Howdy hunters,

Hope y’all are fine and dandy on this marvellous Friday! Stockholm is finally warming up following the seemingly endless winter, and people at the office are also becoming less grumpy and even Doc feels like a rather pleasant human being, for once!

Doc’s Desk Mystery

We believe it’s your fantastic efforts to clear his desk of all the mess that has put him in a chirpy mood. As I write this, the total number of community harvests is approaching 440,000 which means we are almost halfway through, and some things are starting to become visible to tease your imagination. There are some guesses and theories being shared in the forum but, for now, we won’t be commenting on those. Not until the last leaf falls off Doc’s desk. We’re following the thread and reading your conversations eagerly, discussing it intently within the team. Thank you for your fantastic engagement!

10mm Semi-Automatic Pistol

Earlier this week we released a new instalment for our handgun gallery. The sleek 10mm semi-automatic pistol. Semi-automatic firearms have been notoriously popular with our community and this one is no exception. Following your feedback about the performance of the pistol versus large game, yesterday we tweaked its ballistics data a bit to give it slightly better penetration. Right now we are running a special close-up challenge for you to try out the new pistol, and you can also find a matching bundle in the store.

Player Survey

Following our good tradition, every year in spring we run a large player survey. Lots of good things have made their way into the game as a result of those surveys, including Timbergold Trails, feral goats, not to mention more stuff that is currently in the pipeline. Of course, we collect your feedback every day from the forums, support and social media channels, but this kind of global survey helps us reach as many of you as possible and collect a vast amount of community data, to make sure that we are developing the game you enjoy.

The theHunter 2017 survey will be open for 14 days, from today until May 19th midnight CEST.

It should take you no longer than 15 minutes and we would appreciate your honest and detailed feedback. You can only participate once, but please ask your hunter friends to complete it as well. If you answer all the questions and fill in your theHunter name at the end, you’ll be automatically enrolled in our em$ draw, in which we will randomly choose five players and gift them 1,000 em$. You can also choose to submit your answers anonymously. Please note that even if you let us know your name, the information you provide will not be stored with your account details, shared, sold, distributed or used in any other way that may harm you.

Take the survey

Odds and Ends

Finally, we would like to give you a brief overview of what we are working on. Obviously, almost all of us are busy with the mysterious creation hidden on the Doc’s desk, but not only that. Roberto has been doing an excellent job on our web launcher, and we can now say that we are in a very safe spot when it comes to patching the web launcher so that you don’t have to resort to the Steam workaround any more (unless you prefer to use Steam of course). We still have some work to do there before we can confidently say that we fixed the issue once and for all, but we are getting there.

Linus and Moe worked on some Dall Sheep related bugs that were fixed in the patch yesterday. We are aware of the crazy Dall Sheep scoring bug that is still experienced by some players, and we continue investigating it. In the meantime, we will regularly rid the leaderboards of erroneous scores.

As always, we are trying our best to find a good balance between fixing bugs and developing new things and we appreciate your help in filing proper and detailed reports in the bug forums, which we always read and take into account.

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hi hunters, it’s status update time!

Reindeer is here

As we announced in the game update, the herd of reindeer is now migrating through Hemmeldal, shaking their majestic antlers all over the area.

Here are some gameplay notes for you to keep in mind: The herd is broken up into smaller groups which cross over the borders, move across the reserve and cross the border again, leaving Hemmeldal. The game mechanic is similar to that of the waterfowl. If a reindeer is injured, the migratory behaviour gets cancelled to prevent it from being out of reach of the hunter.

Hunting reindeer is different from other deer species. They are always on the move, stopping only to feed. This will make spotting and stalking easier if players cooperate: by helping each other, players can pinpoint the reindeer and relay the information to other players who can get ready to give the animal a warm welcome.

Reindeer also are less attracted by callers. However, using an antler rattle will attract males looking for trouble.

New reserve sneak preview

The new Alpine reserve is slowly emerging and today we’re ready to share some screenshots with you. Please bear in mind that the work is ongoing, and some things are subject to change.

Once again, we’d like to ask for your ideas and inspiration when it comes to naming the new reserve. It has become a great theHunter tradition to come up with reserves’ names with the collaborative help of the community (Hirschfelden was initially a suggestion by community member MonacoSteve and Rougarou Bayou was brought up by player Mills), and we’re happy to continue with it. Your name suggestions must reflect the soul and nature of the new reserve as well as fit nicely all the other geographical names in the EHR. Your suggestions are very welcome in this thread.

User survey

It’s been a while since we ran a player survey, and with all new players having joined us following the Steam launch, we thought it’s time to do it again. As usual, we’re asking for your help to set priorities for the future development of the game, but please do not make assumptions of the future content and features, based solely on the fact that they were mentioned in the survey.

The survey is up and running and will be open until September 7th midnight CEST. You can only participate once. You can choose to remain anonymous or fill in your theHunter name, in the latter case you will automatically take part in our em$ draw, during which we will randomly choose three players who have completed the survey and will add 1000 em$ to their accounts. Please note that even if you let us know your name, the information you provide will not be stored with your account details, shared, sold, distributed or used in any other way that may harm you.

Complete the survey

Happy reindeer hunting!

Discussion

Hello Hunters!

This week we’re introducing our new team member and presenting some results of the latest player survey.

Meet Dante

Player survey – Results

We’ve had a record of almost 3,000 people filling in our player survey, thank you for your invaluable input everyone! Although we can’t publish all the results, we’d like to share with you some numbers that we’ve found interesting. About the unpublished results, you can be absolutely sure, that every single answer will be carefully evaluated and taken into consideration when planning the future of theHunter.

So, according to 3,000 players who have completed the survey:

• Most of you play theHunter to enjoy the game experience. The second most popular answer was working on hunter score and skills, closely followed by having fun with friends.

• As for the issue of bugs in theHunter: 37.45% of players experience them occasionally or not more often than in any other game, 30% – seldom, 16.65% – quite often, 8.66% – almost every session and 7.11% – never.

You’ve evaluated our efficiency at dealing with bugs with 6.92 as the average score, on a scale from 1 to 10:

• 97.52% of our players would recommend theHunter to a friend, this figure has made us very happy …

… as well as another one: 95.32% players who have made a purchase in the game would consider buying something again:

• You are mostly satisfied with our communication, the average score being 3.68 on the scale from 1 to 5:

• Almost 80% of our players don’t play any other hunting games:

• Curiously, the hunter/non-hunter in real life ratio of our players is very close to 50/50:

• Our players who are hunters in real life have evaluated the level of realism of theHunter as high as 6.64 on average on a scale from 1 to 10:

• And finally, here is the word cloud with the most important words used by respondents when answering what are three best things in theHunter (the bigger the font of the word or phrase is, the more often it has been mentioned):

As promised, we’ve randomly chosen three players who have filled in the survey and added them 1000 em$ each: the lucky winners are pedroserra, Dron26 and Papajetz, congratulations!

That’s all for today, happy hunting!

Comments

Hello Hunters,

This week we have quite an exciting piece of news for you, something the community have been waiting for a long time. But first thing’s first…

Server news

As you know, on Monday the site was closed for a couple of hours because we were deploying the new code, as a preparation for our move-to-the-cloud project. We’ve fixed all major bugs caused by the new code, to a large extent thanks to many detailed and straight to the point reports you’ve provided. There are still some minor issues left, if you notice any, please make sure to let us know in this forum thread. We’d appreciate specific and meticulous reports, they are of huge help for us when debugging. Unfortunately, comments like “Nothing is working, fix it now!” neither help us nor speed up the process.

Because of Monday’s downtime and game-breaking bugs, we added one additional day to all active memberships, so that our technical hiccups don’t affect you. As a little “thank you” for your patience and support in these quite turbulent days, our new flat cap that was planned for St. Patrick’s Day, will be available in the store for free until the end of the week.

We will continue preparing for the big move and, once ready, we’ll announce it in advance.

New species in town!

It’s been a while since we introduced Mallard Ducks and we know that you all are very eager to get a new species in theHunter. So, today we’re thrilled to shed some light on what the team has been working on for the last couple of months – another member of the waterfowl family and a popular resident of the community Thoughts & Suggestions forum, the noble and graceful Canada Goose. The habitat of the new birds will be Hirschfelden and they will feature a similar to Mallards gameplay, although with some unique peculiarities. Canada Geese will become available to hunt once we are completely done with the server transition (will be announced separately), until then here are a couple of pictures to give you a sneak peek and something to look forward to.

Player survey reminder

In less than one week we’ve received almost 2000 replies to our survey, wow and thank you everyone who took time to share your thoughts with us! It is still a drop in the ocean though and we would love to collect more insights, to be able to draw as complete picture as possible of what you think of theHunter and in which direction you want us to develop. If you haven’t filled our survey yet, please consider doing it, there are only a couple of days left, as the survey closes on March 23rd midnight CET. This is your chance to influence the future of theHunter and win a sweet amount of em$!

Complete the survey

Happy hunting!

Comments

Hello Hunters,

This week’s status update is shorter than usual, since it’s rather quiet in the office, with all the attention concentrated on Herman, Emil and Adam’s corner and the upcoming server move. Speaking of which,

Server update

We had to shift the server move to early next week, to make sure that everything goes as smoothly as possible. Later this week we’ll publish more detailed information about the work we are doing as well as the dates and scheduled downtimes.

User survey

We want to get to know you, our community, better and hear what you have to say. So, today we’re launching a user survey and inviting you to complete it, to help us improve theHunter. The results of the survey will guide us in our future work on developing the game, however, we are asking you not to make assumptions that certain features will be introduced, based solely on the fact that they were mentioned in the survey.

The survey is already live and will be open until March 23rd midnight CET, so you will have 10 days to complete it. It shouldn’t take you longer than 15 minutes to answer all the questions, and you can only participate once. We will appreciate your honest and detailed answers. You can choose to remain anonymous or fill in your theHunter name, in the latter case you will automatically take part in our em$ draw, during which we will randomly choose three players who have completed the survey and will add 1000 em$ to their accounts. Please note that even if you let us know your name, the information you provide will not be stored with your account details, shared, sold, distributed or used in any other way that may harm you.

Complete the survey

Happy hunting!

Comments