Greetings hunters,

Another week has passed and things are great at Expansive Worlds. Our interns are getting up to speed and hopefully you will soon see some of their creations in the game.

We’ve started working on a new species, we’re telling you this much since some of you seems to think that we aren’t working on the right things. We will tell you more at a later stage, but as many of you, who have been around for a while, knows, it takes a very long time to complete a new species. For those of you who are fairly new, a new animal requires a lot of work from our graphic artists, animators, game programmers and game designer and most of the time they can’t work simultaneously, since they need to wait until the previous discipline has completed his part. We can also tell you that its one of the species mentioned in the user survey posted a while ago. So feel free to speculate on what it might be 😉

We’re aiming at releasing a bunch of new missions next week. The missions are being tested at this very moment and we need a few more days to make sure everything is fine and dandy.

And the winner is…
After long and hard discussions we’ve finally selected a winner in the Profile Shot Competition. We’d like to thank all of you who participated, and if you liked this kind of competition let us know, we might have another one in the future.

1st prize goes to ohotnikna who gets 5000 em$
 Second prize goes to vladimiroquai who gets 2500 em$

And finally third prize goes to ToyBoy who gets 1000 em$

We’ll end this status update with an apology. In the last installer we managed to add a rather undesirable feature. When you install the game the installer makes your browser auto start when you boot your PC and sets theHunter as default web site. This was never our intention, but we have added a fix in the new launcher that will remove this. So if you are experiencing these problems just update the launcher (you do this by starting a new game) and the problem will be resolved.

If for some reason the automatic fix does not resolve the problem you can manually address it by following these steps:

(Windows XP, Windows 7)

1. Open the start menu and navigate to “All Programs/Startup”
2. Right click “theHunter” and select “Delete”
3. If there is a dialog about administrator permissions click “Continue”
4. Done!

(Windows 8)

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete
2. Select “Task Manager”
3. Select the “Startup” tab
4. Right click “theHunter” and select “Disable”
5. Done!

Once again, we’re terribly sorry about this. Happy hunting!

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We have closed down the survey since we felt we had enough answers. We’d like to thank all of you who took the time to fill it out. The findings will guide us in improving the game and to make sure we’re working on the things you, our community, wants. We had a workshop on Tuesday, where we discussed the result of the survey and made some initial planning. It seems as Daniel is very disappointed that not more of you seemed to like the idea of paintball guns in the game. I’m sure he’ll tell you about his vision when it comes to the subject of paintball later on.

We also spent a few hours trying some different rifles at the shooting range. Unfortunately we had so much fun so we totally forgot to take pictures…

We’ve launched a new feature today: Teams! Teams is an optional way to organize players in a multiplayer game into teams. This can be used for things like unofficial competitions with players on the same server or to allow private communication between a group of players in a free for all game. There might also be other uses that we haven’t thought of so be creative! You will soon be able to read more about how teams work in the wiki.

We are aware of that there may be some questionable ethics involved in the type of hunting that comes from real-time competition but we feel that this is a case where fun has to prevail over realism.
We would also like to point out that this is an experimental feature and we will, as always, monitor community feedback to guide its future development.

Sadly we have something negative to bring up. We really don’t want to bring it up, since we don’t want this to happen in our game, but unfortunately it does. If a player uses a hijacked PayPal account or stolen credit card to pay for anything in the game, he/she will immediately be banned from the game. It is against the law and it gets reported to the police, but it also costs us a lot of money in fees.

We’ve fixed a few minor bugs in the game and you can read more about in the game update.

Happy Hunting!

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