After many years of service and having been applied to countless thousands of hours of the most realistic hunting experience, our once brilliant Hunter Score system has lost its appeal for many players. The reasons are numerous, the most brought up being the amount of weapon variations which we’ve added over years, each carrying its own achievements, further influencing the Hunter Score figures. Another one is that it has become somewhat of a never-ending and demotivating task to increase one’s Hunter Score, with the Achievements bars being set so high.
The challenge to redesign a system with such a huge amount of data, affecting every single player we’ve ever had, hasn’t been an easy one, and what we’re releasing today has gone through many iterations. Our main goal with the new system was to find a balance between preserving what you’ve already achieved in the EHR while adding additional levels to the Hunter Score which would eliminate the problem of weapon variations, making the system more compelling for beginner hunters (imagine joining the game and looking at the achievement progress bars of top players) while still attractive for players with many years of EHR hunting under their belt. As much as we would like to introduce even deeper identifiers of one’s hunting skills and the breadth of one’s gameplay (such as, we wanted to add Hunter Score points for completing missions, harvesting rare animals, competition trophies, harvest value etc.) this has proven to be a huge task for us, at least for the time being given our resources and other projects in the pipeline. In the new improved system, we’ve removed “Exploration” from counting towards your Hunter Score, as this is one of the most controversial categories. Instead we replaced it with another category (which some might find as controversial). That new category is “Collectables”, inspired by community feedback relating to mushrooms and other treasures being meaningless.
Long story short, after months of hard work we are proud to present you with the new Hunter Score. In a nutshell:
1.Achievements. Our Achievement system will remain untouched in terms of numbers and thresholds. However, it will represent nothing more than in-game achievements. As usual, you will receive an in-game pop-up and hopefully a sense of gratification after reaching achievement milestones, but this progression will have no direct impact on your Hunter Score. Achievements will become a means of gauging your own progression, competing against yourself to become a better hunter, but not something to compare yourself against others in game.
- To add an additional edge to the Achievement system, we are introducing two new features: Achievement Collector Badges. They are available in five different categories, named after EHR animals and ranked by their hunting difficulty. Those badges will be awarded to you after you’ve reached a certain percentage of Achievement points available and will be displayed on your profile, under your profile picture. Badges are dynamic, which means that if the amount of Achievement points becomes higher, they get recalculated.
Turkey – 90 – 100% existing achievement points
Red Fox – 75 – 89% existing achievement points
Black Bear – 50 – 74% existing achievement points
Roosevelt Elk – 25 – 49% existing achievement points
Moose – 5 – 24% existing achievement points
- Achievement Master Header images. Those are the available in six different variations for each of the Achievement categories. You unlock them by reaching certain levels in becoming a Species, Weapons or Exploration Master. Unlike Achievement Collector Badges, once unlocked, images remain available to you forever, even if there are more species and weapons introduced later. You can pick the image you want to display on your profile within the Profile Settings menu. If you don’t choose any, the most recently earned head image will be displayed by default.
Species Master
Level 1 – 1 harvest for every species of animals
Level 2 – 25 harvests for every species of animal.
Level 3 – 100 harvests for every species of animal.
Level 4 – 250 harvests for every species of animal.
Level 5 – 500 harvests for every species of animal.
Level 6 – 1000 harvests for every species of animal. 
Weapon Master
Level 1 – 1 harvest using all unique weapons with separate Achievements.
Level 2 – 25 harvests using all unique weapons with separate Achievements.
Level 3 – 100 harvests using all unique weapons with separate Achievements.
Level 4 – 250 harvests using all unique weapons with separate Achievements.
Level 5 – 500 harvests using all unique weapons with separate Achievements.
Level 6 – 1000 harvests using all unique weapons with separate Achievements.
Exploration Master
Level 1 – “10 Traveled” (10 km) + “1 hours” (1 h)
Level 2 – “Evergreen Marathon” Achievement (42 km) + “A Day Well Spent” (24 h)
Level 3 – “Stockholm-Copenhagen” Achievement (522 km) + “Heroic Hunter” (72 h)
Level 4 – “Los Angeles-Austin” Achievement (1987 km) + “Master” (336 h)
Level 5 – “New York-Paris” Achievement (5851 km) + “Veteran” (720 h)
Level 6 – “Globe Trotter” Achievement (40076 km) + “Legend” (8760 h)
- Steam achievements. We are finally bringing out these bad boys! Steam achievements will mirror our existing achievements per animal, unique weapon as well exploration and total harvests. To unlock an animal or weapon achievement, you need 250 harvests per animal / weapon (except duck, geese and mallards, those have 1000 harvests). Exploration and total harvests have different levels, please check all the details on our Steam page.
2. Ranks. Ranks are the new sheriffs in town, i.e. they will count towards your Hunter Score. Ranks come in three categories. These categories are Species, Weapons and Collectables. Species and Weapons are grouped in the same way as our Skills system, so all species have their own Ranks and all unique weapons have their own too. Weapon variations, such as the three different Plinkingtons, are grouped together and harvests with any of the three of them will count towards the same Rank.
Example:
The “.22 Plinkington” comes in three color variations; “The .22 Plinkington Blue Marble”, “The .22 Plinkington Winter Camo” and the “The .22 Plinkington Wood”. All of these count toward the same Rank and no matter which gun a player uses, all kills count towards the one Plinkington Rank which in turn counts toward the Hunter Rank.
What it looks like in the old system:
22 Plinkington “Blue Marble” has 100 kills
.22 Plinkington “Winter Camo” has 50 kills
.22 Plinkington “Wood” has 50 kills
… would look like this in the new system:
.22 Plinkington has 200 kills
Collectables have three Ranks: Common mushrooms, Rare mushrooms and Treasures.
Each kill per Rank adds you one Hunter Score point. All Ranks are currently limited to a maximum of 500 points, aimed to make the system as accessible as possible. Please note that we will monitor the performance of the new system in the first months and will adjust the bar if we deem it necessary to do so.
That’s it! You can now go to your profile, check your new Hunter Score and new place on the Hunter Score Rank Leaderboard (please note the Hunter Score recalculation will take some time), Achievement badge and headers images. Have a look and let us know what you think!
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