Marathon KKV-9SD and High-RPM Guns: The Bullet-Eating Problem

High rate-of-fire weapons have a problem, and players are starting to name it. u/Ornery_Mood put it plainly this week: "Eating bullet is so annoying in this game. This makes kkv really bad to use, and another smg with high RPM." It's a short post with no upvote traction — this cycle's Reddit signal is genuinely thin — but it touches something that keeps surfacing in passing across the broader community. When fast-firing weapons eat your own bullets against geometry, cover edges, or inconsistent hitboxes, the feel of the entire gunplay loop degrades. The ⬢ KKV-9SD - SMG in particular, sources-listed at 1,200 RPM with 8 damage per shot, is a weapon where bullet registration matters enormously. Miss even a modest fraction of that fire rate and the math collapses fast.

The timing is notable. Patch 1.1.0.3, which dropped June 23, directly addressed a KKV-9SD bug — fixing an issue where the weapon would stop firing while holding down the trigger on certain controllers. That's a meaningful acknowledgment that the gun had real mechanical problems at launch, not just a feel issue. Whether the patch fully resolved the sensation u/Ornery_Mood is describing is something the lobby will have to answer. A controller trigger bug and a general bullet-eating sensation are related but not the same thing, and fixing one doesn't automatically fix the other.

Where Reddit is quiet and specific this cycle, Steam reviewers are speaking in broader strokes — and the divergence is worth naming. The negative reviews skew heavily toward queue time friction and Destiny grief. A 5-hour reviewer called it a "moth eating cables simulator" and cited queue waits of 10-15 minutes for matches that can end faster than that. Another with 30 hours wrote that they'll "forever disagree with limiting the otherwise lore-heavy franchise down to a shallow, niche genre." These aren't gunplay complaints. They're genre-fit complaints from people who wanted a different game.

The contrarian voice here is real, though. A 317-hour reviewer described the multiplayer experience past the initial skill ceiling as "the most fun I've ever had in a modern shooter." A 73-hour reviewer called it "a well made and unique addition to the extraction shooter genre." The players who have stayed and ground past the friction curve are largely not the ones writing the negative reviews. The gap between the two groups isn't narrowing on its own.

Twitch clip titles this week add texture. The most-viewed clip from glorpinity's stream — 232 views — is titled "BUNGIE THE GAME IS UNPLAYABLE." That's the loudest single attention spike in the data, and it reads as frustration rather than hype. Below that, the signal shifts: a clip titled "GOTWHOLELOBBYSLOOTASSOLO" from pyroxna's stream pulled 76 views, and "CRAZY 3K" from Toonchie's stream grabbed 37. The clips that aren't frustration are plays — solo looting highlights and multi-kill moments. Two different communities are watching two different versions of the same game.

That split maps almost exactly onto what Reddit and Steam are showing. The players deep in the loop are finding things worth clipping. The players bouncing off the early experience are the ones writing the "unplayable" titles. The loud signal and the satisfied-but-quiet signal coexist — and right now, the loud one is winning the attention war even if it doesn't represent the full lobby.