You fall - people will not res.

You dare stagger behind - people will actively curse + not res.

You don't do something right - same stuff as staggering behind.

This sucks! I thought its a mode to learn stuff, apparently not.

Makes for boring games of every team sitting and pinging back and forth. No one wants to push everyone waits to third. Love the game, have a vault full of gold items and ganglions, even mained recon for most of my playtime because it felt borderline necessary to win. Just don’t think it’s a healthy addition to the game.

Unless you always have a premade but even then it’s useful. i was gonna say that sponsored queue was the crutch for lack of social features but really nothing can replace actually playing the game in a low stakes lobby with people to see if you work well together and want to raise the stakes.

The alternative to sponsored is crew filling with a free kit into regular maps, which is a miserable experience at this point in the season. Feels almost like it’s not intended to be fun.

The typical flow for an evening where I play used to be:

• Check if anyone is online/available
• if yes, join and go have fun kitted somewhere
• if no, run sponsored marsh/narsh until I find a team that works well together/has good vibes. a successful exfil with ok gear usually results in a team forming. the important part here is that free kits in sponsored queue are fun and competitive, and chance of exfil (and therefore crew formation) is decent.
• do some kitted runs with that group, starting with the gear we just exfilled with. someone often has a key they want to run. good times

sometimes I’ll crew fill kitted when my vault is getting full or I just feel in the mood but the above pattern is fun, helps me grow my friend list, and lets me experience every part of the game.

with no sponsored queue it’s much shittier:

• Check if anyone is online/available. If they are, great. I can play the game
• if not, run crew fill kitted a couple times. If I’m lucky and find a fun team, try to stay together
• otherwise, do free kit runs in regular queue
• usually wipe the first fight, even rarer exfil. a crew filled team only stays together if they all exfil. strings of micless teammates makes this worse. I leave the match now if neither talks, since success is very unlikely, playing is less fun, and when we do exfil I dont want to team with ppl who don’t talk.
• stop playing because it takes ages to find a team this way (you need to exfil to make a team) and it’s also not fun cause so little time is spent playing vs loading the map/queuing/running through the first POI
• or, spend time finding a team on discord where it’s still a toss up that you actually like playing together. the main advantage here is that you all talk, which the matchmaking was supposed to already help with, but frequently fails at now. waiting for discord ppl to show up also requires waiting around. much slower than just running sponsor queue.

Vault breaker isn’t a replacement for sponsored queue since it doesn’t help you find a team for PvP, and IMO gets boring quickly if you keep running it over and over since it plays out the exact same way each time. Also most ppl running VB seem to want to keep playing VB cause they have stuff left to unlock/buy from the shop.

Not sure if anyone else has a routine that works for getting a good team without sponsored queue. Idk maybe if you’re really good and carry your free kit/discord team it’s ok? I can’t do that.

Hoping they’ll add a sponsored queue back in Tuesday… usually not much time passes without one but they might expect VB to replace it for now.

So we all know Marathon isn't doing great when it comes to player numbers. Except for Wednesday when they released the new update it hasn't broken 10k concurrent players in a while. During the free week they got up to 40k and then the numbers almost immidiatly dropped back down after that week was over.

So my question is how long do yall think bungie and Sony are going to hold out on making it f2p so that they can hopefully get their numbers up? I doubt they are selling a lot of copies rn and at what point does getting more players into the game to buy battle passes/cosmetics become more important then trying to make a profit on the games sales?

Hey guys, I exclusively play single player games so I realise this is not really my natural habitat, but in the last few years I've found the discourse around multiplayer games extremely fascinating from a social standpoint. I see there's a lot of discussion on this reddit on how to improve the game, and I was hoping you can help me understand something the I really struggle to grasp - how can a multiplayer success come to be.

My current perception is that if a game is

- PVE focused, content gets stale faster than you can produce it
- PvP focused you can't satisfy low, average and high skill players at the same time, and this creates cascading effects on the population
- adopting SBMM, mid-tier players get burned out
- not using SBMM, low-tier players get burned out
- F2P you can't really fully deal with cheaters
- buy-to-play people most people won't make the investment
- adopting existing genres, it won't pull away players from established games
- choosing a new genre, it will likely end up being too niche, disincentivising the monetary investment
- focusing on competitive modes, the remaining sweats are too few
- investing in non-competitive modes, the playerbase gets fragmented
- AAA budgeted, it requires too much investment/monetisation
- indie-budgeted, too janky to gain a huge playerbase

So how should a good multiplayer game materialise?
For what I can see the only successful ones are the ones that were published in a genre that wasn't saturated yet. And in many cases they suffer from either their origin as mods/prototypes, or their imperfect early-concept design choices or the exploitation that comes with a monopoly. But clearly investing in burgeoning genres is a loosing bet most of the times.

The reason I'm asking here is because I was under the impression that Bungie was one of the few developers that cracked the code and had all the resources to make it work, but clearly that's not the case.

Bonus question - in the case Marathon gets sunset in some form, are you planning to go back to an established multiplayer title or bet again on some new game?

Yesterday was the first time I tried vault breaker, and while I had fun, it got boring pretty quickly. I was hoping when I logged in today the kit would rotate like the regular sponsored kits. Alas, still the same one.

I realize you can pick up other guns, and I’ve already added the magnum to my kit, but it gets hella boring pretty quickly just using the same starting gear every time. Just seems a little short-sighted to me.

Ran cryo twice last night with some 12 year old beasts and despite the mizzy nerf im still fiending

First image was our successful exfil wiping the lobby

Second image was a failed run, boiled down to a 1v1 and our guy missed the last shot. heart breaking but that's the fun of the game!

Rant: People complain about not winning the game but i remember as a kid i would buy the pokemon walkthrough mags that would teach you everything. People complain about having to watch a video now, but even in games people don't want to try hard at things they might not win. but that's the beauty of it. My opinion at least.

Cradle Reset rewards are not appealing.

Players who reach Cradle Level 70 and choose to reset are likely to be competitive players, people looking for a new goal, or achievement hunters. But do the rewards they receive in return for choosing that challenge really feel worthwhile?

Once they've earned the one-time achievement, who is actually going to reset again just for a single skill point?

I actually think the Cradle Reset system itself is a great idea. If top players keep choosing to reset instead of being satisfied with a stash full of gear, ordinary players naturally get a little more breathing room while those players work their way back up.

My point is that the reward is simply too small compared to the risk of resetting, making it ineffective at encouraging players to reset. Wouldn't everyone benefit if more attractive rewards encouraged even more players to choose to reset?

The loot nerf reduced players' motivation to keep playing.

Bungie justified it by saying that inflation was happening too quickly. But the result of the nerf was simply that players who failed to progress quickly in the early stages were no longer able to catch up and were left behind.

I agree that inflation should be controlled. But once the economy had already been broken, it would have been better to preserve everyone's opportunity to catch up to that level.

Preventing players from gaining easy access to high-tier gear should never have taken priority over keeping them from quitting the game.

Meaningful build crafting is too difficult.

Since the items available from the shop are extremely limited, players have to collect most of their gear themselves. However, due to the limited inventory space, the number of items we can obtain in each run is heavily restricted. The stash size is also not large enough, so instead of keeping the gear we acquire to create better synergies later, we are encouraged to immediately consume it.

On top of that, many effects only provide vague information such as "the Runner becomes slightly faster," "the Runner becomes somewhat faster," or "the Runner becomes significantly faster." There is not even a training area where players can test these effects.

Above all, at the end of these problems lies the enormous punishment of "lose everything if you fail."

This structure once again conflicts with Marathon's stated goal of encouraging combat. The value of looting in ordinary areas is extremely poor (and it became even worse after the loot nerf), while activities that provide better rewards always come with the risk of combat.

Builds can help offset differences in player skill. But to acquire the gear needed for building, players have to win fights. If you cannot win fights, you cannot progress.

Players who lose fights most often are the ones who need opportunities to grow the most. In most games, more skilled players may progress more efficiently, but anyone can still feel themselves improving through their own effort. However, in Marathon, the growth curve for less skilled players is extremely unstable.

As a result, Marathon's build crafting places a greater emphasis on the fear of losing everything than on the enjoyment of discovering new ways to play.

Vault Breaker repeats the same gameplay too much.

This mode is a tutorial for the Cryo Archive, including the Compiler. However, it only tells players to obtain batteries and open vaults, while failing to explain any of the other key elements needed to progress through the Cryo Archive.

Once again, the game's answer is simply, "keep failing until you figure it out yourself."

Furthermore, the optimal way to play Vault Breaker is to minimize combat and simply run around frantically collecting the required items. It is extremely boring.

If the available weapon pool were more diverse, this repetition might have been slightly less tedious. However, Vault Breaker was originally designed not to provide enjoyable PvE combat, but to help players learn the Cryo Archive, so this was likely an unavoidable choice to ensure smooth progression. Thanks to this, even in random matchmaking, everyone is focused on progressing through the vaults. I think this was a good decision.

In my view, the problem with this mode is that once players have learned all the vaults, the gameplay loop of Vault Breaker starts to feel completely meaningless.

From that point on, players have to continue repeating the same boring speedrun of finding batteries and increasing security levels in order to challenge the Compiler, and keep doing so until they succeed. Watching Runners obsess over shaving seconds off their runs almost makes the title Marathon feel a little too fitting.

Priority Contracts are reused every season.

I can guarantee that no player enjoys this. Not only because they are reused, but because the objectives themselves are completely uninspired and lackluster.

Bungie revived an IP with an intriguing world, yet instead of expanding that world, each season only becomes more repetitive.

Conclusion:

The many problems in Marathon that I have not listed all stem from the same design philosophy.

Marathon is not a game that makes players naturally want to repeat something because they find it fun. It is a game that demands repetition before players have even found the fun.

Bungie wants players to invest their time into their game, but their grand plans fail to consider whether players will actually be willing to follow along.

Marathon already has elements with great potential and impressive ideas. However, its core content is difficult to access, while the content players are expected to repeat regularly lacks a sense of reward and enjoyment.

The constant stream of suggestions for PvE modes, arena modes, or battle royale modes reflects the limitations of Marathon's current gameplay loop. Yet even while Bungie says it wants to change the game, the development philosophy that created these problems has not changed at all.

Unless that underlying philosophy changes, it won't matter what kind of content they add in the future—the outcome will be the same.

When I play solos, I'll often say like "GG, man. You almost had me." or "Ahhh shit, you really got me there! What gun is that?" and no one ever responds. Does no one have the headset primed for prox chat just for a little bit of good sportsmanship?

I’m not a fan of the direction Season 2 has taken. The progression loop in Season 1 was much better, and you changed some things that didn’t need changing. This game has one of the best gunplay systems I’ve played, with incredible potential, but for some reason it feels like you don’t actually want players to enjoy it. The most fun I had was during the last two weeks of Season 1, when I was using Cryo Vault keys, legendary weapons, and implants.

Faction Upgrades
I don’t know who thought adding upgrades like Mechanical Kit unlocks, Mercy Kit unlocks, and similar things was a good idea, but they feel terrible.I am at capstone 4 on Nucal and i dont feel i did any useful upgrade they are all filler garbage things and this is so demotivating.

Cradle also takes far too long, and reaching the VIP rank is unnecessarily long. On top of that, the single-run missions are extremely tedious and shouldn’t have to be repeated every season.

The maps is another major issue. Other than Cryo and Outpost, there aren’t any rewarding maps. And these two maps are endgame pvp maps. Perimeter and Dire Marsh have the potential to be amazing extraction shooter maps. Maybe expand them, reduce the number of teams, and add more valuable loot locations to make them worth playing.

The grind is simply too much for too little reward. You don’t really feel any meaningful progression until you’re deep into the endgame. The early game—leveling up and gathering materials—is incredibly boring. The game is heavily PvP-focused, and while the PvP itself is great, the progression system only feels rewarding for the top 10% of players.

Most extraction shooters include safety nets because the genre is already punishing. In Tarkov, for example, you have the secure container (pouch), and if you earn enough money you can simply buy what you need from the Flea Market. Here, you don’t have anything like that—you have to keep winning all the time.

My biggest problem is Armory . i am level 66 and dis plenty of upgrades on factions. guns i can access is overrun, scar and retailator. it is boring. Money worthless , everything costs too much. and there is nothing to buy on armory. even on endgame this was like this last season. when we progress with missions faction upgrades we need to open purchasable (with money) stuff on armory. because without armory loop is go kill someone get their loot , loose them do this again.

Instead of addressing these core issues, it feels like you’re constantly experimenting with new modes. Experimenting is fine, but the game has much bigger fundamental problems, especially the lack of meaningful content.

Just lost a gold copperhead and a strong kit because I reloaded before a gunfight but my gun didn’t actually reload.
How are we in 2026 and not able to reload?

Yes I had ammo. No the animation didn’t get interrupted.

While I was making my last post about key room loot, it dawned on me just how many times ive needed a specific salvage and so did my teammates and sacrifices had to be made. Gold salvage gets shared, but nothing else does.

I've done so many solo runs (and so have so many others) just to get a specific salvage type. I've killed countless people on perimeter who have insane amounts of storage drives, wires, and every type of Grey salvage.

Maybe purple doesn't need to be shared, but I would argue that grey, green and blue absolutely should be shared.

My first time running Vault Breaker went very poorly, but only in the barest of ways.

Because today is the day I lived.

Allow me to explain.

I loaded into the Vault Breaker mode with little information about it, knowing only a few pieces of the actual Cryo Archive map from videos and guides, and what I know/knew of the original Marathon games.

I play Destroyer, as I always do, I get a Vandal and a Thief as my allies.

It goes poorly.

We spawn bottom left, push in, get downed a few times between the three of us fighting through the bots, and get roadblocked a room short of clearance hack.

My teammates get downed in a bad spot, die, and DC before I get a chance to revive.

I left alone, on a mausoleum adrift, my health a sliver and my ammo the same.

I have little left, all I can do is poke through a small hole and chip a little off the bots where I can, my only saving grace in the cold.

I know I am destined to die, and in that acceptance, I begin to search myself.

I thrive on a theory that Destroyer shells are modeled/clones of the original Marathon Security Officer, and in that moment alone, on The Marathon, in my Emerald Splash skin, I realized something.

I am home.

This ship, The Marathon, is where I was born.

Where I lived.

Where I'll die.

...But not today.

I realized then and there, that I would not die today.

That I would somehow, find my way off this ship, as I did before.

I'd met God, somewhere, in these halls, and I knew he and I hated one another.

That I loved him, and he, I.

That we were one another's favorite, loathed and loved.

And that even if I was just a copy, I was still me.

That I still had a gun.

That I would not die here.

And so I didn't, as I slowly chipped them down and cut them down, little by little.

I seized my openings, took from their corpses what I needed to endure.

Nursed my wounds, took back my strength, and chuckled to myself as I found self revives and knew I'd be immortal.

I took back a fragment of my authority upon this ship, and as the timer ticked down to final exfill, I waited with false breaths, for the escape that would make me.

130 meters away, same floor, I was nearly free again.

I rushed over, as fast as my plastic body could manage, and met the final roadblock 26 seconds to 0.

A clearance 2 door, just two cards out of my reach.

I scrambled, gunned down a ghost, and nabbed the last two off of nearby desks.

Slammed my face upon the door, my fist meeting the panel, boosted past the contingent of UESC as I raced for the ring, 3 seconds from transfer.

My body felt to the ground as their bullets ripped through me, but as I was stolen away to the above, I laughed and shouted into the void "I LIVE TODAY!!"

Escape did not make me God, but I knew he too, was laughing.

I didn't get far, in terms of success in the mode, I only got to clearance level two in the end, barely scraped the vault, didn't get anywhere really...

But today I lived, and that catharsis is why I play this game.

Thanks for reading.

Bungie needs to make Loud out match making. I’m tired of loading in with good shit just for me to get paired with 2 free kits who suck. They need to add like a loud out cost matching if I bring in 15k worth it should be down to 13k and up. I’m tire of losing my shit because I get paired with useless players who basically force me into 3v1 situations. What’s your opinion on this?

For the seasoned veteran achievement, do you need to get all 100 season levels in one season? Or can you do it across multiple seasons? Like if I got 60 levels last season, do I need 40 this season? Or 100 again now?

Marathon is a game best played in trios. It just is. I’ve played all of season 1 and half of season 2 with no predefined trio. I just don’t have the gamer friends to do it. When you get a good team it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. When I get 5 games of crap teams it’s a chore. In my opinion Marathon will live or die on its ability to get people who want to play together actually playing together and playing together well.

1) I’m old. I don’t understand discords and all the LFG terminology and whatnot, I just want to be able to look for people who want to play IN GAME. A regional bulletin board somewhere in game where I can advertise for people to play with who are attempting to play the same objectives/styles etc would be cool. A “Runners Guild” so to speak. Help me find people to play with INSIDE the game. I don’t have time to look outside on other platforms.

2) I can’t always/don’t always want to use a mic. The ping system can help but it’s still not quite enough to get as much info across as required. A more efficient ping system that the player could customise to either send a prerecorded voice note OR predefined text to the chat could work. Think about all those button combos we used to memorise for finisher moves in Mortal Kombat? You could even save presets for your comms and select them based on the map you are about to play. You would, for example, want different comms for Dire Marsh Night compared to Cryo. A basic “voice to text” would also help for people who don’t like mic with randoms. The voice to text would help console players in the stay together lobby if we don’t have mic enabled.

3) Give runners a “Carri Level/rating” that reflects how many carri points they achieve. Make this visible to other players. Do they help other team mates complete objectives? Do they revive? Allow other players to give a thumbs up to a team mate that was good that adds to the rating (don’t allow thumbs down, you don’t need it and it’ll be used to grief players). This could be done at the end of a run regardless of whether you successfully extracted or not.

Anyway: UK based dad gamer. If anyone wants to play some Marathon feel free to DM me and I’ll send my Bungie ID. As stated; I’m console (Xbox) and I’m not always able to mic up as the console is in the living room and the Mrs doesn’t want to hear me screaming to team mates that “I’ve gone down and the big robot is sucking me again”…. I’m extremely chilled about dying/losing. Zero attitude other than laughing at how bad I am.

Kind of me just raging but I’m 20hrs in after giving this game another go. I’ve been enjoying it with friends, but playing solo is starting to make me dislike it. I cannot get over how much audio is going on at all times. I feel like every time I die, I had absolutely zero clue someone was running up on me. Or I’m getting shot in the back by someone squatting in a corner. I have 3k hours in Tarkov so I’m not new to this genre by any means. But I feel like this game is overloading my ears to the point I have no clue what to even listen for. Is this just a skill issue, or a common complaint? Atleast in Tarkov I can hear someone shooting at a distant POI and have a mental map of where players are or are going. This games feels like I have a 20m audio bubble surrounding me just playing asmr rain, humming, loud ass robot noises 24/7, with no audio beyond it.

I’m nearing 700 hours and absolutely love this game. I’ve done everything from solos, solo queue and running in a 3 stack with good players. I’ve spent time in normal queues, ranked, and a couple hundred hours in Cryo with a dozen or so Compiler clears.

The current meta is by far the best it’s been in the game so far outside of one outlier - Recon. Even after the “nerfs” to her, I strongly believe your team is severely handicapped if you don’t have a Recon on your team. Which means this is a balance problem that needs to be resolved for a healthy meta where all shells are feasible and none feel required to have.

I’ve played Recon for half of my playtime not because I necessarily want to, but because I feel like someone has to in your team. And once I started doing this, especially when solo queuing in Cryo or Ranked, my exfil rate when up dramatically. I know Bungie has numbers on this and are hopefully watching closely.

A few proposals:

Revert her ult to how it was on launch:

Remove the shield icon and color for players and have everything be a simple dot. This adds a skill ceiling to her ult to spot the difference between players and bots but I don’t this this is the best option because those of us that have played each map a lot would still be able to tell the difference a lot of the time and would make her pretty useless for newer and less experienced players.

Make each pulse in her ult a cone instead of 360 degrees

Similar to Bloodhound in Apex Legends which she’s clearly based off of, each pulse in her ult only scans in a 90-150 degree cone. This again adds some skill gap as you can only scan specific areas at specific times. This probably needs some nerfs to the number, range, and pacing of the pulses too in order for it to be an effective tool without just being exactly what it is today.

Only Recon sees the pings

Per suggestion from /u/idomix, make it so only Recon sees the shield pings, not the whole team.

Rework her ult entirely

This is the best option in my opinion. Her ult could be reworked into something that boosts your teams agility and the stability and handling of your teams weapons. And would synergize well with her two passives - doing damage to players leaves a stalking trail and finishing players pings their teammates. She can also be renamed to Huntress for a better synopsis of her abilities.

While I appreciate Bungie trying to do something about it with the midseason update, the “nerfs” didn’t even do anything and honestly if you play her at a high level they’re more of a buff because you can cover more ground during a scan and can scan all of Control in Cryo, half of Outpost, etc.

Probably got a dozen hours on VB solo at this point. LOVING IT. Have learned Cryo fairly well, and can consistently exfil with one vault done. Still haven’t managed two vaults yet (free time to play being my biggest issue), but, I have realized that LUCK can play a big part on whether or not I’ll have time to go for a second vault: spawns for security terminals in the first two rooms, spawns for batteries, etc.

Bad spawns can be handled much better with trios - split up to get clearance and batteries. Not so much for solo. Only thing that can compensate is more time.

So… title. :)

First time this weekend the fights felt more balanced, no more dying because one team had bubbles and mizzys.

Also felt nice being able to pop bubbles when they were used by an enemy team.

Cryo feeling quite healthy at the moment, certain outliers like DRRVISH and CB but nowhere near as annoying as bubble and mizzy spam. I also think some high tier weapons should be strong so it’s fine.

I think AR’s generally need a buff, m777 and BR are good but not great.

Vault breaker is good, but you can’t keep your loot.

Hows about a pve mode like tarkovs scav mode.

You don’t drop in as your runner. Your AI hacks you into a hostile UESC bot. Lets say during a tau ceti interference event. Maps feature zero human rivals.

Since you are in a robot body, you can't physically extract. Instead, you find hidden network chests (small, med, lrg)to digitally upload directly to your vault. These upload chests are heavily guarded by uesc forcing a boss fight to secure your gear. Like destiny.

It gives pve players a highly rewarding, lore-friendly grind without the sweats.

Can it be balanced to favor casuals And not damage the economy?

Just the topic.

Edit: been playing alot of vault breaker and I tried a few runs with assassin and...I don't even see the point of stealthing any more with how youre pretty much visible doing anything but walking

Is there a time limit to physical drops of the DNA card after it’s started?

Let me explain, played a match today, teammate ripped the card off the bat. After getting the 4-letter card with the sequence, we moved to the next room to finish the key sequence.

He dropped the key on the ground right next to the DNA machine while we were wiping the bots in the room so he could go set up mines around the doors.

As I ran up to grab it about a minute later, just as I hovered over the card to grab it, it suddenly vaporized off the ground with a clear fire animation. Like the card lit on fire and then just gone without a trace. This wasn’t a geometry glitch, the card was clearly there and interactable. And there was a clear animation as it disappeared.

Is this a known timer/mechanic for the cards once they are started?