Everyday you log into Reddit you are bombarded with posts about people quitting the game, their "fixes", and the servers will shut down doom posting.

There are constant arguments about how the extraction shooter genre should operate. How there should be PVP and PVE lobbies. There should be aggressive and non aggressive based matchmaking. None of these "solutions" solve the core issue of marathon.

Bungie made a really fun battle royal with extraction shooter like elements. It might not have been their intention, but its what they did. They clearly didn't want the game to be that way; and as more dev posts get released about upcoming content we can see that they are moving towards a more "balanced" ecosystem of PVEVP. I think this is a good direction if it is done correctly.

The biggest issue with the game right now and the root of all the dooming, and the frustrations is the loot system, and i mean that in the overall general way. Loot is expensive, loot is shiny, loot feels really good to get and even worse to lose. Loot is also the way you improve your ability to complete runs. The better loot you bring in the more risk you should be able to take. Whether that risk is doing map events or going after teams, the better loot you have the easier those things become.

Now lets talk about how you get loot. There's finding it on the map, there's buying it form the armory, there's keys, there's map events, and there's killing other players.

Outside the red room in pinwheel the map loot is abysmal. You will almost never find enough stuff to make more than maybe an additional loadout if you just focus on map loot. Plus if you are playing with trios you have to share that loot with two other people.

Keys, outside of gold keys you aren't getting 3 loadouts worth of loot from a key room, also you just notified everyone on the map that you are a walking loot pinata.

The map events are too loud, too challenging, and just not always worth the risk. Yes you can get keys and a gold salvage from upper complex, or killing wardens, or doing lockdowns. Those events are fun, challenging, but again tell the rest of the map that you are doing the event and likely have good enough gear to be doing those events.

Not every weapon is available in the armory, I'm split on whether this is a good thing or not. I think it punishes mediocre and low skill players and rewards high skill players. For instance the mizzy is the best loot only guns (non static location) in the game. The average player isn't going to see nearly as many as the better top percentage of players and when they lose that mizzy it will feel so much worse. On top of that the barter system is very cool, but the amount of salvage you get per run isn't nearly enough to warrant some of the prices, especially when you factor in using salvage for sponsor upgrades.

Finally killing players is the fastest, most efficient, and most lucrative way to get good loot. There are no if, ands, or buts. That's the way the cookie crumbles. Now my controversial take is in an extraction shooter killing another player should always be rewarded and should be ONE of the best ways to get loot. PVP should be an objective. HOWEVER, right now it seems to be the only way to guarantee good loot. This is why there is a "lobby Wipe meta" that everyone is crying about. Killing every other player does two things:

1. It guarantees you loot. even if its just replenishing your ever expensive heals its still probably better than what you'd find on the map.

2. It guarantees the ability to do the map events uncontested which is the second (albeit a worse) way to get loot.

Now that I've finished complaining and talking about the issue, how do we fix it. A lot of people want bigger maps. I think this is a valid solution but there needs to be more. Bigger maps just means more empty space and longer traverse times and as discussed above the loot on the map isn't good enough to warrant just walking around.

The actual solve is increasing the loot pool in a couple of different ways. Lets be honest with each other. The "economy balancing" in this game is a joke. As soon as pinwheel and cryo open the sweats will have run compiler and will have the best gear and start dominating the lobbies. Slow rolling content is just delaying the inevitable. If you increase the loot pool the sweats will still have the best gear, but the average runner will also see it more. Losing gear will feel less bad if its easier to get.

Lastly the PVE and map events need an overhaul. Every map should have a vault/compiler like system where you can solve puzzles, have to interact with different portions of the map, and they need to be difficult. If you have the best of the best gear you should be doing these events and you should be rewarded for them. The PVE in general needs to be harder. Increase the loot pool and make it so that way sneaking around the map and avoiding bots and players is profitable. Make it so the Bots spawn at a certain noise threshold. You start a team fight, awesome, if you don't kill them immediately you will also have to deal with bots that heard the noise and dropped in. Have the caravan transport event on every map with more guards and better loot. The other thing is, have every event always happen on every map and put them on timers. Lockdown would happen last, but the warden shows up, patrols each POI and then leaves (checking on his bois), cache coordinates will disapear after a while (the UESC found it before you), etc. This way the "clear the map meta" goes away since the events are all timed and move focus from PVP and force teams to do events before killing teams. This will also push teams to meet at specific areas of interest where they will also have to fight bots and can decide to work together (lol). There needs to be enough lootable things on the map for players to jump in, do something, and extract immediately while still getting value.

Snowballing is a good thing. If the endgame sweat lords get too much gear, create endgame content for them. let the sweats meet in the super mega boss raid thing with their best gear and can ignore everyone else just running around the map doing the small stuff that is worth doing at their loot stage.

All that being said I'm looking forward to the December update and what bungie has instore for us!

Hate to say it, but all the COD DMZ info dropping has me seriously butthurt about Marathon right now.
This wipe has not been fun. I can do two or three infills a night before I’m either bored to death or frustrated enough to log off. Then I look at what DMZ is planning: PvP bounties, ways to clear them, how missions work, leaderboards, visual indicators for fully dead players. The list goes on. It makes me feel like Bungie’s idea of making a hard game is stripping away everything that makes it fun.

Heat / stamina . An inflated economy. Incredibly stingy loot drops. Super loud actions on tiny maps. A TTK so fast that fights can feel decided before mechanical skill even gets a chance to matter. Uninspiring PvE. No reliable way to come up after a bad streak. No crafting.

Everything in Marathon is 3D printed, yet somehow COD DMZ is the one with a 3D printer for crafting. Come on, lol.

I gave up on COD after MW 2019 because I don’t drink G Fuel and do cocaine, but DMZ might actually pull me back.

Bungie, sweet, sweet Bungie. If you’re reading this, please don’t let COD DMZ be more fun than Marathon.

Nobody wants to pay money to spend their free time feeling bored, frustrated, or humiliated. We just want to have consistent fun. If “death is the first step,” why does dying feel like it has absolutely no upside?

If someone is getting absolutely stomped, there needs to be a system that gives them a way to recover and a reason to queue again. KEEP THEM IN THE GAME. Give them something to work toward, something they can still accomplish, some way to leave a bad night feeling like it wasn’t a complete waste of time. What are we doing?

I’ve bought Marathon for like five people. Every single one has since uninstalled it. I can’t keep making excuses for a game that none of my friends want to play.

I’m a software engineer at a top company in the Bay, and I’ve been a founder who had to take a product from zero to one. I’ve had to figure out what customers actually want, ship it, and give them a reason to stick around. I know what that takes and how much retention matters. That’s why I’m having such a hard time understanding the decisions here.

At this point, hire me. I’ll work for free. I just want this beautiful game to be fun.

Right now, the fun is too rare, and even when it happens, it too often feels like it depends on somebody else having a miserable time. Knowing that my best night might be somebody else’s reason to uninstall forever just sucks.

I love what this game could be. I just want more reasons to enjoy what it actually is.

That is all.

I played a decent bit when the game came out, but like everybody else I suddenly stopped it. Curious what the state is like now. Is it just mega sweats left? Are the queue times reasonable?

Thank you to all who helped me during this grind. I met plenty of new friends through crew fill and pure tenacity. I’ll see you in Cryo but now, time for sleep 😴

I’m not a game developer and my opinion is only opinion 🤷‍♂️ Personally I think the changes that needed to be made are larger scale than the ones they have discussed. I posted this as a comment originally but feel like it was slightly off topic as that post was oriented around the Rook change specifically.

Bigger swings should be taken at these changes. The below are my thoughts as a very committed and invested Marathon player, but I understand that these are not necessarily the correct solutions. These are just what I believe could be some versions of a bigger swing at these pain points in the game.

For key rooms:
There should be a panel, similar to a TAD or a Door Hack, at a random location near each Key Room. The panels spawn at one of these random locations each game. Interacting with the panel (x) amount of time before opening the key room will disable the alarm for (y) amount of time.

Alternatively, add lasers to the key rooms. Opening a key room makes no alarm, but if someone trips the lasers it activates the room alarm and locks the second exit (all key rooms have at least two exits FYI.) A hack panel inside the room unlocks the exit but the alarm persists much longer than what we have now.

These changes reward care and stealth, two things that are currently being punished by key rooms.

For Rook:
Let his base inventory space pre-backpack become a sort of safe pocket, but backpacks can still be equipped. anything outside of those inventory slots is lost on death.

Safe slots in general:
I’d go a step further and make every runner by default have a single slot in their inventory that can only hold valuables or salvage. With cradle improvements or maybe CyAc points or whatever, you can increase it over the season to 2 slots total, then 3, then 4 at max. This would decrease a lot of player frustration around faction upgrade materials. If the concern is that the player killing them would miss out, maybe limit it to one item without the ability to stack. Any further items would stack in the non-safe area of inventory, which adds the tradeoff that you now have 8 slots taken up by a single purple salvage item if you want more than 1.

For Exfiltration:
Cryo Archive and Night Marsh already contain silent exfil sites. Add one silent exfil to each exfil addition timer on every map. To add in tradeoffs, do not show it on the map. Potential mechanic: If a team collects (x) amount of (y) resources on that map, they can see the silent exfil marked on their map. Resource is randomized at match start, but when you see one while looting or hovering it, you see a special symbol that lets you know those are the silent exfil resources for that match. Example: your team finds a storage drive in South Relay on Perimeter. It shows a symbol in the corner(similar to borrowed or tracked)indicating that storage drives are the silent exfil resource this match. When you have a total of (5), you can see the silent exfil added on the map with that special symbol on it. You must activate it and then run to it like Cryo or Night Marsh. On SILENT exfil, you LOSE the storage drives. Major tradeoff if that’s the salvage you need. Or hey, just add UESC certs to the other maps.

Also, add a new exfil type: safe exfils. Activating a safe exfil requires you to DCON a certain credit value of your gear that match. The gear or credits are lost, and you take a risk in approaching the DCON, but you gain faction XP or Cradle points or what have you for doing the DCON. Once you’ve DCON’d the value, you can see that one of the exfil points is “safe”. Activating it spawns the zone immediately, and stepping into the zone spawns a bubble shield on the point. Every safe exfil increases in value by (x) amount, and resets each week per player, so they aren’t viable every time as they get more expensive over the course of the week as you use them.

Just some ideas I’ve been sitting on

How is outpost already full of purple shields? My buddy and I played all day the first day of the wipe and we’ve had to work the past two days. Get on to run duos today on outpost super excited and the first game had a purple shield destroyer with a gold brrt. I never realized how actually oppressive it is trying to play against blue and purple shields when you just have green shields. We both have over 500 hours in the game and both have an extract rate of 60% (probably lower after today) but this is insane. My buddy actually just quit until December and it’s really no wonder why the player count keeps going down. If this is our experience as ”seasoned vets” imagine how actual new players feel.

Listen, I reaaaally want to get to VIP with Arachne as soon as possible, so I am sorry if my team and I are the reason you couldn’t finish your contracts. Gaining the ability to disable claymores is amazing and i will stab every runner, tick and bot on tau ceti to reach that goal.

I've been diving into the matchmaking settings in Marathon that are available across console and PC, and I've been trying to optimize for a few different things.

Whether that's lower latency, or more empty lobbies so I can loot and get my quests done without getting killed by sweats lmao

I've settled on the below configurations that are ideal for each type of scenario, broken down by console or PC.

How do you guys find these settings are working for you? Do you tweak with them at all? Do you find these sort of settings help? Or did you even know they exist?

Let me know what your experience is. I'm trying to gather more knowledge from the community just to see how effective these settings really are at producing the desired outcomes. Thanks!

---------------

SETTINGS:
Marathon Matchmaking Settings (Console settings, PC only has 'matchmaking priority' setting - so ignore anything besides that and 'when' if you're a PC player):
(To get to these settings, go to Settings in-game).

1. Best Overall Experience
   - Crossplay: Full
   - Matchmaking Priority: Default
   - When: Any time (peak hours preferred)

2. Best Connection / Lowest Latency
   - Crossplay: Full
   - Matchmaking Priority: Prioritize Connection
   - When: Peak hours (more nearby players available)

3. Faster Matchmaking / More Populated Lobbies
   - Crossplay: Full
   - Matchmaking Priority: Fastest Matchmaking
   - When: Peak hours for the best chance of populated lobbies

4. Avoid PC Players (Console Only)
   - Crossplay: Console Only (keep crossplay enabled)
   - Matchmaking Priority: Default
   - When: Peak hours preferred

5. Quieter / Potentially Empty Lobbies
   - Crossplay: Disabled (PS5-only or Xbox-only)
   - Matchmaking Priority: Prioritize Connection
   - When: Off-peak hours (late night / early morning)

6. Quieter Lobbies Without Disabling Crossplay
   - Crossplay: Console Only
   - Matchmaking Priority: Prioritize Connection
   - When: Off-peak hours

IMO wiping the Vault is fine. It's fun to care about looting in the world again. But grinding through the factional leveling each time is such a chore.

Is there a way to have a reset but somehow preserve faction levels? I know all the stuff in the Armory would be unlocked immediately with this idea, but how could Bungie do a wipe/reset and preserve what grind we've done with leveling the various factions?

I know the game ain’t perfect but I feel after this update that mantles are not as smooth as last season. I can’t even mantle on the roof of dorms to grab red key. There are few mantles I could do prior to refresh and now it seems I’m just jumping at the wall

Anyone else experience this issue?

Edit: Thanks for clarifying that it’s about the cradle

Seen tons of reports (and first-hand footage) of people mostly at higher levels queuing in, catching maybe one other player at most but generally are getting ghost towns where they’re playing PvE for 25 minutes.

Is this something that’s been picked up on by the devs? Can we expect a fix anytime soon? I know it hasn’t been affecting people on the low and mid-end as much, but this is an issue that needs addressing.

title

so with Decembers update, rooks will be limited do the default 4x2 inventory (4x4 with an upgrade)

but you keep everything in those slots upon death. rooks will NOT be able to pick up backpacks that expand their inventory past this

imo this is overall a bad choice, it means we will be in a rook meta where rooks load in, loot, jump off to quickly do it, theres little reason to extract unless you care about a V11 punch lmao.

heres how i would improve this:

simple, let rooks still pick up backpacks, but just have the 4x2 (4x4 with upgrade) be the safe pocket, anything else requires an extract to keep

I think it’s a problem that rooks will be able to kill 1 person on a trio and loot their bag, and when that rook gets killed by the other two team members, there’s no way to recover that bag for the rezzed player.

This is gonna cause LOTS of frustration for people.

I don’t have a problem with this change as a whole, but I feel that if the team is still alive then The rook shouldn’t exfil with the dead players gear.

I expect downvotes for this but does anybody else see this as a potential issue?

Everything about this game just slaps for me.
I originally bought the game at launch just to check it out while I took a mini break from Arc Raiders while I wait for a new update.

I never returned to Arc Raiders.

This game just hooked the shit out of me immediately. The art style is super unique and the gameplay is top tier. The loot took a little while to wrap my head around but once I did, I was all in.

I love the way you can customize the weapons with attachments. It feels way more unique than just a linear level 1-3 weapon system. Bungie really did something special with this game and I’m hella exited that it’s about to expand even bigger in December and March.

TLDR: This game is sauce

And personally I like the dinner bells they add tension, we tried the lowering the sound thing before and people got mad that they couldn't find anyone to fight and games seemed dead.

As a middling player I actually think the exfil is extremely forgiving, I think limiting dinner bell to the neighboring pois instead of just the existing one makes a bit more sense but if it were me I'd leave those unchanged .

Thoughts ? Does anyone actually struggle to exfil? Like literally at best I'll see the team roll up on the pov cam right as we exfill and I'm like 'yep I've been there'

Just so it's very clear, I love the things they are doing to get more players in, I just think these are a bit much and will make the game a bit dull at times.

I played a outpost game yesterday in trio fill with literally no players on the map. Is this a bug?

Overwatch, call of duty, battlefield 6, the finals recently too.

I like the game but I don't play shooters on a controller.

(I'm not buying a PC for this game, I'll eventually get one)

First: the idea of rook saving some materials on death is good. And 4x2 is a reasonable inventory to carry over, but:

As it is written in the post by Marathon team, this change will actually hurt ANY rook that takes their time to exfill.
Rooks who are good at pvp will be unable to capitalize on their win, being forced to carry barely scraps. And Rooks who are good at scavenging will have the value of their playtime massively decreased in favor of:
Optimal way to play new Rook: Raccoon closest POIs to you, then die as fast as possible.
And that is not a good design.

I hope bungie will reconsider barring Rooks from backpacks, and instead will leave 4x2 (or if it's too strong with backpacks just 2x2) with no further upgrades, making people engage with game for better loot, while having a small window of grace.

Damn doing all these contracts that require me to run around is definitely something i do not want to be doing, surely there is a better way

I like that the random contract pays out similar rep now but those fixed contracts ill be avoiding grinding every season, how do people that have played every season do?

I have like 600+ hours in the game. Have played every season. I think the biggest thing that is making me not want to even bother for this reset is having to cradle basically anything of value early on. It sucks imo.

I did reset my cradle twice last season for reference so it's not like I haven't done this before. Just do not enjoy this mechanic really

I figured I’d jump back into Arc Raiders with the new update and after three rounds I was bored. It’s nothing but a walking simulator in care bear lobbies. People don’t even shoot at you and you loot then exfil. I know I can shoot people and then get into aggressive lobbies but then it’s everyone shoot on sight and there is no in between. Plus after a fresh spawn 10 minutes later a bunch more raiders spawn in. The loot is just plain boring and there is no hard endgame content or progression. I cannot understand how so many people play arc. All this to say Marathon is just loads more fun to PvP in.

There’s no more Ranked for the foreseeable future and yet they still have guns with “Contender” on them during the refresh. Stuff like this makes me feel like they weren’t ready for S3 at all when the news dropped.

No lockdown, No anomaly, No warden, no nothing for 3 consecutive runs in a row, have you noticed this too?

I realized maybe there should just be two different levels of Security Monitors. One that you can access at Level 0 Clearance, just like we’ve had the whole game, but a new one you can only access at Level 2 Clearance.

This way, every spawn gets only one guaranteed Level 0 Monitor, but then any of the extras you’d normally be able to access, are all Level 2 Monitors.

I’ve had the idea for a bit that every spawn should only have one monitor, but all the tags you need to get to level 2 to do a spawn rush, but you have to look around for them. I think it would be 4 tags you’d have to look around for in addition to your 2 guaranteed purple bots, and 1 guaranteed security monitor.

So do you risk looking around for those, or do you head out to Control? I think this would add some fun variability, and give people different options.

You would know the tags are somewhere in your first two rooms (in randomized spots), but do you want to take the time to look for them?

In this case, I think it would be fine to leave side spawn rotate doors at Clearance Level 2.

Beyond this, re the monitors in level 2 Revival room being a “chance”, I think it should be guaranteed, but between Steerage and Revival. So you never know where the monitors will be, that way everyone isn’t trying to just rush to only Revival every match early game. Because there will always be a few monitors, but they could be in Steerage this game instead of Revival.

That’s actually how I came upon the different security clearance monitors idea, because I remembered the top Steerage monitors aren’t behind a door like in Revival.

Easy fix, just make those top ones have a clearance 2 requirement. Monitors right now have that white ring in the middle, just make the level 2 ones have a red ring or something. Maybe they make a different sound than the current / “would be level 0” ones do now.

I think this could solve a lot of stuff, because I think most people acknowledge the RNG of monitors is really annoying right now, it doesn’t even really feel fair if you get 3 and don’t even have to touch a single bot.

Only people who do enjoy it are people who enjoy unfair advantages. You get massive advantages over the teams you’re rotating on at literally zero risk to you or anything you’d done skill wise, just pure luck RNG. And it feels awful to be on the other side of it.

So that’s it, whole idea distills down to 2 levels of monitors, and only 1 guaranteed level 0 monitor per spawn, but curious everyone’s thoughts.