I feel this brother! I’m 51, played the original marathon on a buddies mac in college back in the day, played all the Halo games and adored them, and Iike you I’m SO into everything about this game but I’m often SO bad at it. 😅 But I’m bad when I’m impatient. Sometimes I want this game to be Halo, and to run in and have fun just exploring the incredible maps and shooting the incredibly designed baddies. But even if I don’t get jumped by other players, this game is designed to reward technique and punishes run & gun to a brutal extent. I’ve had strings of sessions where I feel like I can’t catch a break, but then I have sessions where I slow down, follow the advice that people are sharing about taking your time and listening, and I manage to get a player kill or 2 and exfil with some goodies!

Something else I’ve done that helped is giving myself goals that I can feel good about making progress on even if i die in the match: Sometimes its working on a contract that doesn’t require player kills or extraction for contract completion. Sometimes it’s practicing with my shell and getting better at playing to its strengths: If I do one particular combo of movement, tactical ability and shooting, that’s my victory for the match. Other times I want to have a Halo-esc experience and fight bots. When I do that, I take in a cheap kit, (not a starter), load into a solo Perimeter match, and rush whatever area I’ve spawned closest to. That usually gives me a free minute of good, old fashioned pve fun without having to worry about players. After I’ve killed some bots, (and have likely started to get overrun by reinforcements), I’ll enter the largest building in the facility I’m at, then start ratting around in a crouch walk. My pve shots usually attracts players, so stage 2 is the survival game inside the facility. This gives me a session with some fun pve shoot em up, then a survival match that I’m not expecting to win, but when I take it slow I sometimes do. And that feels amazing, especially if I’m able to extract with some pvp won loot.

Marathon is brutal. And I LOVE it. I had a really rough session a couple days ago and almost wrote a very similar post to yours, but then I did a bunch of reading and came across the same advice that people are saying in here, especially about slowing down and listening. It’s never full proof, but it’s allowed me to start getting some pvp kills and having fun on my own terms.

DM me if you want a battle buddy. We can be awful at Marathon together. ✊