My game life was a revolving door for competitive shooters. The day I finally jumped from the console to my PC was when the shooter suddenly became serious. I easily entered CS: GO, Overwatched for a while, and then Rainbow Six Siege for years. I like all these games for so different reasons, but they all share some qualities that made me indignate: well with badges or ranks that symbolize your value The pressure to do it.
When a friend wants to dive into a ranked Overwatch match, I’m usually the first person to suggest sticking to quick play. My hesitation has nothing to do with the mode itself. Ranked modes often represent the most robust and fairest way to play a game. My problem is that the game itself becomes less interesting as the stakes go up each time it is ranked.
When players promise to win regardless of cost, both teams feel that playing the best, strongest, meta-approved combination of characters and guns is the only option. The strategy is stagnant. I went that way as a platinum siege player, paved with only boring ash mains and toxic teammates. I don’t want to do it again.
Hunt difference
That’s why my most played games in 2021 and 2022 are Hunt: Showdown. (Opens in a new tab).. Hunt is a format that fosters an asymmetrical power struggle and goes against the traditional FPS balance. You can buy your favorite gun before joining the game, including a powerful bolt-action rifle that is superior in all respects to most other guns in the game. The only pitfall is that a good gun quickly runs out of hard-earned hunt dollars. The hunt gun is balanced so that everything from a $ 9 revolver to a $ 500 bolt-action rifle is feasible. Even LeMat, despite its bad stats, even the clunky $ 95 pistol / shotgun combo gun I love can beat the $ 700 dollar pistol if I get a headshot. I can do it.
My first hundreds of hunts were full of players like me who treat hunts more like performativity cowboy fantasy shooters than super-serious esports. While we’re still learning the game, we often encounter players with novel loadouts and players who are willing to negotiate from battle via voice chat before firing in front of them. Did.
For some time, I believed that Hunt: Showdown’s novel approach to balance meant being unaffected by competitive obsession with the worst-case metas and ranks from other games. I think that’s really true for the average player.
But as we continued to play, we continued to improve. We slowly started climbing Hunt’s 6-star ranking system. This is a simple MMR setup that determines an individual’s murder / mortality rate and ranks it based on recent performance. For a long time we were floating somewhere between 4 and 5 stars, but a few months ago all three of us became 5 star hunters at once. When that threshold was reached, all participating servers were filled with other 5 stars (that is, the top 15% to 20% of players in the region). It seems like a slight difference, but it felt like the flips were switched. Goofy loadouts and talkative fighters are gone: we’ve entered the realm of sweaty tri-hards, and it stinks.
Hunt hell
Hunt’s gun shop has more than 20 sidearms, but for a 5-star player, it’s actually only one. Caldwell Conversion Uppercut. The Uppercut is a normal looking revolver with an unusually large chamber that can fire a huge rifle bullet from a small gun (“Uppercut” refers to its huge recoil). It is also one of the most expensive pistols because it is also the most powerful. Once you get used to recoil, it becomes the most versatile gun in the game (as Crytek is in the process of weakening it). Useful near, far, inside, outside, and everywhere in between.
There is no problem with the uppercut being dominant. It’s like a gun point. At a high price of $ 275, you can get a pocket cannon that is difficult to learn. I don’t intend to use it all the time, so it works.
Uppercut has been so good since we first started playing Hunt, but we didn’t start seeing it in every match until it was five stars. Pistols have become very common and their constant presence stimulates our nerves. Finding uppercuts in enemy corpses has become a symbol of players who appear to be more interested in winning and ranking up than making the most of what Hunt offers.
Another encounter unique to a 5-star lobby K / D Farmer (Opens in a new tab), Usually identified by expensive long-range sniper rifles equipped with Spitzer ammunition, increase initial velocity. These players are especially annoying because they ignore Hunt’s main bounty hunter goal and instead choose to spend the entire match in the bush to choose the player who actually plays the game. The goal is to increase their killing / mortality rates and rank up as easily as possible. People who are not K / D farmers hate K / D farmers quite a bit. They have no shameful honor.
Sometimes they will go as far as killing themselves to save their stats or Alt + F4 before you can finish them-unfortunately it’s a sissy tactic that works. We have been repeatedly selected as a trio of K / D farmers and are usually the largest with 6 stars.
Even games like Hunt with a diverse collection of guns, perks, traps and tools, some players choose to distill everything to the best, most broken, or easily exploitable tactics to win. That is impressive to me. And for what really? Rank is less important for hunts than for siege battles and overwatch. There are no account badges, exclusive skins, or shiny gun charms you can earn to reach 6 stars, and no lucrative esports league to graduate.
Still, the top players have the power to reduce the fun of the game for everyone else. As much as I don’t want to admit it, the lobby full of Mosin rifles and uppercut users sitting in the bush all day makes it hard to enjoy my crappy Remat pistol. If you don’t want to lose the first battle, you often feel like you need to devote yourself to the meta of a five-star hunt crushing your throat.
I don’t want to do that either. Unless you occasionally say “screw” and hit the enemy head-on with a bomb lance, you might want to play CS: GO. I really want to go back to the 4 star hunt. How nice The player is. After losing the bunch and being kicked out of the 5 stars, we temporarily returned to the cool hunt, but after some successful matches, we inevitably return to the hunt hell.
At least it’s actually possible to find a peak hunt. The vast majority of players take the game less seriously. The same can be said about other shooters I love. Thankfully, Hunt is a game that’s too good to be ruined by its top-level meta. But the last few months have been a rude awakening that if there is a game that is ruined by compulsive competition, someone will do it.I hope the balance will change in the future (Opens in a new tab) Hunt’s least interesting strategy is less reliable.
