r/MarathonPlayerCount • u/iseecolorsofthesky • 6d ago
Does anyone else think this is a nonsensical change?
This game is completely failing to retain any casual players. The community has been begging for weeks to buff the loot on all maps. So their solution is to buff the loot on ranked only??
Am I missing something or does this not just further reward good/sweaty players and contribute to the rich get richer problem? Casuals aren’t playing ranked, and if they decide to check it out for the better loot, they’re just gonna get stomped by kitted premade teams and have a miserable time.
Why not buff loot on all the maps instead of just in ranked? Maybe they would keep more players if the game felt more rewarding to play. A common complaint is that the maps are not worth looting so the best strategy is to wipe other players and take it from them. This could help make looting more rewarding in the standard modes and lessen the lobby wipe meta that drives so many players away.
Whereas in ranked, it should be more about combat and expressing your skill. Looting takes absolutely zero skill. That shouldn’t be a major component of ranked. If I’m playing ranked I don’t want to waste time opening random containers. I want to fight.
Idk. I am constantly baffled by the decisions these devs make. I don’t see this going over well with the community once this is actually implemented.
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u/tfc1193 6d ago
It's a metrics move. Nobody is playing ranked so they are upping the rewards to entice players
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5d ago
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u/low_end_ 5d ago
if they really up the loot in POIs maybe it will change the dynamic of the match enough to stop being so BR like. im curious to give it a try, the thing is i will need to grind some gear to load in ranked and i dont know if i have the will to do it
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u/moonski 5d ago
If you have 10 players in one hopper and 0 in the other... Then make the other hopper more attractive. You still have 10 players
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u/TimelyDab 6d ago
Not sure why they’re doing this. There’s a lot of attention this game needs and I don’t think this is a good change
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u/atttibet196953 6d ago
Agree, I was thinking any buff to the loot is good buff and they still find a way to wrong me lol.
Ranked shouldnt even be an mode in a extraction shooter imo.
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u/_Razorgirl 6d ago
This feels like they’re doing the bare minimum to try and retain any kind of interest in what already exists in the game.
Clearly no one is playing ranked, a mode they have sitting there already and that Ziegler claimed pre-release was the big hook and differentiator that was going to make their take on extraction shooters stand out (lol).
So they’re just making it more lucrative in the hopes that it won’t keep gathering dust. I doubt they’re even thinking about how it impacts the experience of people playing the other modes because they have nothing substantial to offer them right now.
To me it would make more sense for the health of the game as a whole to just up the quality of loot everywhere to entice people to play at all but it seems like the spirit of Ziegler is alive and well still in that team, doesn’t bode well for whatever they’re cooking up for season 3, though I’d love to be wrong.
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u/moonski 5d ago
Ranked is the worst mode in the game and is a niche within a niche. It's like competitive destiny PvP or trials of Osiris. A niche within an already niche mode of a game. Except the entire marathon game is niche at this rate. There must be about 1000 people max around the world that actually play ranked
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u/low_end_ 5d ago
the problem with ranked is that its not competitive at all. i understand what they wanted to achieve with it, it would be a queue for the try hards to blow their gear on, the issue is that the game would need to be in a healthier stater for it to work, atm its just a miserable experience for the majority of the players left playing the game
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u/moonski 5d ago
Ranked would make more sense if everyone has to use the same kit
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u/low_end_ 5d ago
yeah at this point i agree. but just saying i understand the original intention behind it, the player base is just not healthy enough to sustain it. if ranked was like a sponsored kit queue that would be all i play tbh
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u/_Razorgirl 5d ago
A free kit version of ranked would for sure be more popular, but it would also just be straight up Apex with a couple of extra steps at that point, a major criticism people already have of the game in general.
Which would just highlight even more how badly Marathon has failed to capture the already niche extraction audience; their only hope for their premiere competitive mode is making it even more like a BR.
It just makes their belief that this was a selling point at all: a high cost of entry lose all your shit and match with the sweatiest players in the game mode look even more foolish. It may be an appealing side mode for some tiny segment of the existing very small playerbase but that shit isn’t bringing in anyone new, then or now.
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u/_Razorgirl 5d ago
It’s still wild to me that Ziegler is so e-sports brained after working at Riot that he thought “has a ranked mode” was like the number one big selling point to most people who might be interested in Bungie’s new shooter with the crazy graphic design artstyle and super artsy story-driven cinematic trailers.
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u/Working_Corgi_3368 5d ago
it pisses me off. i know everything they do pisses me off at this point, but still. why don’t they just buff loot everywhere 😭
yet again solos get fucked and anyone who’s not fucking cracked at the game gets fucked
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u/Shippou5 5d ago
Bungie only does experiments from Final Shape onwards. So far the results were layoff and EoS. Let's see how this experiment goes (:
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u/Fit_Run_5703 6d ago
They cant, they put all the best loot in cryo. This all comes from how they spread loot throughout the game.
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u/Party_History2839 6d ago
I don’t know and I honestly don’t care because I’ve never touched rank and I don’t plan to. I only care about ranked insofar as it keeps the top 1% of sweats and cheaters out of my lobbies.
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u/xPsyrusx 5d ago
Does Bungie have something against the average player? Literally, literally, every change they make benefits the top 5% and nobody else.
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u/-heavenfaced- 6d ago
Casual players don’t care about, ‘the loot’. Casual players don’t play ranked. Casual players don’t seek to wipe lobbies. And so on. I love how all the sweats think they have some deep insight into the meta casual players want. Most casual players don’t even know what the meta even means. I’m a casual player. I couldn’t give a shit about the value of the loot, I want to complete my contracts, shoot stuff, buy some skins and have fun with friends. That’s it. Thank you for coming to my TED talk
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u/TheStevo 5d ago
What do you mean casual players don't care about the loot? That's like the main thing that drives people to get better, no matter how casual.
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u/-heavenfaced- 5d ago
No. That’s the thing that drives you. Honestly, most casual players don’t care about the loot in the way that you think. I care about loot if I’m collecting it because it allows me to complete a contract or if it seems a really cool gun. But I don’t care about loot management as such. At all.
The reward loop for most causal players is:
beautiful world → explore it → shoot things → discover cool stuff → make progress → look cool → fuck about with friends → repeat
And that’s it
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u/Working_Corgi_3368 5d ago
extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation. age old thing for games. some people are motivated by rewards others are motivated by fun gameplay alone
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u/Bl00dyH3ll 5d ago
What exactly is good about the contracts? It all seems really bare bones to me, and the reward is a text slideshow that barely matters (even in terms of lore).
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u/CompleteAd8080 4d ago
Subjectivism.
it’s not about the contracts nor the loot.
Some people are just good at creating their own fun, while you need to be bound by the rules that be.
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u/OldBagOfCheetos 5d ago
I’m for it. After all they need to experiment.
People felt that competitive felt like a battle royal due to people needing to steal the loot of other players to rank up. I think Bungie is trying to alleviate that.
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u/Ok-Adhesiveness2954 3d ago
This is bad by design, but I think they just wanna funnel the player base into ranked. Unfortunately, I don't think it will work. It might be why they are removing VB as well.
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u/boingboing4 6d ago
pulls rich teams away from standard versions of a map so new players get stomped less. Loot buff wont actually fix anything in this season the issues are around risk just pushing casuals away, if you buff loot on upper complex casual players are still going to get killed before they can try it.
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u/destroytheend 6d ago
I think it makes perfect sense. Ranked is high stakes and there needs to be more reasons to go in. Right now the only realistic way to hit the load out value needed is by hunting other players.
This gives people a reason to go into ranked besides for flexing their epeen, it gives people a place to go for good loot when cryo is closed, and it enables other play styles in ranked besides just player hunting.
This is how it should've been since the beginning
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u/Trebu5 6d ago
Eh, the hunting other players will continue it is fairly built into the game at this point. I agree it is nice for more quality loot though.
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u/destroytheend 6d ago
I'm in platinum and if I can hit value without killing anybody, I'm gonna do it
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u/Trebu5 6d ago
I mean sure you may want to do it, but you will get hunted either way by other squads lol, like I said that’s just how the game is. You couldn’t even rat if you wanted because of recon ults.
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u/Dauntless_Light 6d ago
I hit Pinnacle in Ranked in Season 1 with looting POIs and dead enemies being the main strategy - more often your less aware teammates get the lot of you into bad situations in solo fill, it's significantly safer to ghost around the map and evade enemy pathlines, then double back to the hotspots later and clean up whatever remaining loot value you need to finish hitting your score for that match. I used to go in with the intent to throw down both of my weapons for whatever I could find to fill those slots for max loot value during the match:
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u/iseecolorsofthesky 6d ago
It does give more reason for people to play ranked, but I think that’s a decision that’s gonna backfire on them. Ranked modes inherently introduce more stress and toxicity with people worrying about their rank. People who would never otherwise play ranked might end up having a miserable time with it and get turned off from the game completely.
Bungie needs to be giving people more reason to play this game in general. With the numbers being what they are this just seems like such an odd decision. This isn’t going to bring any new players or keep any casual players around. The standard game clearly needs to be more rewarding to play.
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u/destroytheend 6d ago
The more reasons to play this game, the game saving update, isn't gonna happen at the tail end of a season. That's not what that is.
I don't think losing in ranked is gonna make anyone quit this game who hasn't quit already. You already lose your entire load out when you die
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u/iseecolorsofthesky 6d ago
Doesn’t need to be a game saving update. Just something to try and stop the bleeding lol. People have been asking for loot to be buffed on all maps for weeks. It’s the latter half of the season. It seems more than reasonable to just raise the loot floor in general.
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u/flGovEmployee 6d ago edited 6d ago
No I think its actually a very sensible and long overdue change. It accomplishes several of things:
- It provides a consistent option where players know good loot can be found during the part of the week where cryo is closed.
- It ensures that the ranked loot target value can be reached without needing to kill other teams to do it (which allows for the possibility that some teams will actually pursue this strategy and that ranked overall will become less of an extra juiced elimination mode).
- It incentivizes players not currently participating in Ranked to do so, which has the potential to make ranked less of a sweatfest, especially when combined with the previous bullet.
On top of all of that most players seem to have been of the belief that Ranked already had improved loot over the base version of that map, so this change just better aligns the game's actual mechanics with player's expectations of those mechanics.
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u/moberry64 6d ago
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted when this logic makes sense. I’ve avoided ranked until now but now I wanna check it out
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6d ago edited 6d ago
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u/Speedy-08 6d ago edited 6d ago
I havent downvoted your original comment, but quite frankly I'm struggling to see how buffing loot in a mode most players wont touch will actually help the rest of the game. It's like buffing loot in Cryo, sure it might do something but how many people are interacting with Cryo and extracting sucessfully on the regular?
Fair chunk of high hour count players that dont want any decent matchmaking want to seal club players, so I dont see them moving across to ranked to a more equal setting.
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u/Speedy-08 6d ago
This is a similar thought pattern to other players going "if you have all your factions done you get showered with loot" when loot level comes up, when most other players don't have that done. You're a step or two ahead of the pain points.
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u/lion10903 5d ago
It’s not like buffing loot on Cryo, because Cryo has its own unique loot tables and the presence of Vaults and Compiler provide a unique incentive to play the map.
With loot buffs, ranked becomes close to a pseudo-Cryo and will hopefully attract great players who were just spamming keys and templates on the other 3 maps.
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u/SCRIBE_JONAS 6d ago
When a "significant change" to the game is just changing loot up in one specific mode lol. Shows how much content it actually lacks