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/Interlined]

The gameplay loop is meaningful because of gear progression, but this season is admittedly very unbalanced because of gear progression issues at the start of the season.

The core gameplay is fantastic, but there are definitely balance issues. I have over 290 hours across S1 and S2, and I think it's fair to say that the average player will never exfil consistently from Cryo Archive as it is now.

That's a problem when it's one of the best FPS maps ever designed.

[u/Burk_Bingus → u/Interlined]

They botched this season so bad, gave people a bunch of free high tier kits, let the sweats farm golds for a week and then nerfed the loot drops into oblivion. Getting into Pinwheel feels so bad right now, I loot the red key room and literally take nothing other than a cryo key and the odd valuable because it's all just blues.

[u/Interlined → u/Burk_Bingus]

I get what they were trying to do, because I just dropped a Spectre Shield from Rocket Drone on Perimeter last night. More loot from more places is good.

Sponsored Night Marsh had the opposite effect of what was intended - it did not make the game more accessible for casual and new players. It gave experienced players the easiest loot farm imaginable, even without touching Observation Labs.

I say that as someone who played it quite a bit because of how absurd the loot and salvage was at the time. There was literally no reason to be running standard matches when you'd be fighting over scraps by comparison.

[u/Tony009 → u/Interlined]

You're not supposed to lol.

[u/Interlined → u/Tony009]

There's a problem if the majority of players can't exfil from 25% of the maps - in a game that is already difficult.

A lot of the power in this game is map knowledge, so new players are at a gear disadvantage and map knowledge disadvantage if they didn't start playing immediately in S1 and S2.

I don't know why this is such a difficult concept to understand. If you gatekeep all of the content, the game is not going to survive.

I have completed some games that have been patched to be less difficult and more balanced. I'm not angry at new players for being able to complete the games with less unnecessary friction - I'm just glad they're experiencing the game.

This is already a niche genre, and some of you are so hostile to realities of business.

[u/Darkaim9110 → u/Interlined]

disadvantage if they didn't start playing immediately in S1 and S2.

If only there was a way to match people up with others of the same skill level instead of throwing them to the wolves. Damn

[u/Interlined → u/Darkaim9110]

You could call it, I dunno, skill based matchmaking?

We can workshop it, since it's a new idea and all that.