Fortnite Battle Royale players are trying to bring attention to a bug that’s affecting the Pump Shotgun, one of the game’s most popular weapons.
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It’s not uncommon for shotguns to be pretty powerful in shooters, and Fortnite is no exception. While the Pump Shotgun can take players out from a deceiving range, especially when the rarer versions are used, there appears to be a bug that affects how quickly players can ready their next shot after switching weapons.
Fortnite player and Reddit user Renovatius outlined the issues with the Pump Shotgun on the game’s battle royale subreddit to raise awareness for the bug and see if anyone else was having similar issues. The Redditor even provided a list of steps that people can follow in order to reproduce the bug, those steps seen below:
- Shoot Pump shotgun for first time
- Switch to different weapon (any weapon will do) before the pump gets cocked
- Switch back to pump shotgun
- Shotgun gets cocked
- After the animation is done and the audio effect played you should be able to shoot right away
After following these steps, the expectation is that the Pump Shotgun will be usable right away, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. A delay of around one second will occur before players can actually shoot the weapon after hearing the audio effect. That may not seem like a great deal of time, but it’s an eternity in a Fortnite Battle Royale scuffle where you’re trying to rapidly change weapons and make the most out of your arsenal.
Popular Fortnite streamer Ninja has also apparently fallen victim to the bug before. The Reddit post explained that Ninja saw the same issue occur during one of his streams and said that the effect certainly didn’t seem intentional.
Players might be inclined to think that this change has something to do with the recent Pump Shotgun nerf that was announced for the weapon in February. While the main downside to using a Pump Shotgun was its lengthy reload time, players were getting around this by packing several Pump Shotguns in their kit and swapping to a different one so as to skip the pumping animation. Epic Games removed this exploit recently in what many considered a nerf but was honestly just a fix for something that was likely never intended.
Other users chimed in on the Reddit post to agree that there was indeed an issue with the way that the Pump Shotguns are working at the moment. Epic Games hasn’t commented on the post yet, but it may be addressed in the future if enough players report a similar issue.
