Howdy hunters,
Welcome to another weekly status update.
Multiplayer Issues
I’d like to start today with a couple of tidbits about what’s been happening in the game recently. For one, we had multiplayer connection issues at the end of last week and over the weekend. Sorry about those, they were fixed on Monday and you should now be able to join your friends’ games without any problems.
Server Disconnects
Over the last couple of days we’ve had some server hiccups that interfered with your games. Our backend team did some digging and identified the cause. We’ve been moving your old hunting data to a new database. As you might expect, it’s a significant amount of data and it created more load on the servers than we anticipated. Our apologies to those affected. We’ve now paused the data transfer and we’re looking into a more stable method of completing the task. Once we resume the process, game stability will not be affected.
Contacting Support
Several players have reported problems logging into our support page, as well as sending emails to our customer support address. This should be fixed now, if you’ve been unsuccessfully trying to get in touch with support and received no reply, please open another ticket at support.thehunter.com and we’ll help you out as soon as possible. If you are still experiencing this issue, email us at contact [at] expansiveworlds [dot] com.
New Spotting Scope
Yesterday we released a new spotting scope which generated a certain amount of mixed feedback. The general consensus appears to be that the gameplay advantage it offers doesn’t justify the price. Fair enough, that was a misjudgement on our part and we are happy to admit it. In an attempt to rectify this, we’re going to increase the magnification of the spotting scope from 12x to 16x. Thank you for your valued feedback as always!
The Exciting New Feature
Now let’s move on to the exciting stuff. It’s time for us to shed some light on our next feature! We dropped some sound hints in one the Lock&Learn recap videos as well as “forgot” to remove a paper from the whiteboard from Sacha’s intro picture. Yes, as many of you correctly guessed, it’s going to be a new dog. A scent hound! Woof!
Following the release of the retrievers, we released a survey in which we asked, among other things, what type of new dog would you like to see added next. Bloodhounds (or tracking dogs) won the vote fair and square. The new dogs have a totally different model (based on a Bluetick Coonhound), animations and, of course, functionality than the retrievers. We’ve learned a lot from our first dog’s successes and fiascos and tried to incorporate all of that experience in our next dog.
Scent hound is a tracking dog that will help you to find wounded animals (we all know the frustration when after that poorly executed shot you search for your downed your prey for half an hour, sometimes having to come back to the beginning of the tracking cone again and again). We’ve also worked to make them better hunting companions, give them a bit more heart and soul as well as make them more discreet so they won’t scare all the animals around (which our retrievers sometimes do).
We’ll be telling (and showing) you more stuff about our scent hounds as we continue working on them, but today we wanted to give you a first sneak peek of this beauty (still a work in progress) as well as share some brilliant animations Dick made. Enjoy!
Closed Beta: Scent Hounds
We’ve started testing the scent hounds and would like to invite those of you interested to join us in a closed beta programme. If you want to be amongst the first ones to take your scent hound with you on your hunts and also help us to find bugs, please fill in this form before the end of the week (please note that you need to have an account on theHunter forum and write in English fluently to be able to participate in the beta.) The chosen hunters will receive an email from us early next week.
Free Species Rotation
Lastly, today Red Kangaroo and Roosevelt Elk are jumping into the free species rotation. From now on, three species (Whitetail Deer, Pheasant and European Rabbit) will always remain free to hunt, whereas the other two will rotate on a weekly basis, Thursday through Thursday.
Lock&Learn Livestream
That’s it from us for today, don’t forget to catch our Lock&Learn livestream today at 16:00 CEST and watch Johanna exploring Bushrangers Run on the hunt for kangaroos. If you missed last week’s stream with ForstHeld (was a blast) you can watch the recap here.
Happy hunting!
PS: Just a reminder – the Polar Bear is in a huntable state right now and will remain so until we communicate it otherwise.
