There have been lots of complaints about the modifications to the Eye of Reach since the last patch. I can totally empathize with the frustration of the new EOR hip-fire. There is always going to be a need for less accuracy for hip-fire than scoped but this seems pretty ridiculous.
At the same time, I understand the developers desire to balance the weapons so that they each have their own uses and previously the EOR was a bit overpowered as an all-purpose weapon. In order to balance the EOR the way they wanted, the developers considered not allowing the EOR to be hip-fired at all but instead just made it ridiculously random so that at least it did something when you pressed the button. Of course the result is that you should never hip-fire the EOR because you won't hit anything and you will just be forced to wait through another reload animation. (So instead of making the button do nothing, you are now punished for pressing the button.)
I would suggest that as a way to satisfy both of these views, the hip-fire of the EOR should be changed to a melee attack. I envision that you could hit other pirates with the butt of your rifle. I think it would work if it did the same amount of damage as one sword swipe, with no 3-hit combo ability, but it would also have a knock-back effect.
tl;dr = EOR needed balancing, hip-fire is now horrible, make it a melee attack instead
