Howdy hunters,
Long time no hear! There was no status update last week, so this one will be a bit longer than usual. But make sure to read till the end, you won’t regret it 😉
Recent releases and other stuff
In case you’ve missed it, on Monday we released non-typical antlers for a Blacktail Deer and last week a Ground Blind in Arid camo. Speaking about the latter, the wrong price slipped into the store at the release (450 em$ instead of 420 em$). It was corrected on May 15th at 9:37 CEST, so if you bought this blind before that (you can check that in your em$ purchase history), please contact our support and we’ll refund you 30 em$.
There is one thing we forgot to mention in our last game update – the old time bug that made it impossible to fast-travel or heal oneself is now fixed! Falling in Val-des-Bois should be more enjoyable now.
Reserve set-ups are in the store
Today we’re starting to release the winning set-up bundles from our recent competition. We’re kicking it off with JackRbbt’s “Turkey Slaughter” set-up for Whitehart Island and will add the remaining 4 over the next weeks. With these bundles you have a great chance to get all equipment featured in the winning set-ups (except for deployable hunting towers) at a lovely 40%-50% discount.
A small update on our reserve load-out competition – we received over 80 entries and are still going through them and preparing for the voting phase.
Password sharing warning
Recently we’ve been receiving quite a few reports about players asking for passwords and login details. Please be wary of such activity. Once you give someone your login, they can easily change your password and lock you out of your account forever. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do in situations like this as often it’s impossible to prove who the account initially belonged to. That’s why we are reminding you to never give away your password but instead to report players asking for this to support.thehunter.com.
“Plinkington” spook radius update
There has been a lot of talk in the forum about the .22 “Plinkington” spook radius pre and post its tweak on Monday. We’ve discussed all your feedback and decided to tweak it further. Here are some notes from our game designer Daniel which shed some light on this decision and the reasoning behind it:
When the .22 Plinkington was released it had the same spook radius as the .22 Air Rifle. This was a mistake on our side (not some evil marketing trick, like some suggested) and the need to increase the spook radius was obvious. With such a low spook radius it made not only the Air Rifle obsolete but also every bow in the game. Taking into account that the .22 Plinkington is a semi-action rifle it effectively turned the game into sort of a carnivalesque shooting range: Game balance was thrown out the window. So some tweaks were made; the .22 Plinkington spook radius was increased to a little less than half of that of other rifles in the game. The bows and Air Rifle may be slower and have a shorter range, but they have a huge advantage in being more silent. It was apparent from your reactions that the tweaks made were too harsh in comparison to what you players had experienced when the rifle was first released: A completely reasonable reaction. You had fun with the gun and we basically took that fun away. With the new spook radius we’ll hopefully bring you some of that fun back without making the Bows and the Air Rifle redundant. The spook radius will be larger than at the initial release but not as large as after the first tweak. Bows are still superior when it comes to noise, but the .22 Plinkington has an advantage when it comes to speed and range.
There are also a couple of other factors that might be good to remind you guys of:
- Turkeys are among the top three animals when it comes to spookiness. Hunting Turkeys is always going to be a challenge and judging a weapon’s spook radius based on how Turkeys react can be very misguiding. The bows are the optimum choice for gobblers.
- Animals spook other animals. If there is a high scoring animal in a group of animals, chances are that it will react to the noise and spook the other animals even though the shooter is seemingly outside of the spook radius. So, as stated before: Spook radius alone is only one part of what determines animal flight behaviour.
- It is also worth pointing out that albeit we’re striving for realism in everything, theHunter is a system in itself: A system we must try to keep in balance. Even though someone has real life experiences with a gun affecting animals in a certain way, these exact conditions and reactions do not exist in the game as the game has its own reality. In the game, conditions can only be measured and compared within the game itself. Who in real life has done the kind of crazy long range shooting we see in theHunter? Who has seen Pheasants as large as those in theHunter? The game is a world in itself. A world we hope you can judge as reasonable even though, in the end, it is just a game.
Finally…
Despite the outrageously cold weather in Stockholm, the summer is in the air; at least here, in the EW headquarters it starts to feel like it. Hoggy has been shedding his winter fur, our artist Tomas changed his avatar to a pup in a T-Shirt, and Hannes, Daniel and Pär went to the refreshing Rougarou Bayou and made a short video for you guys to put you in a summery mood too. Enjoy!
That’s it from us for today!
Happy hunting!
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