u/iseecolorsofthesky

I honestly thought we might get up to 8-10k. Seemed like there was some buzz this morning with lots of content creators playing. Even Aztecross was steaming the game to 10k people. Thought maybe some lapsed players would come back to give it a shot. But 5.7k peak and during the EU peak no less.

They really need to wow everyone with this December update.

Wanna preface this by saying I have never played Destiny. I have zero attachment to it as a franchise or Bungie as a studio. I came into this game having zero thoughts or feelings about Bungie.

I was hype for this game after I saw the trailers and the vidocs. The art and the world looked so incredibly cool. The combat looked fun. As someone that has been playing competitive shooters for years it seemed right up my alley. I was in the server slam and was there on day 1. I had a lot of hope for this game but it really just failed to live up to expectations. Not gonna go into the reasons why on this post as we’ve all discussed these at length already. But it was clear to me and many others that this game was not going to survive or be sustainable with its current model.

For months we tried to provide our thoughts and feedback on the game, and how we thought it could improve. We were insulted, ridiculed, told to “get good” and that the game “wasn’t for us.” We were called mentally ill, doomers, in(chart)cels, you name it. All because we wanted the game to reach the potential we knew it had beyond its extremely narrow scope. We were driven out of the community, banned by the mods, and forced to make our own alternative spaces like this one.

And now look where we are. Bungie has laid off half its studio, is subleasing its big fancy headquarters, and is reviving Destiny due to how much of a failure Marathon has been.

Given the Marathon updates from last week and the statement from Bungie today, it’s now undeniable that Marathon’s original vision did not work. While I doubt the extraction mode is ever going away, it’s obvious that they are shifting the direction of this game to provide a variety of ways to play and to give the players what they actually want. They would not be making these changes unless they absolutely had to. This was a long time coming for anyone who could look at this situation logically. This game needed a drastic pivot to have any hope of being successful.

This isn’t meant to be a gloating post (well, it kind of is). I just want to have a moment for those of us that have stuck around this long, that have been through all the updates, followed the counts, and have participated in all the discussions on how to improve this game and its player retention. And those of us who have been consistently harassed, insulted, and ridiculed by the Marathon community simply for having reasonable discussions. Thanks for sticking around and contributing.

I for one am looking forward to the future of this game. For the first time in a long time, I actually have some hope that it’ll one day be a game I actually want to play and can’t put down. The world and the lore of Marathon lends itself to so many cool experiences, and I hope they can finally be realized

Still just as annoying as ever.

Back again!

Hope everyone is enjoying their Labor Day instead of screaming at their reddit app for constantly refreshing their feed. See you tomorrow!

It appears that we’ve passed the usual peak time for Sundays with a peak of 2876 players.

Damn.

I know I speak for a lot of people when I say we are absolutely fed up with this aggressive home feed refresh on the Reddit app. You cannot look away from the app for five seconds without completely refreshing your home feed. This has gone on long enough and makes the app genuinely unusable. Maybe if we annoy the s*** out of the admins something might be done about it?

Come join me on this journey!

Why would Paul Tassi do this?!?!

In all seriousness, while most of us expected this to be the case, it’s still pretty damning for the game. The new season is in less than 3 weeks, and is supposed to bring improvements to new player onboarding as well as a permanent PvE mode. This seems like the perfect time to get eyes on the game and get people talking about it. Why put so much effort into new player onboarding when you have no new players??

Either this signals that Sony has given up on the game and doesn’t see a benefit to giving it airtime, or Bungie is still trying to finish up content for S3 and doesn’t have anything to show for it yet. Either way, these are both pretty disastrous for the game.

I had assumed by now they would’ve started some sort of hype or teasers for S3, but we’ve gotten literally nothing. This really doesn’t give a good vibe for the future of this game.

The “bones” of the game: gun play, atmosphere, most of the systems, are pretty good. The problem, imo, is that they’re just not put together to function just right. I think there’s some relatively simple changes that would go a long way to smoothing out the rough and frustrating parts without compromising what the game fundamentally is.

Factions:

Upgrade paths are okay leave them be. Remove exfill requirements from all contracts outside of Arachne and Sekiguchi (we’ll come back to that). Salvage no longer takes vault space it just functions are currency. Arachni and Seki are now ”endgame” factions with harder and more focused contracts (PvP and PvE respectively) with increased rewards and higher tier unlocks. And add more/change the contracts every season please. And allow both a primary and secondary contract to be worked on at the same time.

Maps:

DCON can exfil a certain amount (depending on rarity) of salvage and credits once per run. Lower the number of teams on Perimeter, Dire and Night Marsh. Up PvE patrols between Poi’s and drastically up husks on Night Marsh (and add to Dire Marsh). Defeating Commanders gives key for silent exfil option. Remove alarm noise for blue key rooms and remove map wide alert for engaging wardens. Increase amount of blue and green weapons, mods, cores, and especially shields and meds on maps drastically across the board. Increase rewards for map events a bit across the board.

PvE:

We know it’s coming. Personally, and I know this is probably a hot take, but I would let blue and below gear from PvE be “compromised“ where you could use it in PvEvP maps but it would turn into credits on exfil without the little jiggers that remove the compromised label (I forget what the item is called).

Cosmetics

Add a bunch of smaller cosmetics like charms, stickers, and stuff as rare drops in the maps. You can only use them once anyways. Just more reason to engage with the map.

Remove ranked

Again hot take here, but you’re just splitting an already small player base and it could use another round of design put into it. Bring it back when/if the game starts turning around.

I say this every single time drives come around and I will not stop saying it.

The same amount of points are being allotted per match, just split between each team instead of all going to one.

Seriously, it feels like absolute garbage to play out a 4 round match that ends in a draw and get absolutely nothing for it. That’s 20-30 minutes completely wasted, during an already limited time event.

Genuinely no reason to be stingy with this. Drives are already the worst thing in the game bar none. This is the least they could go to make it a little more bearable.

I can barely tell any difference from the standard mode. The grey and green bots maybe take one less shot to kill?

The issue is the sheer number of bots (that constantly respawn) and this seemingly hasn’t changed at all. Idk how they expect anyone to play this solo on any shell but assassin. You still have to avoid bots at all cost.

Idk just a very annoying mode. The bots are some of the most annoying PvE enemies I’ve ever fought in any game. They are just not fun in the slightest.

I think I might finally just be done with this game. I’ve gotten everything I can out of it. It’s clear there’s really not gonna be anything worthwhile in the future to engage with. It’s truly a shame how badly they fumbled this game. It had so much potential.

And I’ve been playing since OW1. I genuinely think I would uninstall if this became the default mode. Curious what others think of it

I’ve done like a dozen rook runs tonight and every single one pinwheel is never open. Has everyone just given up on it or??? Have I missed a memo?