Howdy hunters,

Welcome to another weekly status update from theHunter headquarters.

Please welcome a new member of the non-typical family

We’ve been teasing you with non-typical antlers for yet another theHunter species for a while now, and the word is already out there as to who is coming next. So, here you go – we’ve just released non-typical Mule Deer into the Logger’s Point hunting reserve. They will be as rare as their “special” Whitetail brothers, but still not as rare as in real life, since we want to give every player a chance to bag one.

Some of you were a bit critical regarding non-typical Whitetails, which we might as well address here while we’re on the subject. Some people commented that non-typicals in the game look “farmed” or, as some of you call them, “freaks”, and also pointed out that there is far less likelihood of meeting one in real life than there is in the EHR. Peter already touched on this in his release notes for non-typicals: “The antler system is one of the most complicated features in theHunter. In order to improve the production value (how much time and money something costs to implement) we’ve made an effort to slightly simplify the system that we use for handling non-typical antlers and have come up with a solution that made all this possible.“ So, to reiterate, we had to make a simpler type of antler for the non-typical variation, to make non-typicals a reality in theHunter. If we were to make a completely randomized (and TruRacs-based) system for them, it would have taken us a year or so to implement and most likely, it would never have become a reality for that particular reason. This is pretty extensive work for a feature that few players will ever see. So, the non-typical racks are a compromise but we think it’s better this than nothing.

We’ve also consulted Larry Weishuhn, a.k.a. “Mr. Whitetail”, who is a friend of our support manager David Lucas (NAOutdoors), regarding the non-typicals for Whitetails and he approved them, which is a good sign 😉

Now coming back to our Mule Deer, today we’re also releasing a special pack of missions, two focused on typical and one for non-typical Mulies. Since the latter is more difficult to come across, you’ll get a longer time to complete the set. And yes, those missions will be rewarded with special trophies, typical and non-typical – classy!

Help us pick the best reserve set-up

Before you head off to Logger’s Point in search of a non-typical Mule Deer, please swing by the forum and cast your vote in our best reserve set-up voting to make sure that the best of the best win.

On the photo – the notorious “hopping bear set-up” (outside of competition).

Looking for more translators

We’re once again throwing a call out there for volunteer translators to come aboard our 28-people strong localization team. Right now we are specifically seeking people with native levels of Danish, Spanish, Russian, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, but if you would like to help us bring theHunter in any other language – get in touch! Our translators receive a specially designed T-Shirt (the one our Finnish translator Lapehunter and Polish translator Makaan are rocking in their trophy shots below) along with other perks.

And the last but not least, our backend guy Emil has made some speed improvements for the skills and achievement pages, so they should load faster now, and the skills are now arranged in alphabetical order (which you may have probably noticed).

See you in the woods of the EHR!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hey hunters,

Welcome to our weekly status update, this time unusually real life focused.

On the matter of cheaters

Starting with a murky piece of news, we’ve recently been receiving quite a lot of reports about players who have been cheating by using hacks and other non-permitted practices. Each case was investigated individually and thoroughly and the player accounts that were found guilty have since been suspended. All banned players will be removed from leaderboards, so if you notice any change there, you’ll know why. It’s quite sad when people who have invested considerable amounts of time and money into the game, ruin it for themselves just to bag more animals or to win a competition. As you know, we have a zero-tolerance policy towards cheaters and think it’s unfair to players who have been playing honestly to leave culprits unpunished. If you notice someone whose hunt info looks suspicious (e.g. a lot of animals harvested in an extremely short time frame) please do not accuse people publicly in the forum or on social media channels, but instead contact our support manager David at support.thehunter.com and each case will be investigated. Thank you for your help on this!

German community meet-up

Now moving onto a cool real life event. Since the beginning of theHunter, our German-speaking community has been very active and passionate, and last weekend they took it a step farther by organizing the very first real life gathering. Twenty-two out of 79 members of the theHunter-Community “Die Jagdfreunde” (hunting friends) came from all over Germany, Switzerland and Austria to the small town of Rosenthal near Kassel, Germany, to meet each other IRL for the first time. One of the meet-up participants Pratze says: “It was just amazing to see all the faces of people we usually only know by their voice on TeamSpeak. We had lots of fun together, there was a lot of talking, laughing, barbecuing, drinking and, of course, anecdotes about theHunter.”

It’s been a big success, and Jagdfreunde are planning to have at least one gathering per year from now on. If you are a German player who wants to join this great community – get in touch with the them!

Here you see the picture of this fine crowd, the combined HS of all participants was 25383 and average 1208.7 – theHunter force is strong with German hunters in Rosenthal 😉

I can add that we were thrilled to hear that theHunter brought them together and we made a small contribution to the event by sending them over some T-Shirts and em$ codes as a hi from EW!

EW gone shooting

Now onto another real life gathering, this time here, In Stockholm. Yesterday our significantly grown team (29 people right now, whoa!) went to shoot some guns. Although we were handling lethal weapons, surprisingly, everyone came back in one piece. The team had tons of fun (not as much as shooting guns in theHunter though, obviously).  As our producer Hannes nostalgically said afterwards, shooting the .454 Casull was the closest to inner peace he have ever been.

We know that there are lot of fans of guns in our community, so we took some pictures for you (click to enlarge):

Hannes is reaching his peace…

… and the result of his efforts

.44 Magnum

.38 Special

Instructor is showing the 9mm special rifle, the only one in Sweden

José on the firing line

We’re in the Movember Platinum Club!

In case you’ve already forgotten our Movember campaign, back in November we made a bunch of moustaches and donated 2$ for every sold piece to Movember foundation. Together with theHunter community we raised $3248 which not only made us top 5 contributors in Sweden but also, as we found out today, got us the entrance ticket to the Movember Platinum club. As a reward we’ll be receiving a coveted official Movember Soup Guard which is a special moustache spoon to protect a man’s moustache while eating soup.

This achievement belongs to you, our community, thank you once again! Unfortunately, we can not share the Soup Guard with everyone who helped us raise funds, but once it arrives at the office we’ll hang it up on theHunter trophy wall, and if you are by any chance in Stockholm, come by our office and we promise to borrow it to you for some classy soup eating 😉

Finally, hopefully you haven’t missed our latest competition for the best reserve set-ups? You have a bit less than a day to take part in it to win some nice prizes and, which is even more important, to write your name into our first ever community e-book.

That’s if for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Welcome to this week’s short status update.

Non-Typical Rabbit

Yesterday we announced the release of a Non-Typical rabbit. This was, of course, our traditional April Fool’s joke (if you are new to the game – make sure to check the ones from previous years, the ultimate Goose Hat and the Pit of Doom, those were pretty hilarious too). If you thought that the unicorn/bunny with feral goat inspired ears was released for real and might actually went to search for one – our apologies for this innocent joke, but hopefully it brightened up your day just a tiny bit. For those who got worried that theHunter was moving into a totally non-realistic direction, we can put your worries to sleep – there’s a much higher chance that we’ll implement non-typical variations of Mule and Blacktail Deer before that of a Rabbit 😉

Happy Easter celebrations!

The community seems to have loved the Easter event with the missions from the eloquent rhymer Easter Bunny. If you haven’t had a chance to get on with them – you’ll have another 4 days to get those pretty trophies.

The EW team is wishing you a happy Easter, if you celebrate, and nice Easter holidays to everyone. Today the team is leaving for a short break, we’ll be back on Tuesday 7th. Please note that due to the Easter vacations there will be no newsletter this week, but there is a lot of good stuff scheduled for the months to come, stay tuned fore more!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Time for our weekly status update. This week we’re presenting some results from the player survey, introducing a new weapon and a better version of Skippy (all as promised).

New stuff is here

We’ve just released a new rifle, the highly esteemed and requested by many a hunter .303 Bolt-Action rifle. It’s got that cool and robust looks and with its range of permitted animals it has all the chances to become your new favourite rifle. Check it out in the store.

Another nice thing packed in today’s patch is the improved kangaroo model. Sandra has delved deep into your feedback and did some subtle magic.

Alongside the “normal” kangaroo, there is a now a rare variation skipping over Bushrangers Run – go and find yourself one and don’t forget to take a nice trophy shot, the first rare kangaroo is highly to become the rare of the week.

Survey results

We closed our player survey on Monday. This year we’ve collected a record amount of replies – almost 9000, thank you everyone, the feedback and information you shared are extremely valuable! We spent the last two days digging into the data, some numbers were expected and some surprising.

Today we’d like to share some results with you. Although we can’t make all data public, we can assure you that every single response will be evaluated and all serious answers will be taken into consideration when we decide on our future roadmap of content and features.

Now, let’s dig into some data.

• The majority of all people (approximately 75%) who completed the survey play the game a couple of times per week or more often.

• You mostly play to enjoy the game experience (speaking about which, make sure to check this awesome video by our player HiFisch – theHunter game experience at its best). The second most popular answer was improving theHunter score and skills and the third is to have fun with friends.

• 95.78% of our players would recommend theHunter to a friend – thank you, this is an amazing number every game out there would be happy to get. As we would like to make it 100%, we’ve been checking a random selection of players who said they would not recommended the game, and found that they are some of the most hardcore and frequent players of the game, so despite the disappointing news that they would not recommend theHunter, we take comfort from the fact they clearly can’t get enough themselves.

• More pleasant numbers – 93.13% players who have made a purchase in the game would consider buying something again and about 89% think that the value for the money was either good or all right.

• Almost 89% of all respondents are satisfied, very satisfied or extremely satisfied with our communication; we’ll do our best to make this number even higher by implementing some of the ideas you suggested in the survey.

• 76.78% of players experience bugs in-game occasionally, seldom or never, whereas about 23.22% often or almost every session.

• Our efficiency at dealing with bugs was evaluated with 6.81 as the weighted average, on a scale from 1 to 10.

• The share of hunters vs. non-hunters in real life stays consistent with about 55% belonging to the first group.

• Players who are hunters in real life have evaluated the level of realism of theHunter as high as 6.84 on average on a scale from 1 to 10:

• And finally, here is the word cloud with the most popular words used in open responses to the question what three best things in theHunter are (the bigger the font of the word or phrase is, the more often it has been mentioned):

We’ve randomly chosen five players who have filled in the survey and added them 1000 em$ each: chexmexpandas3x, Geroldine, jakuba34, Grizmund and HobinRood –  spend them well!

That’s it from us for today, see you next week and happy hunting!

Discussion

PS The Easter Bunny has arrived at the Evergreen Hunting Reserves, and it is really excited. Check back on Monday for more news from it 😉

Hi there hunters,

Welcome to our weekly status update. Here is what’s been going on in theHunter.

Player survey

Last week we launched our player survey and since then we’ve been monitoring data from our players from all around the world – pretty exciting! This has been the most popular of our surveys, with about 5,000 hunters having submitted their replies so far. It will be open until the end of Monday, March 23rd, so if you haven’t already completed it yet, here’s your chance to be heard and influence  the future development of the game.

Complete the survey

St. Patrick’s Day Event results

Here is the final leaderboard of the event that ended on Tuesday, with players who collected the most amount of shamrock$ and finished top 10, congratulations guys!

1. trancebabe – 45351
2. zerohero555 – 45133
3. tkaya – 40821
4. SiiinysTer – 39193
5. TROPICIEL3 – 29831
6. corredorcorredor – 29829
7. IJRI – 28112
8. Paf_Paf – 27381
9. Wulf 67 – 26594
10. josepaco – 24119

We’ve also decided to give a special (surprise!) rainbow trophy to the hunters who have collected the highest number of pots of gold during the event but didn’t end up in top 10. Here are the most thorough gold collectors:

Agent441 – 434 pots of gold
Mrkurd – 298 pots of gold
jamesclavell – 222 pots of gold

CSS balancing

We received a fair amount of community critique during the St. Patrick’s Day event about CSS which is not accurately balanced. This results in waterfowl and rabbits disproportionately high CSS values. We hear you, appreciate this feedback and are looking to make adjustment to CSS system, so we can offer a properly balanced score system which will reflects the difficulty of harvesting quality animals within each category and rewards accordingly.

To make this happen, we’d like to ask you, our community, to help us collect data for us to analyze the existing holes in the CSS system and resolve them accordingly.

If you want to help us with that, here is what you should do:

1. Create a multiplayer game, but play by yourself (so that you can keep a track of your CSS values more easily).
2. (Important!) Only focus on hunting one animal.
3. Take notes of the hunt duration, amount of kills and the total CSS that you’ve gained.
4. Open the CSS Feedback form, choose the animal you’ve been hunting in the drop down menu and enter your data. Easy!

We’d really appreciate your input on this!

Say Hi to Paul

Meet another new team member – his name is Paul and he has recently joined our backend gang.

Hey all!

My name is Paul Kruitz, I have joined Expansive Worlds as a Systems Engineer. Which means I work on backend technology improvements for theHunter.

I hail from the Netherlands from a small town called Sittard. I went to the UK to get my uni degree to finally start my lifelong dream and make games. So far I have worked on CMR: DiRT2, DiRT3, DiRT Showdown, GRID 2 and Mad Max.

Outside of work I love to play games and travel to the far reaches of the planet and see how people live of there and experience new things

Kangaroo revamp

On a final note, a quick update regarding the red kangaroo model: we’ve collected some great feedback from our community members and our artists are now working hard to improve the model, based on your suggestions. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to see a better version of Skippy on Bushrangers Run!

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

It’s that time of the week again and here’s our weekly status update with a summary of what we’ve been up to in this corner of the world.

Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!

Tomorrow we’re kicking off a special event dedicated to St. Patrick’s Day which is celebrated on March 17th. Although this day has its roots in Ireland, it crossed the borders long time ago and has become truly international. This year, for the first time, we’ve decided to pay a tribute to the day of shamrock, so there will be hunting, nice trophies and, who knows, maybe even some gold at the end of rainbow if you’re lucky. You will hear more on this tomorrow, but whether Irish or not Irish – come and have some fun hunting!

Player Survey – Have your say!

It’s been exactly one year since our last big survey, in this period of time our community has grown like mushrooms under the rain and we want to learn more about you and hear what you have to say to us. Today we’re launching a new survey, the results of which will guide us in our work on developing the game. As always, please try not to make assumptions that certain features, reserves or animals will be introduced just because they were somehow mentioned.

The survey will be open for 10 days, until March 23rd midnight CET. It shouldn’t take you longer than 15 minutes to answer all of the questions, but you can only participate once. We will appreciate your honest and detailed replies. If you answer to all the questions and fill in your theHunter name at the end, you’ll be automatically enrolled into our em$ draw, where we will randomly choose three players and gift them 1000 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.

Complete the survey

Collectibles on Bushrangers Run

Some of you have already stumbled upon them – there are now three different types of Australian aboriginal knives from different time periods to be found and picked up in Bushrangers Run. They are not to be used for hunting – alas! – but finding one of them will for sure make your Australian hunting experience even more immersive (the Outback Outfit will help too).

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion