Hello hunters,

Welcome to our weekly status update!

Birds of a feather

If you missed our game update earlier today, we’ve just released a flock of Rock Ptarmigans onto the mountainous regions of Val-des-Bois where the birds will join the previously solitary Alpine Ibex. The ptarmigans will surely remind you of Pheasants, since they are distant relatives, but they also have some distinctive features as well. For one, they are more social and thus prefer to hang out in larger families. In addition, they have an excellent camo and blend with the environment exclusively, so spotting them won’t be easy. I shall let you find out the rest by yourselves 😉

To help make the search for Ptarmigans easier, we’ll add 40 free units of climbing gear to every player’s inventory who starts a hunting session between today and the end of Monday, August 1st (CEST). Go crazy on those ridges and don’t forget your medkits.

“What about the Willow Ptarmigans?” I hear you ask. We are still working on those little ones. There are some small issues to be ironed out before we are 100% satisfied with their quality and performance. You may come across some traces of their presence on the website, such as achievements, but we’ll make a proper announcement once they are officially released.

Summer Fiesta firing up

On Monday we kicked off our traditional Summer Fiesta. Lots of challenging missions, a competition with a new format and, of course, sales, trophies and prizes. Tons of hunting fun to add some thrill and excitement to your month of August 😉

A few people have already completed all the missions, woop woop! So we’ll see whether Doc will need to step in again and stir the things up a bit. Today the new animal entered the competition, and I hope you’ve been using your attempts sparingly, since there will be lots of jokers later on 😉

You can find the description and discussion of this event in this forum thread.

Community design competition #2

It’s time for the second part of our hugely successful game design competition. There are still three species missing their specific challenges and we are calling for your imagination and game knowledge! It will be a bit different this time, as your task will be to create a set of missions or competitions for all fours duck species. Mallard, American Black Duck, Northern Pintail and Gadwall. The rules can be found in this forum thread and you will have ten days to submit your design for a chance to win 5,000 em$ / 90 membership days, a very special Contributor membership (that will remain with you for the rest of your life in theHunter) and an exclusive “Almost DEV” jacket!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello good hunters,

Welcome to our weekly status update!

Musings on game crashes

Starting with the big news, in case you missed it yesterday. We released a game patch which has been one of the most celebrated and welcomed game updates in the last months, both in theHunter team and the community. At least for people who were affected by repeated game crashes. In the patch we implemented the community-found and tested fix that we communicated in our last status update. The result is heart-warming and inspiring. Not only do we keep getting reports from people who have been plagued by those crashes that are able to play again with no problem after the patch, but we also see a huge drop in the numbers in our crash reporter tool.

Why just a drop and not a total elimination you ask? That is the million dollar question. The truth is that in any game, especially such an old and complex one like theHunter, with such an immense amount of content, there will always be crashes. Different combinations of software, hardware, actions performed in the game, Internet and server hiccups along with a host of other factors can cause the client to crash. The roots of those rare, random crashes are exceptionally difficult to locate. Although we are 100% committed to fixing as much as we can, especially when it comes to serious bugs and issues, we need to make our peace with the fact that the game will crash for some players once in awhile.

More bits and pieces about the patch

With the last game update we also included a fix for Sitka Deer that capped their antlers and made them too small. On your next hunt, drop by Whiterime Ridge to check them out and, while you are there, why not do some of the Sitka Deer missions created by Mills?

Continued bug fixing

Some known issues that we are looking into right now are disappearing climbing ropes on Val-des-Bois, Arctic Fox footstep sounds as well as weapon wobble on the towers. We are aiming to release a smaller patch with fixes for those very soon. Stay tuned!

Time for a new animal?

If you say so! While fixing stuff, we haven’t stopped working on new stuff for you to continuing experiencing theHunter as a constantly-evolving game. Yes, a new species is coming soon! Well, better to say, not one but two different species, which are variations, coming to two different reserves.

Dying for a hint? I thought so. As we never like making it too easy for you, make sure to come and watch our Lock&Learn today at 16:00 CEST on our official Twitch channel. This time Johanna will be accompanied by our User Acquisition Manager, Sacha, who joined us a couple of months ago and is now taking his first steps into the EHR. They will be hunting on one of the reserves where one the (two) new subspecies will reside, while also dropping some hints on what it will be. To spice the things up, the first person to guess the species and announce it in the livestream chat will get 1500 em$ on the spot. Hope to see you there!

Hunt ‘em all in Hemmeldal!

We continue releasing bundles with community loadouts that won in our competition, and it’s now time for Hemmeldal’s “Hunt-em-all” loadout by SloNeZ. You can pick it up here at a pretty great 53% discount!

That’s it from us for today!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Hope you are well on this glorious summer’s day. Here’s what has been happening at the Expansive Worlds’ Headquarters.

Game Crashes – Workaround Test

Here is some important information for those of you who have been experiencing issues causing the game client to crash. We’re hopefully starting to see some progress on the matter, thanks to the dedicated efforts of our awesome community members who’ve discovered and thoroughly tested the workaround. While we are testing it internally, you can try to implement it yourself following the instructions in this forum thread. Please read both the original post from caledonianblues as well as the post from our producer Philipp carefully, ask your questions and report your findings in that very same thread. We will be closely monitoring the data and once all testing is verified, we will build the solution and roll it out automatically for everyone.

Thanks again to our community members Pretty_Boy, Fletchette, caledonianblues and others who helped to test and roll this out to the larger community. You guys officially rock and we are humbled and honoured to have you playing with us! <3

Geek out on your hunting data!

Staying on the matter of impressive community efforts, make sure to check this sophisticated stats web app, developed by the aforementioned caledonianblues: https://www.uhcapps.co.uk/stats_lifetime.php?username=caledonianblues (just exchange “caledonianblues” in the URL to your own theHunter username to see your own stats). Search among your weapons, species, collectables, see some nice graphs of your hunting achievements and much, much more. Excellent work!

Semi-automatic wonderfulness

Yesterday we released another member of our semi-auto weapon family. The ultimate varmint equalizer, a .223 Semi-Automatic Rifle. From what we’ve gathered so far, the majority of you seem to like it, so that’s sweet! One of the common requests has been to expand the permitted species list by adding Sitka Deer (which by the way are getting a score upgrade in our next patch, don’t miss it). Our game designer Daniel is investigating this possibility, stay tuned for more news on this. If you want to see the rifle in all its glory, check out this video by our community member ronMctube:

Also, there is a nice bundle in the store right now with the new rifle, matching scope and a scent hound – have a look here.

Jambofinal is (almost) here

Our Football Jamboree 2016 is – alas – coming to an end. This Sunday is the last day when you can buy the “winning” t-shirt to secure that delightful 7mm Magnum Bullpup with gold engraving (it won’t be available in the store, ever), so place your bets and keep your fingers crossed for your favourite team to win. Following the requests from many players, we’re also releasing all the 32 national caps from theHunter Football Jamboree 2014. You can get them until the end of this week in our store.

New textures for old weapons

Recently we’ve been trying to show some love to our old content, and as part of this attempt we’ve given facelift and slight remodeling to our oldest (and arguably the least prettiest) rifles, the .243, .270 (wood), and .300 (composite) Bolt-Action Rifles. Go and check them in game to see the difference!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hi hunters,

It’s going to be a short status update today as there’s not much news from this corner of the world. The backend and client programming team, together with Dennis our QA Manager, continue working on persistent bugs, issues and crashes. Improvements for “alt-tabbing” and further sound memory fixes are in testing. On Monday we released a patch with some fixes for things that broke last week, game crashes due to sound memory allocation problems, and the pheasant scoring issue.

The art team has started working on something new and cool and you can expect to hear more on this in future updates.

The quarterfinals of our Football Jamboree are starting today. There are only 8 teams (or eight t-shirts) left. The prices go up again on Monday, so be sure to make your t-shirt bet while they’re still at a low price!

Yesterday we released the .45 Long Colt Revolver, “The Mule”. If you want to see it in action, check out this video HooCairs made back in January.

Check out the Lock&Learn stream today at 16:00 CEST on our official Twitch channel. Johanna will be joined by our community champion caledonianblues as they travel to Whiterime Ridge in pursuit of the mighty bison!

Last but not the least, on Monday theHunter team be having some visitors from a TV studio, who will be filming some footage of theHunter. We will of course let you know the details, including the broadcasting time and channel afterwards.

That’s it for today folks, more news next week. Happy hunting!

Discussion