Howdy Hunters!

Here is our weekly status update with snippets of this and that:

Easter on theHunter

On Monday we’re launching our one week-long Easter event, with 7 daily competitions for any taste and liking, some special challenges and, of course, dainty trophies and prizes. Don’t miss our Monday update!

AMA with Peter

As the survey results have shown, you’ve found our first ‘Ask Me Anything’ useful and asked for more of those, so we thought it was time to do it again. Now it’s our art director Peter who will stand up to the interrogation, and you must know that ‘eloquent’ is his second name, so it’s time to start pondering over some interesting questions for him 😉

Peter’s AMA thread will be unlocked for 48 hours, starting at 12 p.m. CET on April 11th. All the questions will be moderated and supervised by the moderation team, the standard AMA rules apply.

The thread is live

Account theft warning

Lately we’ve been receiving reports of stolen accounts, with dishonest people contacting players via private messages and announcing that they allegedly have won free em$, offer free em$ or weapons; and in order to add those to player’s account they’d need their login details. After gaining access to an account, they often use game hacks and cheats, which leads to a permanent ban of the account. It’s sad when such things happen, especially if a player has ivested time and money in the account. So, we are asking you to be highly suspicious when it comes to any ”free” stuff and never give your login details to anyone.

Terms of Service reminder

Since we’ve recently had an incident of sexual harassment on the forums, which resulted into a permanent ban of user’s game and forum accounts, we’d like to remind that we do not tolerate such behavior, regardless whether it comes from a guest or a paying member, and that applies to all communication tools on thehunter.com, including chat, private messages and forum.

According to our Terms of Service, ”you may not post, upload or link to any sexually explicit, harmful, threatening, abusive, defamatory, obscene, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive imagery or content.”

Happy birthday & holidays to Pim!

On a more joyous note, today we’re sending Pim away on vacations to sunny Florida (why yes, we’ve sworn not to break anything while he’s away) and having a Swedish ”fika” to celebrate his departure and, by the merest accident, also his birthday – Pim turns 40 this Sunday!

See you around and happy hunting!

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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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