Hello hunters,

It’s Thursday again and it’s status update time.

News from the tech corner

We are still busy with the server move which will happen some time next week. During the move the forum and wiki will be down for some time before they re-emerge in their new capacities. We’ll keep you updated as to when this will happen, the game itself won’t be affected though. Because of the server move our backend guys have been working in kind of force majeure circumstances, but after it’s done we’ll have more time to devote to some lingering issues which we know have spoiled the game experience for many of you, such as spotting and tracking stats not updating as they should.

Today we released a patch with bug fixes and we will continue working on other pestering bugs, such as the game sometimes not closing, travelling distance not calculating properly, the harvest function of the huntermate bug not working as it should and other issues reported by you in our bug report forums or via support. Unfortunately, we can’t tell you which bugs will be fixed and when, as it is impossible for us to make those promises. We understand that “we are working on it” is not the most satisfactory reply, but it is the only one a game programmer can give before the fix is tested and committed. We just want to reassure you that we are 100% committed to improving the quality of the game and we want to thank you for your patience.

New guest competitions

As we promised before, we will be splitting all free species competitions into two divisions: one will only be open to guests, the other one only to members. You can tell members only competitions by their names. Both divisions will feature new trophies, designed by CaptainMunch and our artist Tomas. This change will happen in two steps:

• This Friday, March 11, the free species competitions that are running over the weekend will only be open to guests.
• On Monday, March 14, when the competition schedule restarts, new members only competitions will start running alongside the guest only versions. This also when the new trophies will be added.

This is a new feature for us, so we appreciate any feedback you might have. Please share it either by contacting support or leaving a comment to this status update thread.

Game contributor memberships

Briefly coming back to the winners of the community game design contest we announced last week. Apart from em$ or memberships, they will also receive a unique item. A little brother of the magic DEV jacket – well, they are almost devs, after all 😉

Aside from the jacket (will be added to winners’ inventories after the next patch), we wanted to add something extra special to those people who helped with making theHunter more fun and diverse, so, we’ll create a special membership type, Contributor, which will be assigned to players who have written their names in the history of the theHunter game development. Apart from the winners of the game contest above, it will also be given to Gostwind who created the design for the Ghillie suit, CaptainMunch who designed the new trophies, Stevenky (bowhunter93) who came up with the name Whiterime Ridge, MonacoSteve who came up with Hirschfelden and Haldur, who came up with Val-des-Bois. Our translators, wiki team members and moderators can also apply for this title – just give me a shout.

Membership sale

Today we’re kicking off an end-of-the-week membership sale which will run until Monday next week. It’s a good opportunity if your membership is about to run out or, even if not, just to make a bargain, since your membership time stacks.

Use the following codes in the store to get discounts on memberships and membership bundles:

• WAYFARER – 15% off on 3 months memberships and Wayfarer membership bundle
• PATHFINDER – 20% off on 6 months memberships and Pathfinder membership bundle
• TRAILRUNNER – 25% off on 12 months memberships and Trailrunner membership bundle

That’s it from us for today!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Ahoy all you good hunters, time for our weekly status update!

Polar Bear post mortem

We’ll start with the Polar Bear which we released earlier this week in a huntable mode. A common sentiment which we’ve gathered from many recent forum posts has been disappointment, since you got the impression that we didn’t listen to your feedback during the open beta by releasing it with hunting restrictions. To address this, we did listen very closely to your feedback and a lot of changes and tweaks were made solely based on your feedback (such as the bear fur colour). However, the final decision on the game design itself was taken long before open beta. We didn’t have room for any major changes in this respect and we should have been more clear about this, our bad! The event-based game design for Polar Bears has been the result of many a discussion and we of course have taken into consideration arguments that we see being brought up on the forum, theHunter being a hunting game and all. Community feedback and input has always been one of the main driving forces behind every single decision we take, but, naturally, it’s not the only important criterion we have to take into account as a company, there are a number of different factors that we need to weigh against each other.

Regarding the achievements and leaderboards many of you were asking about, we’ve decided to remove them in line with the underlying concept of the Polar Bear game design. It’s the first species in theHunter with which we are taking a step away from the sport, or trophy, style of hunting. The way the Polar Bear is intended to be hunted in the game is rather a population control style, and we don’t see achievements and leaderboards fitting into this. We understand and respect the fact that this way of hunting will not be for everyone, but our game is as diverse as our community, there are various ways to play it and we hope that everyone can find something to their liking.

If you haven’t had a chance to go on your first Polar Bear adventure yet, check out this new video by HooCairs to know what it’s like:

Update on game crashes

If you read our game update from the 1st of March, you saw the mysterious crash reporter note. Now, what it means is that we developed a more advanced and sophisticated software that allows us to collect better data quicker and therefore take a deeper look into game crashes. Since the crash reporter introduction, we’ve already found and fixed two game crashes (these will be included in the next patch). However, the most common one, that usually happens after quite some time playing the game, is still being looked into. It’s deeply rooted into our code and it’s going to take a while to get to the bottom of it. Alt+tab’ing the game significantly increases the chances of a crash, so if you want to stay on the safe side, try to minimize your alt-tab’ing when playing (or make sure to harvest all your downed animals before doing it). Hopefully this temporary solution will reduce the amount of crashes you experience while we continue working on the fix.

New forum and wiki

As we’ve mentioned a couple of times before, we’re in the process of moving the rest of our infrastructure to Google App Engine (the main game server move happened over one and half year ago, you can refresh your memories here). We’ve already moved our launcher and patching process (which will result in much faster and more pain-free downloads of the game and patches). Right now our hard working Wiki team is moving our precious well of theHunter knowledge onto its new place (more on this next week) and Calle is working his magic on the forum. As a part of this move, our good ol’ forum has received some much needed love, in form of a face-lift and improved user experience. We’ll be migrating onto the new forum within the coming weeks, and we’ll of course keep you in the loop. Here is the sneak peek screen of the new forum theme (still work in progress), stylized by our community member caledonianblues, together with our artist Marcus and backend dev Calle. Click to enlarge.

Desktop view

Mobile view

Winners of the game design contest

The community game design event has been a huge success with a whopping amount of entries (you can find all the numbers here). Daniel and myself have spent long hours going through your submission and we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of many designs, having said that we’ve also received a fair share of amusing ones (my favourite has been a mission objective to harvest a mutant Snowshoe Hare killed with a .22 Pistol with tranquilizer adapter). But the votes are in and winners are:

• Bison missions – Villkatta, for the unique historical touch
• Bison competitions – Ash1302, for the variety and staying true to existing competitions
• Snowshoe Hare missions – Bengalis17, for all the science
• Snowshoe Hare competitions – Bosloe, for keeping it short and sweet
• Arctic Fox missions – Waiora, for the meticulously pedagogical approach
• Arctic Fox competitions – Waiora again, *this guy is just too good*
• Sitka Deer missions – Mills, for a good story in the style of existing missions
• Sitka Deer competitions – Zack775, for good variety and sane approach

Bonus winner:

• Whiterime Ridge travel missions – Hardtree

Congratulations guys, you can be really proud of yourselves! You can find the winning designs here and we are starting to work on incorporating the first packs into theHunter.

All in all, the engagement in this contest has been amazing, and so was the quality! We are really impressed and are planning to do similar events in the future.

End of support for Windows XP and Vista

A reminder, as of yesterday, we no longer support outdated operating systems Windows XP and Vista. If you run those systems and can’t play theHunter any more, we are offering you a refund or membership transfer. You can find all the details in this announcement.

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Last week saw no status update, with quite a few people on the team, including myself, having been mown down by disease. It’s good to be back though!

Testing dem bears

The Open Beta for Polar Bear that started off last week is still ongoing and will run until Monday. This is the thread for your feedback as well as updates from us. As always, your testing and feedback have been of incredible help to us, and we are busy working on making some changes on the bear’s model, plus bugs, that we gathered from your posts and comments. Once we’re done with the final tweaks and fixes, we’ll be ready to go!

Polar Bear during Open Beta, image by Hardtree

The feedback about the Polar Bear and the event-based game design we’ve received so far has been mixed and we’re of course taking all of it into consideration. A lot of people have been concerned about the frequency of events during which the bear will be huntable as a “normal” species. We’ll make sure to run those events often enough for everyone to have their chance to hunt these magnificent animals, as well as announce them well in advance, so you can prepare. Among the majority of concerned people, one of the most common questions seems to be whether the special hunting events will happen often enough for everyone to have a chance to participate in them. We can assure you that we’ll be planning them very carefully and will aim to find the sweet spot for everyone.

About cheaters – again

Recently we’ve seen a lot of highly toxic threads on the forum about cheaters, so we thought it’s time to address it once again.

For one, we hate cheating as much as you do and we ban people who do it with no trepidation. We are aware of the situation with the increased amount of them lately and we are by no means ignoring the situation or taking it light-heartedly. We do have special anti-cheating software in place that detects abnormal player behaviour, however, as with any software, it’s not perfect, and cheats do slip through the cracks. That’s why we are extremely grateful when you help us to find culprits. Having said that, we are strongly against “witch hunts” on the forum as these kinds of discussions bring more harm than good to the community and for that reason the forum staff removes them. Here is what you should do instead, if you want to help us to deal with cheaters as efficiently as possible.

If you suspect someone plays the game in any way which is not intended, please report them to support. By “not intended” we mean using third-party programs and exploiting bugs to gain a game advantage. There are a couple of things that should make you suspicious when you look at someone’s hunting history; for example, an unusually high amount of animals shot in a very short time frame, from the same place etc. We greatly appreciate your reports and we try to deal with them as fast as possible. Thank you for your cooperation on this.

New competition division for guests

Staying on the topic of cheaters, there have recently been an increased amount of reports about guest accounts placing at the top of competitions by means of cheating. A competition might sometimes end before we are able to tackle the culprits which as a result robs honest hunters of their em$ and trophies and we get that this is really frustrating, especially for some who have been supporting the game by buying memberships.

As an interim solution we’ve decided to separate competitions for free animals into guest and member divisions, and this separation will happen as soon possible. We’ll also be looking into how we can further improve the situation.

Bits & pieces

A short recap of the Valentine’s event – the final leaderboard for that one can be found here, congratulations to all the winners and participants! Since this event design and implementation has received a fair amount of improvement suggestions, the plan is to repeat it soon, taking that feedback into consideration.

The community contest to design competitions and missions is now over (at least the submission phase) and we are busy going through your entries. The battle is fierce, especially in the bison mission department, and it’s a pretty tough job to pick the best designs, as there are a lot of real gems there! We’re going through all the submissions right now and are hoping to announce the winners in one of the next status updates.

Team news

Our client programmer Josef will be leaving us in a couple of weeks, he has done a great job with cold weather gameplay, Polar Bear and many, many more cool things during his time with theHunter. We are super grateful and sad to see him leave, but we already have a new programmer who will fill Josef’s shoes. Meet Patrick!

Hello everybody! My name is Patrik Andersson and I’ve just joined the theHunter team as a Junior Gameplay Programmer. I’m really happy and excited to be here, and I’m looking forward to all the challenges that lie ahead!

Before I started here, I have been working as a system developer at ABBA the Museum (though it was a touring exhibition when I worked there) developing interactive applications. After that, I worked for 5 years as a system developer at Saab AB (Security & Defense Solutions) where I was in a team developing a simulator used by military forces for virtual training (briefly, almost like a 3D-game). I worked mainly with the graphics engine and other graphics/gameplay related programming.

In my spare time I enjoy playing games, work with my own programming projects and hang out with friends. I also have a thing for tabletop games, so I enjoy painting and playing with miniature figures (Warhammer 40.000 mainly).

That’s is from us for now, happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

Welcome to a new status update in which we have some important things to tell you.

Time to confirm the sixth species coming to Whiterime Ridge. Well, it’s not exactly a secret anymore since a recent update to one of the reserve locations. The mighty Polar Bear it is! It was one of the top choices in the post-WRR survey and we thought that the arctic ice floats would remain pretty empty without someone jumping on them. However, naturally, we had some major concerns about introducing this animal to the game, given our stance on ethical and responsible hunting, and a Polar Bear is a vulnerable animal, the hunting of which is highly restricted in real life. We wanted to do it right. So, we tried to simulate real life conditions for hunting the Polar Bear as much as possible and the result has become the event-based game design which will be unique for this species at this point. According to the design, a handful of Polar Bears will spawn in Whiterime Ridge reserve, which you will not be permitted to shoot unless they attack you. Polar Bears killed in self-defense will not yield any score, nor will there be a harvest screen. Our good old Doc will of course send you an educational message on the matter too.

From time to time there will be special events in the EHR during which the Polar Bear population will increase due to various natural influences and animal control. During such an event the aforementioned restrictions will be lifted and players will be permitted to hunt Polar Bears like any other animal. Those events will run for long enough for players with not so much time on their hands to take part in and they of course will be announced well in advance.  I am sure that you all have a lot of questions about this game design, so please ask away in the forum and we will try to address them all.

To test the Polar Bear, we will be opening our beta servers for everyone, more details will follow early next week.

The EW team has now diligently responded to all of the questions in Ask us Anything – you can find their replies in this thread and can discuss them here. It is a bit of a lengthy read I am afraid, so make sure you have a drink and are comfortably sat before you embark on the reading journey. It has been a good exercise for us all and we are hoping to do it again some time!

Valentine’s Event or, to be more precise, the option of giftable points, has received some critique whereas you seem to like collecting our cute balloons and the ushanka “Mishka”. All feedback, both positive and negative, has been duly noted.

Finally, almost 2 years later than supposed, we are thrilled to present you the new trophies that will replace the old coins (the ones you have already received will not be replaced). The design for these trophies has been created by Captain Munch in our trophy design competition and here is what the final trophies made by Tomas look like:

That’s it for today, see you next week at the open beta!

Happy hunting!

Discussion