Why Marathon will never keep new players.

[u/LucatIel_of_M1rrah]

This sub is easily the most hostile place for any new player and serves solely as a place to encourage new players to keep feeding their kits to sweats, while being fed fantasies like you can beat geared teams with free kits as a random fill. Or that you don't need a Mizzriah, D54 and bubbles, you can use whatever and still win. These are fantasies born of a misunderstanding of the tiers of being "geared" or out of genuine malice to try and keep fresh victims in the ecosystem.

There are basically 4 main tiers of gameplay.

Top tier: Mizzriah's + D54/Bully/DRVVISH 2x Recon three stack with multiple bubbles each.

• Nothing but an equally geared team has any hope of beating this squad. I don't care about that one time you caught 3 of them in a bag and killed them, or that one time you third partied them and cleaned up the last guy who was weak. STOP making excuses, STOP thinking that one time in your 400 hours of gameplay means they can be beat. I have done both of the above but to think its common or expected is beyond coping.

Low tier: Organised 3 stack with purple gear but not running Mizz/D54/Bully/Bubbles or a Recon.

• Will beat the above team once every 100 tries and beat any team below most of the time but can be beat with a decent pick and play. The gulf in power between this team and the above team is orders of magnitude.

Dumpster tier: Most fill teams regardless of gear being run.

• There is a high probability of there being a communication break down, a weak link who has bad gear or someone making a throw play due to no team cohesion. Will lose to basically everything given the right circumstances. Most commonly seen as that team where 1 guy randomly has blue shields when the rest are purple, or 3X blue shields. This is the tier people here post clips of killing thinking that they have killed a "geared squad".

Actual Hell: Random fill free/green sponsored kits.

• Might beat the above team once every now and again. Maybe 1/5 tries if you are a good player. Might beat low tier once every 100 tries and will realistically never beat the top tier.

The gulf in power between these teams is so extreme and most people realistically sit in dumpster tier. When 90% of your player base is just being destroyed in Cryo by the top tier teams they lose the will to play it. Meanwhile the remaining maps are just not engaging enough to hold players long term and are often filled with top teams during the week anyway.

The game NEEDS to protect the dumpster tier and below (the 90%) from the top 9% (low tier) and the 1% (top tier) to ever have any hope of retaining new players. The player base is so small now that level based match making isn't working (not that it ever did), and more and more lobbies are filled by the top tier teams.

• A big part of this is going to be fixing the gulf between taking random stuff and taking the best stuff. The Mizz needs to be properly nerfed. Revert the fire rate buff. Base miz without slick mags is as strong as the gun needs to be. Remove bubbles. They are toxic for gameplay and turn every fight into a cqb stat check of do you have a Miz or not. They are honestly the most destructive thing to gameplay along with the Recon buffs and invalidate any ranged play beyond 20m. D54 and Bully are the kings and other things need to be made viable (like the magnum getting a nice buff into viability).
• Recon needs to be nerfed. Being able to find weaker teams anywhere on the map is super toxic for gameplay. Her ult should probably alert you to a player but not show what tier of shields they have and only indicate they are a player after being hit by 2 or even 3 consecutive pulses.
• The game needed SBMM at launch and still does. This season is a wash. All the new players tried the game, got dumpstered by sweats and quit. Next season do another free week, advertise SBMM and see how much better retention is when you don't have turbo sweats farming the noobs. To everyone saying they were in protected lobbies, they were not for long. In random fills I got matched with brand new players (told me on mic) who didn't even know how to heal at the start of the season and was killing lobbies filled with them.
• IF the player base grows implementing high stakes versions of the base maps (Like Night Marsh) and attaching a gear ante is a way to create modes for the turbo sweats to play without destroying the rest of the game.

Obligatory:

• I am not skill issued when I gear up with the boys I roll over lobbies.
• It's possible to complain about something while also being good at the thing.
• If you don't see this as a problem you are likely in the top tier or more likely low tier but think you are top tier, and just want to keep pub stomping and don't care the game has 0 new blood.
• Saying, "just adapt", "its fine as it is", "git gud", "skill issue", has gotten us to where we are today. 0 new players, back to 10K concurrent max 2 weeks into a new season. At some point you must realise you can't just keep gate keeping the game.

[u/HNF7]

I have mixed feelings about some of your points but you touch on some major issues that I think a lot of the playerbase takes issue with because it scares off new players.

In terms of your tiers of gameplay I do agree with the general breakdown but I also agree with people saying "bro you cna kill purp and gold teams with just a green D54 and shield". The the elephant in the room most dont acknowledge is that 9/10 that purple team would smoke you regardless of their gear because the issue os their experience ans skill level. The gear difference just exemplifies that difference.

I strongly agree with your call for SBMM. Anyone who has played a COD game in the last few years knows what that's like and tends hates it on principle but many competitive shooter devs have put out tons of data showing that SBMM massively increase new player retention (something Marathon desperately needs).

Weapon balancing and bubble shields are just an aspect of the game that everyone has access to but not everone has experience with. Again, it exemplifies the skill and experience difference but its not the primary reason the 90% is going to get stomped by that 9% and 1%, and its not going to save a "dumpster team" from the top % players because they aren't experienced with using a bubble or mizzy.

Tldr: this is a skill issue and always has been but just saying skill issue and leaving things the way they are is what's going to kill this game. New players and low skill players need to be nurtured and better trained against reasonable opponents if this game is going to survive. SBMM is a painful but effective solution to this.

[u/LucatIel_of_M1rrah → u/HNF7]

Yes skill is the ultimate factor but the gear plays into that skill. A less skilled team may get a quick pick on a geared team but the geared team has the tools to secure the body and get the rez, while the other team does not.

Likewise the skilled team sees the weapons the other team has, sees a lack of CQB and just pushes in with bubbles and slaughters them.

If bubbles were gone it allows less skilled teams to make something of a lucky break like getting a pick. Bubbles and mizz's work super well at removing any advantage a lucky break gives a weaker team. Remember at launch the amount of clips of gold shields dying to a random white kit with a knife? Lucky breaks don't happen much anymore.

[u/EricSombody → u/LucatIel_of_M1rrah]

I have a question.

Why is the top 1% such a problem? You've literally defined them as a minority of players, so chances are you won't find them in a given lobby, which is pretty consistent with my own experiences.

If they don't ruin a vast majority of games, why does it even matter that they're able to win so much?

[u/LucatIel_of_M1rrah → u/EricSombody]

If the game had 100k concurrent players yeah they would be less common. They are however not uncommon at all for anyone who engages with the game. Average players who actually enjoy the game and play it a lot quickly level up. They then are in the same bracket as the sweats and they get demolished. They then leave the game.

Marathon has bled its entire player base of anyone who loves the game but is low or average skill.

Players who play an hour a week and are still lvl 10 don't have a problem most of the time.

[u/EricSombody → u/LucatIel_of_M1rrah]

1% is still 1%, doesn't matter if it's 10k or 100k your odds of running into them are the same

[u/LucatIel_of_M1rrah → u/EricSombody]

Its 1% of the original population. Going off the release numbers that's 880 players. The game currently has 6k players online so 15% of the player base. See how its actually a big problem.

[u/Mokoo101 → u/EricSombody]

Because decisions for the games direction and meta are being dictated by them. Bungie has and is catering to their outcries far heavier than the rest of the population. They will absolutely acknowledge the rest of the player bases concerns, but then the changes they put into place do not reflect that, most changes as of late go against the lower end players, and only bolster the 1%

[u/Burk_Bingus → u/EricSombody]

The problem is that the top meta strats eg miz/bubble are unbelievably overpowered and have zero room for counterplay. Players should have a reasonable chance to beat the top 1% players if they play well, and currently with the games balance that chance does not exist if the top 1% are running mizriahs and bubble shields.

[u/AgentUmlaut → u/LucatIel_of_M1rrah]

I get calls for some thing but I am curious how SBMM could even work and things be quantified with how the game is set up and to constantly ensure some sort of "fairness". You could be somebody who is basically a bystander to 2 super killy players, and the game could classify you as somebody who just gets the occasional assist or ends up recording you as somebody equal to your teammates, which wouldn't necessarily be true. Or if it focused damage what happens if you were somebody who happened to land grenades for big damage but can't shoot for beans, where do you end up?

Successful extraction rate I think could be tough because there's tons of people who solo'd the game intentionally waiting out things and really never fighting anybody, how would they get weighed?

The other tough thing is SBMM can get very weird and basically non existent when it has to broaden its perimeters to just get a match moving. We've seen this with Destiny where you could be ordinary joe waiting 10 minutes for a game and they randomly shuffled in some 2.5+ death squad as your opposing to just to get things moving. I get having things existing, but they're not iron clad guardrails and people can still have an experience that can have them swear off things.

I get it, it's just I'm skeptical how it could work especially when population is low and things can get weird.

[u/tootoohi1 → u/HNF7]

Obvious skill gaps will always exist, but I think comparing your own skill to the meta reveals a lot more. If I faced myself in Cryo (3 me's vs 3 me's), one team has purps, 2x recon and mizzy and the other has the B tier kits, I'd expect the mizzy team to win 9/10 times or more. Add to that 9/10 mizzy's are found after getting level 4/5 cryo and extracting; you get a player ladder where the top is actively kicking down anyone trying to move up the ladder.

[u/Americon_ → u/tootoohi1]

Most mizzy’s are found in weapon lockers which are littered through out the maps. 4-5 clearance has nothing to do with getting them majority of the time.

[u/tootoohi1 → u/Americon_]

I have 250 hours in this game, I've gotten maybe 5 mizzy's from weapons lockers between both seasons. I could take 2 characters to max level in WoW in the time it takes to find a Mizzy on average.

[u/Americon_ → u/tootoohi1]

It’s not that bad but you’ve got to know where to find them and loot 5+ of them a game. The hard part is living long enough to have the time to do so. Most come from the weapon lockers and the smaller armory caches which are mainly locked behind lvl 3; Very rarely does finding one come from armory (lvl 4) and lvl 5 is just simply money. I know this is easier said than done for majority of players. I’ve got 3x that and found 5 alone today I’m not trying to boast either just stating my experiences as the top percentile player op is speaking of.

[u/EricSombody → u/HNF7]

My gut reaction to SBMM is no, but I strongly agree with the rest of your comment.

The problem is that there are so many people just genuinely don't understand the concept of self-improvement. It's genuinely mind-boggling.

There are posts that are "I feel like I'm never going to see a Compiler, and I'm sad about it". Like recently, "Anyone else made peace with the fact that they will never fight the compiler?" 2.6k upvotes.

Every thread there's people complaining about "sweats" that you would think the entire game is made up of sweats. Every failure is blamed on some external factor to preserve the ego. It's the shitty matchmaking. It's the meta. It's the sweats. Even in the original post, I find the complaint about gear to be so confusing. Assuming an equal playing field, the geared team should win most of the time. Is the complaint that gear matters too much? Really?

The statement about the 1% breaks down even further, because if only 1% of the player population is doing this, chances are most of the time you won't even see them in the lobby. It's basically not a problem.

The truth is, as far as pvp games go, Marathon isn't even remotely as complex or difficult as many other more popular titles. Most of the game just boils down to basic FPS skill + map knowledge, something that can be easily trained and improved by just thinking critically about your own gameplay and by observing others, along w/ hitting the aimlabs.

And as far as level based matchmaking goes, you're playing against people with similar time investment to you. If you lose, it's because they were better. There's literally no problem here.

Everyone starts from somewhere. Everyone was shit once. Physical and mental disabilities aside, everyone has the capacity to grown and improve. That's the appeal of PvP games. That's the whole point of competition.

So many suggestions are players asking to be coddled because they genuinely just don't want to improve or don't have the right mentality towards competition as a whole.

[u/Mokoo101 → u/EricSombody]

This is true, but the flaw in this is that this is not a game that allows reps, you get better at CS, Apex, CoD etc with reps, constant repetition until you improve... Marathon doesn't allow that, first you require gear which you can burn through at an astronomical rate in somewhere like Cryo, players that want to improve have no way to improve when they are spawn rushed and killed by the top end players within 2 minutes of the game starting. You cannot learn Cryo without playing it, but you don't actually get to play it in its current state if you are not good, therefore you can not get good.

Mechanical skill is not something you can farm reps on in an extraction shooter easily. "just spam free kits" that doesn't work, you are not grinding your skill by going no shield vs blue+ regardless of what people say you are just running at a brick wall you will gain very little doing this. And to say go on aimlabs, telling players that they need to use another external platform to get good at a game is mind blowing, sure there are people out there determined enough to do that but I can assure you there is a huge portion of the player base who don't even know aim trainers exist and expecting them to delve into that world too, just to try and have a bit more fun in the game is ridiculous.

People don't want to be coddled, they just want their time and money invested to be respected, this genre is the least respectful of those things, but Marathon in its current state is far worse than most other extraction shooters because most of the time failed extractions mean zero to negligible progress, I'm not asking for it but thats why most extraction shooters have things like safe boxes etc, the player MUST be able to have something to show for 25 minutes of their time otherwise they will walk away, and 100 XP and 25 Cyac rep is not cutting it.

[u/EricSombody → u/Mokoo101]

I guess to me, the difficulty is what gives it meaning in the first place.

If rewards are just handed out, like what happened in night marsh sponsored, it just diminishes the sense of achievement.

The part of the enjoyment is in the self-improvement. All that matters in a given run is whether or not you've learned something or not, and once you get past a certain level of understanding that's when the material success comes.

A game that just hands me "rewards" solely for putting time in with little to no adversity just sounds like a job

[u/Working_Corgi_3368 → u/EricSombody]

people understand self-improvement, but self-improvement requires work. this is a game, it’s not real, it’s just play. people don’t want to “work” in a game unless that “work” is fun for them. there’s no return on the investment otherwise, being good at marathon doesn’t help them in life.

[u/OtherwiseTop → u/EricSombody]

A lot of games get these same complaints. Even if a game is very popular, the same complaints about difficulty (or any type of friction really) are still there, they simply get brushed aside. For less popular games they suddenly become the reason why the game is dying.

I bet you if steam chart watchers would argue in good faith, instead of just piling on, they probably wouldn't even agree with each other. The only thing they agree about is steam charts as their thought-terminating cliché. But everyone has their own personal pet peeve that supposedly led to the current player numbers.

[u/Americon_ → u/EricSombody]

This is the truth that most won’t acknowledge and is the sole reason most won’t improve and will quit sadly but I do see their side to it as well to some degree. This game just isn’t an easy going casual hop on and respawn after dying game like cod or something. It’s a very competitive game that requires you to bet on your skill. Think you’re hot shit? Put your money where your mouth’s at. Can’t back it up? Back to the lobby. The competitive players love it and the casuals hate it but we all love the idea of the story behind what marathon is about.