Dear Epic Games,

This is an open letter from the community and a plea for change. Over the past week I've been noting feedback from online and from the casual players of your game. Season 5 has added some great additions with the Rifts/ ATK's speeding up mid-game and Paradise Palms/ Lazy Links replacing the ghosted Moisty Mire/Anarchy Acres.

But overall, the game has gone backwards with the past few patches, in terms of tweaks you've made and the bugs that have crept into the game.

We as a community are asking you to address or look into the following to be changed/reverted back to how it was:

• SMG Meta: this "Spray and Pray" meta is not fun for anyone. Not even the casuals. (most of my casual friends have stopped playing recently because of this exact reason) The shotgun meta in it's prime was more playable than this and that's saying something unfortunately. (Casuals,Hardcore and Pro players are all in agreement that this meta is horrible)
• Shotguns under preforming at close range: This is in part with the removal of double shotgunning when you added the "cool down between switching shotguns" and the fact you've buffed SMG's so much in the past month. It would be nice to look into removing the cool down or looking into making the pump do it's old damage along with the old multiplier of 2.5x seeing as we can no longer run two shotguns efficiently. (these are the two most requested solutions I've seen) Shotguns can coexist with SMG's for close range combat, but please make it so it's not SMG's that are doing all the work, right before Season 5 came out I thought you had the balance about right in terms of performance.
• Material Nerf: Over the past 2 months, you've decided you don't like the building meta either? Most people would agree here in saying that's what made your game special. The material reduction nerf and the change of structure health need to be readdressed, this is more apparent after you've created the Spray SMG meta that you don't want as much building going on.

• Bug Fixes before new content: v5.1 and 5.2 has brought in some unplayable bugs, especially on console with the constant freezing and crashing. We wouldn't mind a few weeks of no new guns etc so you could get the game polished up again and get all those bugs out, there seems to be more bugs than ever in the past 2/3 updates which is very concerning.

I have a feeling this SMG meta and building nerf was added not for the casuals, but more so for the competitive scene you're trying to break into recently.. to stop most matches just consisting of constant build battles and "turtling"

at what cost though? the cost of the community's enjoyment of the game? Hopefully you hear our concerns and fix these problems. We want to love this game like we did before all the changes, so let us. We want to see this game live a long life!