It’s that time again!

Well, it was yesterday but we had to postpone because of personal related issues (the whole team went go-karting). Unfortunately no one thought to take a picture so you’ll have to take our word for it.

New Tracking & Spotting Abilities
Something that has been on the (in)famous TODO-list for a very long time now is to improve the skill system and therefore we are very pleased to announce that we are finally in a position where we can begin to tackle this.

There are many flaws with the current system including transparency (it’s unclear to the player how xp is earned and what the benefit of it is), xp being rewarded for the wrong things (shooting an animal multiple times gives more xp than a clean kill) and a general lack of a sense of progression.

What we are currently working on is the progression problem. By introducing a new set of unlockable abilities for tracking and spotting we hope that players will begin to feel that gaining levels actually do something.

For spotting this includes:

• Random weight information that gets more accurate at higher levels
• Random score information that gets more accurate at higher levels

And for tracking:

• Random weight information that get more accurate at higher levels
• Random track age information that get more accurate at higher levels
• Random animal health information for blood tracks

In contrast to most of our current skill benefits these abilities will not increase incrementally with each level, but instead make larger jumps at specific levels. For instance you may unlock weight information with an accuracy of 20% at level 5 and then jump straight to 40% at level 10. The idea behind this is to make progression more noticeable, it also allows for more variation at each level since we can have, for instance, gender at level 6, weight at level 8 and weight at level 10.

Another cool thing specific to the tracking abilities is that we can now specify the track-types for which an ability works with at a specific level. For instance we can have weight information at level 5 from footprints only and then make it available for all track-types at level 10.

Once we getting ready to release this update we will post more specific information on what each ability does and at which level it is unlocked in the wiki. This will also include frequently requested information about current abilities and incremental improvements already available in the game.

This, however, is only a temporary solution to the transparency problem since we also plan to revamp the skill page attached to your player profile. The idea is to display both your current progression and information about what each level do in the same place. Imagine something similar to the achievement page.

That’s it for now, happy hunting!

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