For MeinMMO author Mark Sellner, Hunt: Showdown is the best shooter on Steam and he would have preferred not to have played any other. But a serious mistake in the game made him distance himself from Hunt for the past six months. Now comes the fix for the hardest problem in the game and new trips to the bayou are finally no longer frustrating.
That I’ve fallen a little in love with Hunt: Showdown shouldn’t be a secret to readers of my articles. After all, last year I spent more than 700 hours in the shooter and advised you to do the same.
But shortly after this article in the Christmas season 2021 I no longer touched my favorite shooter.
But that wasn’t the fault of the new DeSalle card or much less night cards, which I still miss a lot, by the way. No, I didn’t mind the new ammo types and nerfs to various weapons either. I could even live with the common bugs in the game, especially since they were usually fixed quite quickly.
But there was one thing that drove me nuts in almost every round of Hunt: ping abuse. Unfortunately, I don’t mean teammates who use the ping function a little too often to mark a location. It is much more about the targeted abuse of a bad Internet connection.
This trailer gives you a first glimpse of the game:
Hunt: Showdown Launch Trailer
Because in Hunt: Showdown, a bad ping is your ally. That annoyed me so much that I had uninstalled the game that I used to play every day for months. I’ll be happy to explain to you in detail why this upsets me so much.
Who writes here? Mark Sellner is an author at MeinMMO and, in addition to MMORPGs, also likes to play shooters. He especially fell in love with Hunt: Showdown, which he spent over 750 hours on. His KD is a solid 1.9 and more than 2,400 enemy hunters have had to bow to his ambitions. He prefers to use the Mosin Nagant bayonet.
I won but I’m still dead
If you have a high ping in Hunt, meaning a bad connection to the server, that’s good for you. Because even if you are actually no longer in the game, you can still cause damage.
This led to bad pings being abused and fans from Asia or America playing on the European servers on purpose in order to be in the match with worse ping.
If you then play against someone who has a hugely high ping, it often happens that you are still killed by your enemies even though you have already won.
Imagine an enemy coming around the corner, behind which you are waiting for him, shotgun drawn. You play alone against a team of two players, but your chances are good.
Then the enemy finally comes running, you shoot him neatly with a load of shot. He falls to the ground, you are happy, want to keep running and then die as well. The enemy you just took out of the match killed you.
Why does this work? He has a higher ping. His shot is therefore only sent to the server later and arrives, although the user can no longer shoot on the server.
Shotguns are an extreme example, because in close combat one shot is enough to kill. But even with weapons with a high rate of fire, not only in Hunt, lousy pings lead to unwanted advantages:
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The ghost shot colleague is then comfortably picked up by his teammate and continues his match while you’re out and lost everything you had on you thanks to permadeath mechanics.
These so-called ping abusers ran into me so often at the beginning of January that I ended the game more often with the exit combination Alt+F4 than in the normal way. To illustrate this, you can watch the following video, which shows another mild form of ping abuse.
Developer solves the problem… somehow
Well, over half a year after I left Hunt in frustration, Crytek announces that it will fix ping abuse with the upcoming 1.9 update. I happily downloaded the game again and have even spent a few hours in the bayou in the last few days. I died again against ping abusers, which fuels my anticipation to finally return.
Only how exactly the studio wants to solve the problem, they are still silent. You should not be afraid that you will be punished for bad internet and you should be allowed to continue playing with friends from all over the world. A solution idea that was often requested by players was to simply ban the players from playing in other regions. You can currently choose and change them as you like.
However, it is currently questionable how they want to stop ping abuse in a targeted manner if none of these functions are to be restricted.
Nevertheless, not only I am relieved, but also the community. Of course, in addition to exploiting the ping, there are other problems and bugs in the game that are massively disruptive. Weapons become unintentionally strong, buildings unplannedly transparent and sometimes players are unjustly banned.
But I have hope. Hoping that with the new update I’ll be able to spend time in my favorite shooter again. And you can even have fun doing it. Because I would really like to recommend that you try Hunt: Showdown again.
What do you think of the changes? Do you think Crytek can abolish the ping abuse in a meaningful way? Have you ever played against such abusers yourself and then ended the game with similar anger? Are there other bugs that are currently bothering me? Write it to us in the comments here on MeinMMO. See you soon in the bayou!
6 weapons and loadouts to start with in Hunt: Showdown – How to win your first rounds