June 21, 2022 Crytek says the studio is treating the LeMat issue as its current top priority, and a partial fix should be deployed within 24 hours.
The Hunt: Showdown community hates the LeMat Mark II revolver right now, thanks to an exploit that makes the pistol incredibly overpowered. Crytek says it’s working on a fix, but that in the meantime, taking advantage of the exploit can get you in trouble and potentially banned from the multiplayer game.
To understand the problem with the LeMat, it’s important to know why it’s a unique weapon. The LeMat Mark II is a cap-and-ball revolver with nine chambers, but the way they’re arranged is what makes the pistol special. In the centre of the cylinder there’s another chamber, which accepts a shotgun shell. This fires out of a second, smooth-bore barrel that lines up underneath the main barrel.
Practically speaking, this means the LeMat can be used for precise firing at pistol range, but can also pack a wallop of a shotgun blast when enemies get close. However, this secondary fire mode is where the issue has cropped up. It turns out that it’s possible to get the gun to glitch so that when the shotgun shell is fired, each pellet is treated as a full metal jacket pistol bullet.
These bullets don’t have the normal spread of shotgun pellets, so the LeMat can effectively be made to fire a whole handful of FMJ pistol rounds at a time, without the spread or range constraints you’d normally have with a shotgun shell. Naturally, this makes the LeMat absurdly overpowered, and players have been frustrated by the proliferation of the exploit.
Hunters,
We are aware of the issues relating to the LeMat. The team are aware and have been actively working on resolving the bug, and will release a hotfix in the coming days.
Keep an eye out regarding news for server downtimes to deploy the fix. pic.twitter.com/ifEbAghETK
— Hunt: Showdown (@HuntShowdown) June 20, 2022
Crytek says it’s currently working on a two-pronged approach to addressing the issue. The first approach involves a “partial disable” of the LeMat that removes the weapon from the arsenal screen while keeping it available through other means, such as normal in-game weapon spawns. The studio says that completely removing the gun would involve a larger and more complex update than the fix, and that the partial disable will at least help mitigate the widespread use of the exploit.
The second prong of the approach is to rollback the latest Hunt: Showdown hotfix, which addressed an issue that had cropped up with single-shot weapons. The studio says it plans to revert this hotfix, but warns players that the single-shot issue will inevitably return as a result. That update should roll out on the afternoon of June 22.
“We understand that this has been a frustrating experience and we are doing what we can to resolve it as quickly as we can,” the Hunt team writes in an update on the Steam page. “We want to sincerely apologise for the inconvenience this has caused and will provide further updates once more information becomes available.”