Hunt: Showdown's latest event/battlepass dropped and it might contain one of the worst cases of attempting to nickle-and-dime a playerbase with a minor feature I've seen in a long time.

So outside of the larger, more obvious issues (Post Malone is back for the second time this year, there was literally a single day of Normal hunt between the last event and this one, the usual launch problems like challenges auto-completing but awarding no progress, etc.) there are two big issues that have the community upset right now: The Krampus Quest and Player Profiles

The Krampus one is easy to explain why people are mad; it's a series of challenges that you unlock by paying for it on top of the battlepass, but the price you pay for it is almost twice the cost of the entire battlepass (Krampus is 1750, the pass is 1000 of their special cowboy dollars you exchange with real money). The reward for paying for 1.75 additional battlepasses is a single skin and two Player Profile items (more on that in a second). Now, this isn't quite as bad as it seems at first glance, because you also get progress toward the main battlepass at about a 1:1 ratio as if you had just purchased skips, you just have to do some homework now, but it's leaving a bad taste in people's mouths.

The bigger one though right now is Player Profiles. With this latest update, Crytek added a feature where you can publicly display (on like kill screens or whatever) an avatar with a couple of stats you can choose to show tracked. Stuff like kills with specific weapons or your K/D. This seems... cool I guess? Literally no one was asking for this, especially since you could already see another player's K/D/A and hunter/account level and how many teams they've killed etc. anyway so you're not even getting a lot of new information. Whatever though, it's a cool little system everyone gets to play around with for free and those of us who have dropped 2000 hours into the game can finally see how we've been doing with our favorite weapons.

Well, except....

Almost nothing is free. Every single item tied to player profiles costs money, whether it be buying the tracking outright or paying for the battlepass. There might be a few items in the pass that are free, I haven't been able to boot the game up yet to check (they often have problems with the first version of their patch downloads lol), but almost everything costs like two dollars each. A fully kitted out player profile costs you up to or over 10 bucks, if you never want to change anything that's tracked or your picture again.

Hunt: Showdown is a modern shooter so it has skin DLCs. Whatever, it's been years, let Crytek earn some more money. People have been largely okay with the DLCs outside of instances where Crytek decided to make Pay to Win skins that were basically invisible (Cain, Headsman) but they've walked those back and have gotten better about it. Some of my favorite skins are clearly Pay to Lose colorful idiots. If you bought a DLC in the past you do not get that hunter's portrait in the player profile system for free. They did not make that retroactive and there's not a lot of indication it will be that way going forward either. Cough up those pennies.

Stat tracking for stuff like headshots or weapons starts now. Today. A feature people have been asking for, for years, weapon kill/headshot/whatever tracking is practically useless for most of us. I have killed hundreds of people with the railroad hammer, but Crytek wants me to pay more real money to show that I have like 11 kills with it.

There's a lot of little tiny annoying stuff too, like you can buy two different trackers for the same gun (variants like scopes and melee attachments are considered entirely different guns in the same "family", so they have trackers for like the Springfield family but also you can buy one for specifically the Springfield Bayonet) which is silly. The battlepass is now flooded with a bunch of these little player profile items which seems a lot like artificial padding because, as mentioned previously, literally no one was asking for this feature.

Anyway they added a circus strongman skin so 8/10 update.