Hello Hunters,

It’s Wednesday and it’s time for that weekly dose of tidbits from the EW headquarters.

Server move next week: Planned downtime

Our backend wizards are approaching the finishing line of their more than month long work; that means that next week we’ll be finally moving our server to the Google App Engine, which will hopefully significantly improve players’ experience. Inevitably, there will be a couple of hours downtime related to the move, and we will make sure to announce the exact date and time well in advance, for you to be able to plan accordingly. Our apologies for any inconveniences!

Design theHunter Outfit Competition: Results

The voting is finished and the winners are chosen by you. The community was unambiguous about the winning design – 50% of all votes went to the ”3D Leaf Camo” Ghillie Suit by GostWind. Our art team will pick it up and evaluate how we can incorporate the idea in the game. We can not tell the exact date when it’ll be released in the store, but you probably can expect it within next couple of months.

According to the voting results, the second place and 2000 em$ went to Gooseman81 for his Outdoors Man set (53 votes), and the third one to Ruuster12 for his variant of the ghillie suit (50 votes). However and sadly, we had to disqualify Ruuster12’s design, since we received confirmed reports that the creator attempted to solicit votes by sending private messages to other players. Our goal is a fair and square competition, that’s why we’ve decided to give the third place and 1000 em$ to Hiijinx for his Gamekeeper Attire design, which finished 4th with 37 votes.

Here are the winning designs:

1st place: GostWind

2nd place: Gooseman81

3d place: Hiijinx

We also liked some ideas from other designs, especially the second and third places, so we do not exclude the possibility that they will also get incorporated in theHunter in the future. We’ll keep you posted!

Thank you everyone who’ve participated in this competition, either by creating a design or by voting and commenting!

International Women’s Day in theHunter

After our Manly Man competition dedicated to Men’s Day, we’ve been receiving a lot of feedback asking whether there’d be a female day equivalent. And yes, we’ve prepared a special event to celebrate the International Women’s Day on March 8th. The details will be announced on Saturday.

On the matter of bugs

Following the release of the Army Cap with a Brazilian flag last week, there was a heated forum discussion which, as it sometimes happens in our community, resulted into the “new items vs. old bugs” flame war. I thought it might help if we give an official response on the matter. For starters, I’d like to clarify that creating new items has nothing to do with fixing bugs, we have two different teams dedicated to those tasks and those are two parallel and independent processes. That’s why arguments like: ”Instead of making new clothes you’d better fix one-year-old bugs,” don’t hold water and do nothing but bring frustration to the community and the dev team, because we, like everyone, also need appreciation for the work we do.

Another thing I’d like to bring up with you is that it is our goal and ambition to fix all the bugs. If we receive a detailed report and can reproduce the bug (like it was with the recent Mallard issues), we usually release the fix for it in the next game patch. If the information in the bug report is not sufficient enough, or we are not able to reproduce the issue ourselves, it would take a developer a long time to find and fix the problem, which would of course disrupt the development process and cause delays in releasing new features. If a bug has been reported and is not fixed yet, most likely it’s because we were not able to reproduce it on our side. That’s why we always ask you, when reporting bugs, to post detailed step-by-step descriptions in the bug section of the forum.

Speaking of which, as you might have seen, our awesome moderators have started to bring some order into that section by creating user-friendly indices (Animals and Miscellaneous are already done), with reference numbers to our official bug tracking system, where applicable. Please refer to those before posting a new bug report.

Happy hunting!

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Hello Hunters,

This week our status update comes a bit later, and here’s why:

EW Go-karting race

Yesterday we went to blow off some steam and did go-kart racing. Despite a couple of nasty scuffles, we are happy to let you know that all the devs are still safe and sound enough to continue working on bugs fixes and new features. Although Pim was rather unequivocal about his winner’s preferences, it was Herman, Emil and Robin who made it to the victory stand. The fact that the two of the team’s fastest and most technical racers are the ones working on our server migration, is quite comforting, right? 😉

Gift codes scam continues

Sadly, we still have problems with people selling our gift codes bought with stolen credit card details. We want to alert everyone that if you’ve purchased such a code on a third-party site, per Skype, or anywhere else but our official homepage, we will remove all em$, items and memberships acquired with this code, and it’s only the scammer you paid your money to will benefit from it. If you find out that someone is selling theHunter gift codes cheaper than our official price, it is a sure sign there’s something fishy and we’d really appreciate if you let us know about such incidents.

Ask Me Anything

Today we’re introducing a new community feature – Ask Me Anything. For starters, it will be me who you will be able to put your questions to, and if it is a success, we’ll be hosting AMA sessions with other team members as well.

Here is your unique chance to ask something you’ve always wondered, but please respect the rules:

• Our Code of Conduct applies

• No tech support and bugs related questions, as these usually require a thorough personal investigation and we have specific channels for those type of queries (customer support and Bug Reports forum)

• Try to avoid opinionated questions, eg. ”Why does the new gun suck?”

• Do not repost your question multiple times

• All questions may be asked, but not all questions may be answered, although I’ll do my best to reply to everything I can. If I the answer is unknown or can’t be revealed, I’ll let you know. Questions will be answered not necessarily in the order in which they’re posted.

The AMA thread will be unlocked for 48 hours, starting at 12 p.m. CET on February 28. All the questions will be moderated and supervised by me and the moderation team. I’ll do my best to reply to all the questions within a week after the AMA session is over.

UPDATE: The AMA Thread is now unlocked for questions.

Design competition – vote now

The poll for the community design competition closes in 3 days, please make sure to vote for the design you want to be implemented in theHunter.

Aimpoint sights

Yesterday we released two Aimpoint sights that seemed to become quite a hit, sweet! Some of you have pointed out that the original definition ”scopes” was not quite accurate, since they are in fact sights. The point taken and the descriptions are updated accordingly, we are happy to admit our mistakes.

Happy hunting!

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Hello Hunters,

This status update is quite packed with goodies, so grab your coffee, sit back and enjoy 😉

New semi-automatic shotgun and a new challenge

Tomorrow we’re releasing a weapon, which a lot of you have been eagerly waiting for – 20 GA semi-automatic shotgun. Since it has been a hot community topic literally for years, we’ve decided to do something special this time to celebrate the launch, so today we’re running a unique challenge, 5 lucky winners of which will get the new shotgun for free! Read the details and join here.

Please note that, for now, the new shotgun will be released with birdshot ammo only.

An eventful rest of the week

To pay tribute to the Olympic Games in Sochi, we’ve created our own version of the Olympics – theHunter Quadrennial Bird Games 2014, during which you’ll be able to put a new “semi-awesomatic” shotgun to test. The challenge will launch tomorrow, so keep an eye on our updates.

Another event we’ll be celebrating this week is February 23, which is the Men’s Day in Russia and other Russian speaking countries. We’ll be throwing a proper hunting party on that day, make sure to check the forums on Sunday for details.

Design theHunter Outfit – the voting starts today

We’ve received 30 submissions for the Design theHunter Outfit competition, and we were pleasantly surprised by the overall quality level, thanks to everyone who took their time to participate! The team put their heads together and picked 7 to go through to the final voting round. When choosing designs for voting we were taking into consideration a number of criteria: how well a specific outfit would fit into the theHunter world and gameplay, how much resources its incorporation would require, as well as the general idea and implementation.

Cast your vote here

A piece on theHunter

Pim has recently been interviewed by the video gaming website Polygon, alongside the CEO of Avalanche Studios. It has been talked about the future of Avalanche in general and theHunter in particular. You can read the whole article here.

Happy hunting everyone!

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