Howdy hunters,
Last week saw no status update, with quite a few people on the team, including myself, having been mown down by disease. It’s good to be back though!
Testing dem bears
The Open Beta for Polar Bear that started off last week is still ongoing and will run until Monday. This is the thread for your feedback as well as updates from us. As always, your testing and feedback have been of incredible help to us, and we are busy working on making some changes on the bear’s model, plus bugs, that we gathered from your posts and comments. Once we’re done with the final tweaks and fixes, we’ll be ready to go!
Polar Bear during Open Beta, image by Hardtree
The feedback about the Polar Bear and the event-based game design we’ve received so far has been mixed and we’re of course taking all of it into consideration. A lot of people have been concerned about the frequency of events during which the bear will be huntable as a “normal” species. We’ll make sure to run those events often enough for everyone to have their chance to hunt these magnificent animals, as well as announce them well in advance, so you can prepare. Among the majority of concerned people, one of the most common questions seems to be whether the special hunting events will happen often enough for everyone to have a chance to participate in them. We can assure you that we’ll be planning them very carefully and will aim to find the sweet spot for everyone.
About cheaters – again
Recently we’ve seen a lot of highly toxic threads on the forum about cheaters, so we thought it’s time to address it once again.
For one, we hate cheating as much as you do and we ban people who do it with no trepidation. We are aware of the situation with the increased amount of them lately and we are by no means ignoring the situation or taking it light-heartedly. We do have special anti-cheating software in place that detects abnormal player behaviour, however, as with any software, it’s not perfect, and cheats do slip through the cracks. That’s why we are extremely grateful when you help us to find culprits. Having said that, we are strongly against “witch hunts” on the forum as these kinds of discussions bring more harm than good to the community and for that reason the forum staff removes them. Here is what you should do instead, if you want to help us to deal with cheaters as efficiently as possible.
If you suspect someone plays the game in any way which is not intended, please report them to support. By “not intended” we mean using third-party programs and exploiting bugs to gain a game advantage. There are a couple of things that should make you suspicious when you look at someone’s hunting history; for example, an unusually high amount of animals shot in a very short time frame, from the same place etc. We greatly appreciate your reports and we try to deal with them as fast as possible. Thank you for your cooperation on this.
New competition division for guests
Staying on the topic of cheaters, there have recently been an increased amount of reports about guest accounts placing at the top of competitions by means of cheating. A competition might sometimes end before we are able to tackle the culprits which as a result robs honest hunters of their em$ and trophies and we get that this is really frustrating, especially for some who have been supporting the game by buying memberships.
As an interim solution we’ve decided to separate competitions for free animals into guest and member divisions, and this separation will happen as soon possible. We’ll also be looking into how we can further improve the situation.
Bits & pieces
A short recap of the Valentine’s event – the final leaderboard for that one can be found here, congratulations to all the winners and participants! Since this event design and implementation has received a fair amount of improvement suggestions, the plan is to repeat it soon, taking that feedback into consideration.
The community contest to design competitions and missions is now over (at least the submission phase) and we are busy going through your entries. The battle is fierce, especially in the bison mission department, and it’s a pretty tough job to pick the best designs, as there are a lot of real gems there! We’re going through all the submissions right now and are hoping to announce the winners in one of the next status updates.
Team news
Our client programmer Josef will be leaving us in a couple of weeks, he has done a great job with cold weather gameplay, Polar Bear and many, many more cool things during his time with theHunter. We are super grateful and sad to see him leave, but we already have a new programmer who will fill Josef’s shoes. Meet Patrick!
Hello everybody! My name is Patrik Andersson and I’ve just joined the theHunter team as a Junior Gameplay Programmer. I’m really happy and excited to be here, and I’m looking forward to all the challenges that lie ahead!
Before I started here, I have been working as a system developer at ABBA the Museum (though it was a touring exhibition when I worked there) developing interactive applications. After that, I worked for 5 years as a system developer at Saab AB (Security & Defense Solutions) where I was in a team developing a simulator used by military forces for virtual training (briefly, almost like a 3D-game). I worked mainly with the graphics engine and other graphics/gameplay related programming.
In my spare time I enjoy playing games, work with my own programming projects and hang out with friends. I also have a thing for tabletop games, so I enjoy painting and playing with miniature figures (Warhammer 40.000 mainly).
That’s is from us for now, happy hunting!
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