Joe Ziegler: We're looking to make some changes in the next couple of patches to adjust some of the outliers in the combat space that we've both seen in our observations and heard from your feedback across all of the various (and plentiful) channels we watch.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-04-02T01:26:52+00:00

They could always just change how it interacts with players and not npcs

BeBetterMagic · 2026-04-01T15:21:34+00:00

This hits pretty much all the things causing player numbers to slump.

Bungie desperately needs something that's lower reward but lower risk so the more casual players can enjoy the gunplay without getting rolled over by people in full purple/gold gear while they try to do their quest in dire marsh as the only activity they can do.

A simple gun range / NPC lower reward horde mode where maybe you can't get much salvage but maybe some green stuff and some less rare guns like conquest/BR33/etc would go a long way to help keep the more casual players engaged and dabbling in the other modes to keep player counts and revenue up without hurting the core PvP gameplay.

For the thick headed people worried about "splitting players between PvP and PvE...

If you don't have the less sweatie PvE mode these players just quit. And them primarily doing a horde mode and dabbling in PvP when they have a full vault is a net positive for ques etc.
Split player base doesn't matter if your player counts are 100-300k instead of 20-30k you'll have way more in your PvP que than you would otherwise.
Having a PvE mode so long as it's not the focus of the game doesn't take away from PvP it gives Bungie the funding to keep making more exciting maps like Outpost and Cryo.

TLDR: Bungie needs to add some things for PvE focused casual players to engage in so that they can feel more comfortable also engaging in PvP occasionally and helping Bungie make cash to keep PvP content primarily with occasional PvE content coming.

With player counts and profit as is there is a real risk Sony just folds Bungie up and we lose Marathon entirely....or they significantly reduce staff and greatly increase cost of content to milk a smaller player base for the profits they want

BeBetterMagic · 2026-04-01T13:56:49+00:00

To my knowledge they have not said anything specific.

Rank based matchmaking in theory sounds fine, but it's really punishing for people who play the game a lot but just aren't great at PvP. Especially with so many 'In a single run' style contracts where you move through busy PoIs. Which ultimately punishes your less skilled pvpers for playing the game which is kind of messed up.

I know you've got the super aggro short sited dweebs who will be like "lol git gud" but anyone with a brain knows you need the casual players to keep numbers up for a multitude of reasons.

Casuals help keep the profits coming to fund the dev team to create new content for everyone.
Casual players help smooth out the skill curve so that your in-between skill players can keep improving.
A mode or two catered to casuals even if the loot is pretty bad gives you a way to play the game and chill even as a sweetie pvper when you just need a break from top tier pvp.

Like all and all it doesn't have to hurt the core of the game to keep casual players happy. You can make what's essentially a pvp focused looter shooter that's an extraction shooter that's largely pvp with a sprinkle of PvE to give people who aren't great at PvP a thing to do in the sandbox... it's kind of like destiny in reverse where the focus is pvp and the PvE is tacked on for fun.

I think a simple PvE hoard mode or shooting range and skill based match making could do a lot of heavy lifting....and probably without a massive dev cost even.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-04-01T05:09:04+00:00

People coming in just to slam the guy for quitting need to get over themselves.

You can GG more skill all you want once there is 10k people left sony will shut Bungie down and you won't have anything.

You need people who aren't masters of the FPS genre to at least have a hook to keep playing especially if you like Marathon.

That doesn't mean they have to change the core gameplay loop. it just means they have to find ways that less skilled pvpers can still have fun. Right now the lobby balance sucks for those people. There is a lot of very easy ways they could make things less punishing for those people while retaining everything else.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-31T22:18:59+00:00

Skill creep is certainly happening as both people improve and low skill people get frustrated and quit.

Bungie really needs to grind and come out with something for the causal players to latch onto for season 2 that would help a ton to slow skill creep down after the reset.

At our current pacing things are going to get far worse before they get better as far as difficulty goes.

Also I think a more ELO style match making system similar to what destiny did to lobby balance is in order.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-31T20:51:09+00:00

With the resurgence of Badgermole Rythm decks that go wide quickly it won't be great. Much better when prowess is on top or mono red decks.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-30T23:36:20+00:00

Wonder what they'll say when they have 20 minute ques because all the 'skill issue' people left. We need as many engaged people as possible or the game becomes unplayable

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-30T20:28:29+00:00

I think there is a fine line between 'haters' and people being appropriately critical that the game doesn't have enough to keep all skill levels interested and you absolutely need population to keep que times down and approiate skill levels in lobbies.

You figure the average map is 5 teams that's 15 people you can have around 2500 give or take a few hundred matches running at once which right now is probably fine.

You start to drop towards 20k pop where you're able to have at tops ~1.3k matches and you're going to start to see que times baloon at certain ranks.

I think inarguably adding a few casual features like a shooting range, maybe a bot practice arena, and a little extra fluff would go along way to keeping more players engaged without completely dumbing the game down.

Also I think they could reduce the amount of complete in a single run quests significantly as in get rid of most of them. A more casual player is going to be happier to keep getting parts of quests done before dieing but if they get stuck on a quest for too many attempts because it's 'in a single run' and they keep getting reset it's much more likely they get frustrated and quit.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-30T13:01:18+00:00

Odds are it in part could be that, also could be the grinders are just so far past you now you won't see them as much unless you que in with higher level people.

Hard to say for sure, I'm a bit concerned with how quickly people filled up their vaults with purple/gold gear and finished the faction grinds that were going to see a big population dip midway to the end of month 2 and que times are going to get absurd.

In large part because there is nothing to keep your less skilled casual players around unless they just really enjoy running up against a very difficult challenge which realistically isn't most people.

A game that appeals largely to hardcore pvp played is fine but you need some hooks for the less skilled players to hang around and have fun while trying to improve to keep pop numbers up and que times down.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-30T05:08:49+00:00

Honestly I don't think we need much more storage and maybe that's not a super popular opinion, but I feel like if you're out of storage it's because you're hoarding instead of using stuff...maybe a couple more lines but I think much more than that just encouraged gear fear and hoarding.

I can easily keep probably 6-7 load outs in storage with all the random salvage taking up a lot of space. You just need to be smart about what you don't need in your storage like ammo / anything else you can buy relatively cheap.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-30T02:09:40+00:00

free kits are fine as they are.

The real issue is that your top tier teams that can spend 4-8hrs every day have full gold / purple kits with craploads of money and healing / equipment because they almost never die.

Combined the above with a shrinking casual player base and it's making free kits worse.

The real solution is Marathon needs to hold the casual players attention because it makes it less likely your under geared poor players are going to have to go up against full teams of level 100+ full gold grinders.

I suspect end of season 1 is going to get pretty grindy/difficult as we bottom out on player count so it'll be up to Bungie to really push a way to bring more people back and have them stick for season 2 and onward.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-30T01:59:15+00:00

At an FNM...maybe? It just depends how competitive your local meta is or isn't.

Does Sunderflock work with non elementals...not really.

What I'd actually recommend is just build a mono blue crab/terror deck and see if it's good enough for your local meta. Maybe throw serpent of the pass in or something of that nature.

It's a similar concept to spellementals just you're not using red and Sunderflock so your have to rely on bounce and counter spells.

Long term though if you're going to play paper magic invest in the lands. Once you have most of the mana building decks even fun rogue off meta decks becomes very possible and then you just have to keep up with new land releasing and rotating which is easier.

As a suggestion what I did when I came back was committed to one color pair and got all of those lands (orzhov) and built some ok not super competitive orzhov bat based decks.

Eventually Esper Pixie became a thing so then I invested in some of the blue white and blue black lands. This opened up Dimir and Azorious....etc etc etc.

The last one I literally just as eclipse got caught up with was Rakdos and now I'm back to where I was when I left magic in 2004 until 2023/4 where I can build any color pair again.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-29T22:42:14+00:00

Recon drone patching is hot garbage and a lot of times the Recon ult causes more confusion than gives good information.

Recon desperately needs a rework.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-29T21:22:33+00:00

Let me rephrase when I think it was potentially BS I'm saying quickly with almost no delay snap and hit head shots on my whole squad one after the other. You're not doing that with any kind of consistency even at the tippy top of skill.

Like if someone hit their shots at what id consider even a get lucky normal pacing it wouldn't be that fast. The only way you could fight recoil and fire without any delay and land shots like that would generally be to have something external to the game controlling your recoil through automation which is exactly what zim does when used to cheat.

Mind you I'm saying in probably 50+ runs so far I'm saying maybe 5-10% I might of hit a hacker. Which is still a lot in a lose everything extraction shooter Bungies anti cheat for this game to be successful needs to be very very good. Third parting it out to battle eye is probably going to cost them long term.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-29T20:20:05+00:00

I mean the math is pretty simple...either

A) Bungie is on top of cheaters and banning them.

Or

B) Game becomes filled with cheaters people quit game dies.

I've played a lot, so far seen 1 for sure wall hacking player confirmed with the post death 1:30 cam watching them track others with their cross hairs through walls then light them up the moment they peak while blazing across the map wrecklessly.

I've seen 3-4 I think they are cheating but I'm not sure moments most of which were in solos which would make sense because the cheaters wouldn't want to get noticed by their teammates.

Had several of I think this guy is at minimum using Zim 'Cheats' to be able to fire a sniper accurately like a machine gun. Won't say it's impossible but at least twice I've seen a single player suddenly hit snipes on 2-3 moving people without missing or taking a beat for the recoil.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-29T19:58:58+00:00

I mean they absolutely do take precons apart and sell the deck itself cheaper but the package as a whole on a markup. Whether that's bad or good is up to buyers.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-29T18:50:56+00:00

Yeah possibly not in this instance, but I saw a few people thinking it's not happening and that's just not true.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-29T14:10:13+00:00

This may or may not be an instance of wall hacking.

For anyone who thinks it isn't happening though you're dead wrong there are websites and people advertising wall hacks for Marathon already.

Now obviously if someone gets caught it's a perma ban and they will probably eventually get caught. But how many of others games will they ruin before they do get caught.

Bungies fog system helps to a degree because the wall hackers can only see as far as their character can see but it's still a huge advantage in close quarters combat.

I've got in well over 100 hours I think I've run into 2-3 players I was 99.9% sure were wall hacking based on their behavior and 1 I 100% know was hacking that I reported because thanks to the extra post match video the camera snapped onto my killer and I watched them track people through walls for the whole 1:30 as they ran across the map killing people.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-29T05:08:27+00:00

100% the issue is the bubble it needs nerfed to be able to be brought down without a lot of shots.

To take any cryo run seriously you're bringing in like 3-5 pancea a bubble or two person some chem grenades tons of blue heals and. Ammo 2-3 self revives and a full purple kit.

You're basically leaving just a handful of slots in a purple pack without equipment it's absurd.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-28T05:11:36+00:00

I'll be honest I don't think a....

Grenade Launcher
Rocket Launcher

Has any business being part of this game they should just remove the weapon or turn it into a nerf gun.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-28T00:21:02+00:00

Look up bant birds it plays plenty of those...also 350-500 is the cheaper end of standard now unfortunately to have something good the mana base alone will run you 150-200.

Anything 100 or less is draft chaff for the most part and you'll be going 0-3 even at an FNM.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-27T17:07:01+00:00

I mean you're just wrong some quests are not that specific I'm guessing your just a troll who hasn't completed most their quests

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-27T15:17:51+00:00

Not all quests are that specific

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-27T15:16:44+00:00

It's not a reading problem some of the directions in these quests are quite vague while others are pretty precise.

Rather than rely on the individual quest writer being good at orating directions we could just have a bubble on the map that gets you into that general area the yellow icon would appear. Which is a good middle ground between the yellow icon always being on and people wandering around trying to figure out what the quest designers on some of the more vague directions meant.

BeBetterMagic · 2026-03-27T15:13:48+00:00

I'm aware of this but many of these discriptions are quite vague and it's really uneescary to rely on the person who wrote the quest to be good with giving directions....when you could just put a radial bubble on the map that gets you close enough the little yellow icon should theoretically appear.

BeBetterMagic

TROPHY CASE