action rifle, and judging by your reviews so far, it seems to be a success. We would love to hear more of your feedback. Do you enjoy the new rifle? Can any of you share trophy shots featuring it?

Last days of Fiesta

Our infamous Summer Fiesta event is slowly coming to an end. We hope that you have enjoyed the mission packs, and the ongoing series of competitions. From looking at our data, quite a bit more than the 23 players I reported in my last update, have completed the 3 mission packs. If you haven’t already done so, it’s not too late. The special trophy being issued by Doc for completing all 3 packs is still going to be very unique, so if you want to get your hands on it, be sure to do so before time runs out.

We will report back on the final numbers at the end of this event. Good luck in the remaining days to everyone taking part.

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Thanks for stopping by! Today we are happy to announce the release of the new feature. Bait site management from the web or launcher. This has been requested for many years and we know how tiresome and, well, boring it is to start the game just to run to each of your bear barrels, hog feeders and mineral feeders to fill them up then wait for the attractiveness to kick in. Now you will be able to do it with one click of your mouse button on your commute to or from work, when the Black Bears of the EHR start calling to your soul inviting you for a cosy evening in Redfeather Falls 🙂

Introducing Bait site management

How this works?

You can access this feature via Settings > Game management > Bait sites. There you will see the list of your barrels and feeders, the amount of bait in them and the status (active / inactive / penalty). If you are not 100% sure how the baiting system works, here is a detailed description. Each bait site comes with coordinates and the location map, so you can easily tell which one is which.

From there you can fill your bait site, using the bait from your inventory, by paying a small fee of 5 em$ or 200 gm$ (there are discounted packs of 25, 50 and 100 refills that you can find under Services in the store, for those of you that have plenty of bait sites and use them a lot).

Please note that you need to have bait in your inventory to be able to use this feature, think of it as an additional premium service, improving your game experience and saving you time by taking away the hassle of filling bait sites manually. Remember, you can continue to fill your bait sites using the old school method.

What changed?

While working on this feature, Luna and Martin have found and fixed a whole bunch of bugs in the baiting system, here is the full list of fixes:

• Fix for the issue when shooting an animal within the radius of a bait site didn’t trigger the penalty.
• Fix for the issue when moving a bait site to a different place didn’t trigger the “inactive” cooldown.
• Fix for the issue where a bait site being placed in the world didn’t set the “inactive” status correctly.
• Fix for the issue where a bait site that had been emptied didn’t trigger the “inactive” status when refilled.
• Fix for the issue with feeders being placed in a reserve didn’t have the correct reserve ID, thus rendering got broken.
• Fix for the issue where the feeders didn’t remove the bait attractiveness from a feeder with penalty.
• Fix for the issue with bait being consumed after a bait site is picked up and placed into the inventory.
• Fix for the issue with barrels being picked up and placed down again not triggering the inactive status.

That’s it, hope you’ll enjoy this new feature!

UPDATE 18/8/2017: Following community feedback, We just released a function to choose the amount of bait to fill in your bait sites. Attention: you first need to pick the amount of bait you want to fill a specific bait site up to. I.e. if I want my bait site to have 40 baits in it, I would choose 40, regardless how much is left in my bait. After that you go to the bait site you want to refill and click Refill. The system automatically takes from your inventory the amount of bait needed to fill the bait site up to the desired amount and adds it to the chosen site. Eg. I had a bait with 5 bait in and I want to have 40 in it, I choose 40 in the top right corner of the UI, click refill button next tot hat bait site and 35 bait get consumed from my inventory (40-5=35). That’s it. Please note that cost per service is the same, regardless how much bait you put into your bait site. Enjoy!

Antler shed collectables are coming!

Here’s something I’ve hinted about before, and it’s another feature that has been asked for countless times. New collectables! Antler sheds with their very own leaderboards. Roberto and Patrick are working on enabling all our male antlered species shed their crowns in respective reserves and Luna is working on sorting out the scoring and leaderboards. Stay tuned for more news on this!

Lock&Learn – Devs vs Community

Oh, and don’t forget to join us today at 16:00 on our official Twitch channel to celebrate 3000 followers. Johanna, Stefan, Greg and myself will clash against four community members: Nightmare, Dragonhorn, Raw100 and magicISO on the battlefield of Hirschfelden. Who do you think will win? See you there!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Time for a status update! As we at Expansive Worlds are enjoying the last days of the very short and, as always in Sweden, erratic summer, we are hard at work tinkering with all the wonderful stuff that will soon to be added to the game. So, Luna is adding her loving final touches to the web barrel and feeder management and in the near future you can expect to be able to hire a little horde of invisible helpers to run around the EHR filling your bait sites while you are at work looking forward to a successful hunt on Hemmeldal or Bushrangers Run.

Bobcat sneak peek

Our biggest darling right now, Bobcat, is being worked on and polished and getting ready to jump into the testing phase (when the real work begins, some might argue). There were a lot of questions about how you will be able to hunt them and whether there will be some special equipment for them in the store. We are still nailing the last nuances of the hunting gameplay, so you will have to wait a bit for a definite answer. All I can say right now is that there will be some sort of lure for them but they, as I’ve mentioned before, will be very challenging to hunt.

I know that many of you have been dying to see the upcoming Bobcats, and here you go. A sneak peek of some renders from our talented character artist Cecilia, and animator Moe. Why yes, there will be albinos, the coveted gem of any trophy lodge!

A necessary reminder that these images are work in progress and what you see is not final.

Crunching Fiesta Numbers

Our Summer Fiesta has been rocking and rolling for two weeks now and we have crunched some data for you on the missions: 133 hunters have competed Johanna’s Epic Hunter missions pack, 31 have completed my Legendary Journey pack and 22 have completed caledonianblues’s Nightmare Mode pack. Only 13 hunters have completed all three packs! If you compare it to 160 who have completed the infamous Doc steps in mission back in 2014, this is a very special achievement! To honour all hunters who will have completed all three of the mission packs by the end of Summer Fiesta, Doc established a special trophy. Doc’s Hunting Champion! A true hallmark of hunting finesse. You still have over two weeks to get it into your trophy gallery, so you can cherish it for years to come 🙂 Game on!

Special Lock&Learn

Here’s a heads-up that next Thursday, August 18th, our Twitch channel will host a special livestream to celebrate the milestone of 3000 followers. You will be able to see the EW developers clashing with community members in an epic battle. The names of developers and participants from the community, chosen from those who applied last week, will be announced next week.

Premium tripod shooting rest

Finally, a new deluxe tripod shooting rest arrived in the store this week. Some of you might have seen it from before as it was featured in the rustic lodge. As the rest of premium items in theHunter Classic, it features a higher price point but offers no additional gameplay advantage that would make competitions unfair or make the game unbalanced in any other way. The main purpose of those items is to add an extra spice to the game experience while not interfering into the gameplay and give their owners a sense of having something special.

That’s it from us for today!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hey you hunters,

Thanks for stopping by on this beautiful August Friday to read up on what we’ve been up to.

Summer Fiesta

Have you already gotten your teeth into our Summer Fiesta? If not, then you should, you absolutely should. This year we’ve prepared a delicious spread for you: a) a grand month-long Scoresaver competition with new animals being added every Tuesday and Friday (Black Bear and Grizzly are already in, and seven more will join them when their turn comes); b) three packs of challenging missions (at least two players, Sycoshowbob and Ravenous_Fox, have already completed all of them, impressive!);  c) four skill based competitions for each of the week of August. The first one, Stealth Challenge is already live and kicking and awaiting all belated hunters to fight for the fame and glory, as well as a unique trophy. You can read all the details and discuss the Fiesta in this dedicated thread.

Are you ready to meow?

Now, onto something that has been the talk of the past week – the new species in the works. As sneaky as I was trying to be in my hints, you’ve sussed me out pretty fast, even my strategic attempt to throw you off with my avatar didn’t work. It is the Bobcat indeed! We are as hyped and as excited as you are, it being the first feline ever to reach theHunter Classic, and we are all committed to doing a great job on this fluffy and mesmerizing fella. The work with the model and animations is in its final stages and the client programmers are hard at work coding their unique behaviours. As work progresses, we will be keeping you updated with some behind the scenes details, screenshots and other assets, so make sure to come to this blog  regularly.

Lock&Learn – 3000 followers celebration!

Our Lock&Learn stream on Twitch started a bit more than one year ago when Johanna joined the EW team and it has grown into a cosy weekly opportunity for the community to hang out in the chat following Johanna and Stefan’s adventures in theHunter Classic and theHunter: Call of the Wild. Yesterday they tried their luck at one of the Summer Fiesta missions, pretty successfully, if you don’t count one very unfortunate Roosevelt Elk (you can catch the replay of it here, starting at ca. 4:23). In the meantime our Twitch channel has grown to 3000 followers – thanks for your support everyone! To celebrate this milestone, we are doing a celebration Lock&Learn stream on August 17th, and anyone from the community can apply to join! If you are interested in taking part, please fill in this form by August 8th.

Say hello to Martin

Finally, today we are happy to introduce you to the latest addition to our team – Martin, our new QA engineer, who will be making sure that the new releases go as slick as a snake in a barrel of butter, and giving the devs a helping hand in our continuous agony and ecstasy of fixing bugs.

Greetings everyone, my name is Martin Sundberg and I’ll be the next addition to the Expansive Worlds team, nice to meet all of you!

When I play games, I want to be completely immersed, remove everything around me and just be there and then. That’s why I believe there’s nothing worse than to be drawn from or out of an experience due to bugs or other abnormalities. If you haven’t guessed it already I’ll be joining the team as a Quality Assurance Engineer.

I grew up close to Stockholm in a little town called Vaxholm. I’ve always loved games, for as long as I can remember and more often than not I played a little too much… So, at a young age I decided I wanted to become a game developer.

My first milestone was to get through university so I applied for a school in southern Sweden called Blekinge Institute of Technology. While studying there I met five other people with the same ambition as myself. We founded Gatling Goat Studios and to date we’ve released two games, they are called Traverser and Chicku (you can find trailers on YouTube ;)!

After a total of five years in Karlshamn I wanted to move on and widen my horizons with new experiences and that’s when I found this opportunity. Now I’m here and I’ll do my best to help the game become even better!

See you around the forums!

That’s it from us for today, have an awesome weekend and get cracking on those Fiesta missions. I am off to find some sneaky Willow Ptarmigans and pray to the gods of EHR that one of them is over 600 in score 😀

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hi there hunters,

Welcome to our status update! The depleted force of the theHunter team is making its way through July, sustained by the occasional ice cream and dreams about the beach. Our main work right now is focused around planning the autumn roadmap and features (and oh my, there is some good stuff in there) as well as polishing and testing things that will soon be released for you to enjoy.

Yesterday, a spanking new shotgun made its way into the store. The 10 GA lever-action shotgun. This beautiful firearm packs some no-nonsense power. And while at theHunter we, like no one else, appreciate sophisticated and skilful weapon work, based on correct weapon choice and precise shot placement, we won’t lie and say we haven’t been enjoying this beast of a gun. It’s super fun, and its three ammo types make it extremely versatile. According to our community member JimboCrow, it’s “sweeter than strawberry-rhubarb pie with powdered sugar and a scoop of vanilla!” Long story short, you should try it out. As always, we’re running a special competition to give your first hunts with the new shotgun an extra punch. Enjoy!

At the beginning of the next week we’re kicking off our month-long Summer Fiesta event which will make sure you don’t get bored in the last days of summer. Johanna, David and yours truly, under the eagle eye of our game designer Patrick, have prepared three missions packs for you (easy peasy, nothing to worry about!) and there will be 5 different competitions for all the competitive souls. Our artist Johan has made some brilliant trophies too, well worth your hunting skills! Anyway, make sure to check back next week for more details.

Since we dropped the new animal bomb in the last status update, there have been a bunch of speculations on the forum. Great to see that with 39 unique species in the game, you are still as excited about new additions as ever! I’m happy to report on the progress. Our character artist Cecilia has finished the model and textures and our animator Moe and client code programmers Linus and Roberto are busy crafting some lovely animations and unique (!) AI behaviours. I haven’t seen many correct guesses as to what it so far, so here are some thought-provoking details for you. The 40th resident of the EHR will live on Logger’s Point, Whitehart Island and Rougarou Bayou (preliminary reserves, still subject to change) and our vision is that it will be an extremely challenging animal to hunt. We’ll see where we end up at the end of the development and testing phase though. So, any more ideas? 😉

Finally, I wanted to share with you this sneak peek of the premium feature Luna has been working on. Filling feeders and barrels from the launcher to let you focus on real hunting. Please note that it is still very much work in progress.

Next status update will be published in two weeks, in the meantime, as always, see you and talk to you on the forum!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Good to see you in our woods! It’s been two weeks since our last status update, hope you haven’t missed us too much, with the new, apparently hugely popular Rustic trophy lodge out and all that. But you know, it’s July outside, and Sweden being Sweden, the action in town is slowly dying out due to the vacation season. We at theHunter are also pretty much decimated by the it, so you will see fewer and less regular updates in the next month (same goes about our support reply times), but we’ll be doing our best keeping you in the loop with the most important things going on in your favourite studio and your favourite game 😉

So, next week we are planning a small game patch with a fix for the longstanding issue of the slow loading inventory and GUI. We are also looking to collect information about other annoying bugs that are making your game experience less enjoyable. Please let us know your top three in this thread and don’t forget the link to the bug report thread on the bug report forums.

This Monday we had scheduled maintenance lasting for a couple of hours during which we moved to a new database all the crazy amount of your kills, achievements and poop found, among other less exciting things. Glad to see you survived that withdrawal. The move went smoothly, with a couple of minor errors that Luna fixed right away. For us this move is a significant infrastructure change, making our backend work more efficient, but you probably won’t notice any changes, except for how the leaderboards are being ordered. Now, if two animals have the same score, the oldest (earliest) kill will take a higher position.

There are a couple of hours left to submit your entry in our game design competition. We have already received a bunch of nice ones, but the door to the fame and glory path (not to mention Contributor title and em$) is still open and our ptarmigans in particular could use some of your love. One of the winning designs of our last challenge (Grizzly missions by drakle) have just been added to the game. We hope you enjoy them!

Finally, to give you something nice to contemplate over the weekend, here are some things we’re working on. Luna has started on the function to fill your barrels and feeders from the launcher to make your life a bit easier, and she is making a great progress so far. Roberto is baking a completely new type of collectables to add an extra level of immersion to game – a little bird told me they’ll even have their own leaderboard – whoa! Patrick is busy crafting insane and wonderful missions and competitions for our regular Summer Fiesta event that is going to start pretty, pretty soon. Linus is taking a stab at a new species. And David is working on a new frontend / backend feature that sometimes makes him cry but will probably be very welcomed by all of you. All in all, we are keeping ourselves busy, and lots of exciting stuff is coming. Thank you for playing and supporting theHunter Classic!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

Here is a short status update for you on this fantastic July weekend.

This week we have been busy at work adding some final touches to the new Trophy Lodge (inspired by your feedback) and testing it. As we are already in the final phase, I have managed to get a sneak peek screenshot from Mattias to share with you. We are very happy with the results and look forward to delivering it to you. Stay tuned for more news on the new Trophy Lodge very soon.

In the meantime, we also announced a new Game design competition for the species that are still missing regular missions and competitions. This is your chance to get that competition idea you’ve always wanted into theHunter and bag some pretty awesome prizes to boot. This time, following your suggestions, we have changed the format slightly. All three ptarmigan species will have their own competitions but share the same set of missions. We have also decided that if appropriate, we will pick and choose separate missions and competitions from complete packs, to put together the best of the best collections. Read more details on the competition in this forum thread, looking forward to your designs and ideas!

That’s it from us for now. Be sure to take advantage of our awesome large equipment sale running right now. This is a perfect opportunity to stock up on tents, tree stands, bait sites and other sweet items for your EHR adventures. Community member Mrmr123 has already bought 19 tree stands, but we don’t judge 😉

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Welcome to our weekly status update! Thanks for the great discussion about competitions following the last status update. There are many factors to consider and we have plenty to think about. We’ll be announcing a new game design competition next week and in the meantime, we’re preparing the missions and competitions of the winning entries from last time.

Midsummer in theHunter!

This week is Midsummer week in Sweden, and as promised we’re bringing a part of it to theHunter. For one, all trophy lodges in the EHR now feature special decorations and today, we’re launching a special event in which you’ll get a taste of a traditional Swedish cuisine and compete for some lovely trophies. Details and discussions are here.

.17 HMR Lever Action Rifle

Today we released a new rifle. A beautiful lever action in .17 HMR. It’s the first rifle in game that is ethical for both small game and foxes and we hope it’s going to become your new favourite. Please note that careful shot placement is of paramount importance when taking down foxes with this weapon. It’s also important to take distance into consideration. Following the tradition, we’re kicking off the new weapon by launching a special competition. Time to test that bad boy out on some bunnies.

Team

As there have recently been some changes to theHunter Classic team, we thought it might be a good time to take a new team picture. The game has been going for a long time. Many people have come and gone, each of them leaving behind a part of their work (and heart) in theHunter Classic. You can track the evolution of the team by these pictures:

December 2012
May 2013
February 2014
October 2014
September 2016

And here is the latest version of theHunter Classic family, sans Linus (who is on his day off today), Adam (who is working from the Vietnamese coast) and David (who works from home on a consultancy basis).

(From left to right top to bottom)

Johan Pauli – 3D Artist
Sacha Karsenty – Sales & Partnership Manager
Mattias Nordin – Art Lead
Patrik Andersson – Client Programmer
Cecilia Eriksson – Character Artist
Katarina Schultz – Frontend Programmer
Roberto Mangiafico – Lead Client Programmer
Greg Iwaniec – Sound Designer
Stefan Hoischer – Community Manager
Patrick Enz – Game Designer
Moe Awira – Animator
Johanna Schramm – Marketing Coordinator
Robin Andersson – Client Programmer
Alena Rybik – Producer
Luna Duclos – Backend Programmer

Trophy Lodges Open Day

Finally, there’s a cool community incentive going on right now. Trophy lodges open day! You can express your interest and discuss the details in this thread. Come join us, this is your chance to show off your awesome trophies!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

It’s status update time, so grab yourself a cup of hot joe, sit back and enjoy the read!

Last week we released a hefty game update with lots of fixes and a new, long requested feature – functional sunglasses. With that patch we were keeping the promise we made earlier in the year about commitment to quality and trying to maintain a balance between adding new stuff and improving the existing features and gameplay, as well as adding depth to the existing game. We realize we will probably never be able to fix all the bugs that get reported, but we have been and will continue doing our best to provide you with a game that is enjoyable to play. Hence, we’ve spent a lot of time (and Roberto and Luna tore a lot of hairs out) digging into the slow inventory and map loading times which, since the release of the trophy lodge, seemed to have spread to more players. This week, we finally saw what looks like a light at the end of the tunnel. There is still some work to be done before we can deliver it to you, but we are hopeful.

Another thing that has been in the works is a new iteration of the trophy lodge, which has been assigned codename “Rustic”. We took in a lot of the feedback you provided after the release, both when it comes to the gameplay, but also look and feel (thanks INTIMID883R, Fletchette and others!) and we will try to implement as much as possible. More news to come soon!

Yesterday we launched a the new pack of competitions. The Rocky Mountain Elk set, designed by our community member Ash1302. In the meantime, we would like to ask you whether you participate in our regular competitions. If yes, what are you favourite ones? And if no, why you think this is the case. Looking forward to your replies in the status update thread!

Next week Sweden and the rest of the Nordic countries are celebrating the holiday of Midsummer which is a local name for summer solstice. The whole team is off on Friday, eating pickled herrings and drinking snaps, and this year we’re also adding some special Swedish fun to theHunter as well. Come back in the middle of next week for more news on this!

Team news
We have had some team movements over the last weeks. For one, our QA manager Dennis Borg has left us. Thank you for everything Dennis, you will be missed! We also have a new addition to theHunter family now. A front-end developer Katarina has joined us to replaced Magnus, who has been working on theHunter: Call of the Wild for the last months. Katarina has already settled in and is now working on the function to let you visit friends’ trophy lodges when in single player. Read her intro below and say hello 🙂

Hi all, I’m Katarina (Kitty or Kat works just as well) and I’m joining the awesome theHunter Classic team as a Frontend Developer.
 
I’m born and raised in Uppsala which is approximately 40 min by train north of Stockholm. I did however spend 8 years living in London where I worked and also studied music for a short period of time. Apart from playing drums (and of course video games) I also enjoy yoga, cooking and having fun with family and friends.
 
I’m very eager to get to know all of you and to learn and grow with the company and it’s amazing culture.

Survey results
Finally, it’s time to announce the results of our traditional annual survey. This year we collected responses from 5609 people – thank you everyone, the feedback and information you shared are very valuable!

Although we can’t make all the results public, every single response will be evaluated and all answers will be taken into consideration when we decide on our future roadmap. We hope you forgive us for including Trophy Room in it by the way, it was a bit sneaky, but if we hadn’t done it you would have been on to us in no time 😉

Now let’s dig into some data:

* You mostly play to enjoy the game experience and increase your Hunter Score and stats. The third most popular option was to have fun with friends.

* 95.82% of our players would recommend theHunter to a friend – thank you for your support and loyalty <3

* Another sweet number – 92.59% players who have made a purchase in the game would consider buying something again and around 90% think that their purchase offered good or ok value for money.

* 84.06% of all respondents are satisfied, very satisfied or extremely satisfied with our  communication.

* 81.94% of players experience bugs in-game occasionally, seldom or never, whereas about 18.06% often or almost every session.

* Our efficiency at dealing with bugs was evaluated with 7.02 as the weighted average, on a scale from 1 to 10. That is the best result we’ve seen since we started asking this question!

* Over 40% of respondents play mostly single player, with another 25.94% both single- and multi-player.

We’ve randomly chosen 7 players who have filled in the survey and added them 1000 em$ each:
TosaInu
Whiteonyx
Wby257
Spyre9
Zadepam
Laces3345
satancete

–  spend them well!

That’s it from us for today!

Happy hunting!

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