So another Wednesday has arrived and and it’s finally time for a status update. It’s getting warmer in Stockholm so it seems as the long winter is soon to be over. We’ve had snow since November here so we think we deserve some warmth.

We’re planning to kick off a new event tomorrow and we hope that you’ll all enjoy it. It’ll be a full week of competitions and happenings, so make sure you check in every day, so you don’t miss out on all the fun.

We got a lot of great name suggestions from you, our beloved community. We’ve spent a lot of time going through your suggestions. A great deal of them were good, others kind of odd and some made us laugh. We finally, after tough discussions, decided on the name Hemmeldal. We’d like to give a warm thank you to BioTek who suggested Hemmeldalen. We think that the name Hemmeldal reflects the spirit of the reserve and has the right Scandinavian tone to it.

We’ve gotten a lot of questions about the new Species both in the forum and on Facebook. Initially we wanted to keep it a secret until we release Hemmeldal, but since some of you are way to anxious, here it come: * drum-roll* Say hello to our new “little” friend, the Brown Bear!

Besides the brown color preference the main difference between this new addition and it’s Redfeather Falls cousin, the Black Bear, is that it is a lot bigger. This size difference does not only make this beast a lot harder to put down but it also makes them more confident which translates into a somewhat less spooky species that is more likely to resort to violence when cornered*.

This coupled with the already notorious viciousness of the female Moose makes the First Aid Kit a highly recommended accessory when exploring this hostile reserve…

*Most Brown Bears are usually not very active predators, in fact only about 10% of the European Brown Bears diet consists of meat. This however does not mean that they won’t tear you apart if you surprise or corner them.

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It´s Wednesday and status update time!

This weekend we’ll be running a special Tripod multispecies competition on Loggers Point – all preys must be shot from a Tripod. At the same time, starting at Friday 00:00 CET, we are giving away a free Tripod with every purchase of 5000 em$ in the Hunter Store!

Also new for the Tripod competition is a new type of condition – limited number of attempts – designed to fight the problem with spawn mashing. It’s quite simple, the number of attempts (game sessions) you have to get your entry into a competition is limited. Every time you start a new game session at a reserve where there is a competition active one attempt will be deducted. Once all attempts are used up no more entries will be registered for that competition. It’s possible to inactivate (pause) a competition, if you decide to do something else for a while, while inactivated no attempts are deducted.
The intention is to implement this condition (and possibly others too) throughout some of the standard competitions as well in a near future, in order to enforce fair play amongst all hunters. You´re all in favor of fair play aren´t you?

What about the new reserve then? Everything is going well and we´re in the final stages of tweaking a lot of small stuff and will get into more extensive testing shortly. An exact release date is not yet decided but we´re still aiming for the second half of March, which we should make if we don´t run into any totally unforeseen problems. We´re pretty sure you´re curious about the new animal and what that one is but we still want to keep that as a little surprise!

We´ll also start looking through all your suggestions for the name of the new reserve and try to conjure up something we think fits nicely. Thank you for all your suggestions, a lot of them really help as we get a lot of food for thought.

Last but not least, there has been a few of our dedicated long time players being slightly upset about the recent changes we have made to the old warden membership. We hope your playing experience doesn´t get too much of a blow by this and before we say; that´s that, we want to give all of you a big thanks for supporting theHunter while it was still very much in its infant stage (and it still counts just as much).

Happy hunting!

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Hej alla jägare,

Thought it would be good to start off with some Swedish today since we’re getting so inspired by the coming Scandinavian looking reserve. 🙂

So another week has passed and a lot of our focus has been on the Valentine’s event. Many of you participated and some of you got the unique trophies. The number of trophies we handed out this Sunday was the following:
203 bronze trophies
301 silver trophies
144 gold trophies

So for those lucky, or rather skilled, hunters bagging a trophy can consider yourself owners of rarities.

We haven’t come up with a great name for the new reserve yet, so we thought we’d let you, our community, take a stab at it. Post your suggestions here, but please refrain from commenting on other players suggestions. We’d like the name to reflect the reserve and its environment and go well with our other reserves. Here are some more pics to get inspired by:

The new rifle, released last week, seems to be a big hit. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on it, and as you know by now, we love positive feedback, so please keep it coming.

We’ve noticed that some of you have discovered the crossbow tracer arrows. We sure have some nosy hunters out there. We’ve decided to hold on to them until further notice. But they will be released eventually.

We have a new addition to the team. His name is Mathias and he’s studying to become an engineer and he’s going to work on his degree project while here. Mathias will introduce himself later on and tell you about what he’s working on. He’ll be with us for about 20 weeks, so feel free to give him a hearty welcome.

We’d also like to know what the interest is for another Video Tutorial competition. So if you’d like to participate in another one, let us know.

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Dear Hunters,

Another weeks has passed and it’s that special time again, status update!

Many of you seems to be enjoying both the new rifle and the countdown to Valentine’s Day. That’s great news for us Devs. We appreciate all kinds of positive and constructive feedback.

If you haven’t gotten your loved something for Valentine’s Day tomorrow, remember that a theHunter membership is a great way to say “I love you” 😉

Today we will also tell you a bit about what Peter and Tomas has been up to lately, but first something completely different. We need to get some more help with moderating the forums. So if you think you’re up to that task, have a look here to see what our requirements are. If you think you match the requirements, please send a PM to NAOutdoors.

Now, some more details on the upcoming reserve. We are indeed attempting to make something that contain snow and convey a different climate than most us are used to in theHunter. While the previous reserve (Hirschfelden) was one step toward a different season there was no changes done to lighting or weather. The new reserve is a Scandinavian inspired landscape set during late fall and early winter and contain a slightly tweaked lighting and falling snow instead of rain which is a first in theHunter. There are several reasons for not going with even more snow than we have chosen to do here, some of them are technical but to larger extent aesthetically related which mainly affect production time and possible unknown pitfalls which we simply choose not to risk making better friends with at this time. The preliminary release date is late March, and so far things seem to go our way and we´re making pretty good progress. The fauna for this reserve is not yet carved in stone, but it will contain one new animal that belong to the same family as one of our older ones.

The images below show the current state of affairs. Some smaller details are still missing and some things might come to look a little different in the end but it should still give you a good idea of the final product.

The environment consist of mixed aspen and pine forests.

View from a hunting stand, and one from the top of a hill.

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Howdy Hunters,

Well, it’s not Wednesday but the closest thing, Thursday! For all of you sending us PM’s and asking about where the status update is, every now and then the update might be late and some weeks there might actually not be one at all. Our aim is to have something to say every week, but sometimes that’s not possible. This time the lateness was due to Pim being ridiculously jetlagged after visiting David in the US. Pim had a fantastic time and came back with loads of new ideas.

Today we’re kicking off the sweet event mentioned in last week’s update. It’s a countdown to Valentine’s Day. Every day up until the 14^th there will be a new challenge for you to take on. To get your hands on the fanciest Valentine’s trophy you need to complete all challenges. To complete most of the challenges you need to use the specially designed Cupid Arrows. Every player will get 15 arrows for free* (we’re giving away 19500000 arrows!), but if you run out of them you can either buy new ones from Doc’s or try to win them by being one of the top 10 completing the most offers through Matomy. You will still get Em$ for completing the offers, the chance of winning additional Cupid Arrows is just a bonus. Matomy’s competition ends Monday at 6:00am CET.

Please note that this arrow does not perform exactly as the regular arrows and that power, trajectories and zeroing varies from bow to bow. Make sure to practice at the Archery Addictions Range before heading out to hunt!

We’re busy arguing what contribution in the Video Tutorial Competition is actually best. Right now it’s a tie between all of them.  A winner will however be declared soon.

Peter and Tomas spent the morning out in the forest today to gather inspiration for the new reserve. It was snowing heavily here in Stockholm yesterday, so we’re not sure how much that’ll inspire them.

Happy hunting!

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* Each player will receive their 15 free cupid arrows when they log in for the first time during the event.

Wednesday means status update! So, even if it might feel quite weak compared to last weeks update, here it is.

We have been out of office all day today. We spent the day at Pim’s place for a day of planning and brainstorming. So our interns, Tomas and Erik, has been holding the fort while we’ve been away. We’ve been going through some of your suggestions and feedback and talking a lot about the game and tried to figure out what features to work on in the future. There were a lot of great ideas that got tossed around. Unfortunately we can’t reveal anything, since nothing is set in stone yet, but we can assure you that (more) good things are coming.

Pim’s house

Peter and Tomas’s been kept busy the past week working on the coming reserve. It’s looking better and better for every day, but it’s hard work and creating a reserve takes time. So even if the sneak peak we posted last week looked pretty done there’s still a long way to go.

We, especially Björn and Herman, are working on a new event. It’s kind of a sweet surprise, so we don’t want to ruin it. But stay tuned it’s not very far away.

We’d like to remind you all that it’s a good thing to like us on Facebook, since we, every now and then, have Facebook exclusive offers and competitions.

There’s still plenty of time to join our video competition. So don’t be shy, show off your bear hunting skills and have the chance to win a great prize!

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It’s Wednesday!

We know that many of you have been waiting a long time for the new bow, so we got some good news for you. It’s finally here! The wait has been long but we think it has been worth it. It’s a great bow and it looks stunning. We’ll kick off a new competition today where you’ll have the opportunity to explore the new bow extensively.

The new 3D archery range is also live now. We hope you’ll spend loads of time there to get to know the new bow and improve your archery skills.

A big congrats to the winners of the new Parker Python compound bow in last weekends multi-species competition:
MrEnzO
whiteox
Patrik6357
Trackingmaster
juagarzo

We got a delivery this week. Our new theHunter t-shirts arrived. Unfortunately no one wanted to pose as model so we had to take this picture of José, without his knowledge, while he was working. One of you might actually win one of these tees in a competition in the future.

We’ve started to investigate how to be more effective in preventing spawn mashing. We think we might have a solution, so we will investigate this further and will preform some testing on this over the coming weeks.

Peter and Thomas are working on the next reserve. It’s coming along nicely and we’re aiming at a release in March/April. All we can say about it at this stage is that it is pretty cool looking.

Sneak preview of the coming reserve

Robert and Herman are still working on the web framework. This will eventually mean that site and parts of the client will get a visual improvement. But since it’s a major task we can’t communicate a release date at this stage yet. More info will come at a later stage.

We’d like to thank all of you who filled out last week’s user survey. The information you provided well come in handy for us to make decisions for future development of theHunter. It was especially great to see that almost 80% of you are very likely to recommend our game to a friend! Please do so! The more new players we get in the more effort we can put into develop the game further.

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