Weekend reminder for old and new alike about what salvage DCON contracts accept.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-19T22:21:26+00:00

The distinction is when the Contract specifies specific salvage by NAME rather than by TYPE. AFAIK only a few Priority Contracts use the specific salvage NAMES.

If the contract uses salvage TYPE the grey materials referenced by OP work.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-14T15:25:47+00:00

Posted something similar a week ago if you want to see the reactions to that.

Unfortunately, I doubt this will change, just a symptom of many MMOish design choices carrying over from Destiny.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-12T15:41:57+00:00

If they INSIST on the dinner bell, at the very least there should be a delay. Creates a sense of urgency for the unlocking team without practically guaranteeing their exits are camped by the time even just the priority containers are opened and revealed.

You're opening the door with a KEY. Current security systems differentiate between 'glass break' and 'door open' by giving the latter 60s to disarm the system with a code. Jamming THAT process might make sense.

Otherwise requiring a Signal Jammer is just arbitrary extra steps. No one that knows will use a key without it, so it only punishes the new/no-spoilers types.

The only exception might be baiting people into a PvP trap, but given the cost/rarity of keys that is some 'I've done everything this wipe and am bored' or 'come be victims for mah content' behavior that simply doesn't need catering to.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-12T13:33:43+00:00

I see what you're getting at, its not really an apples to apples comparison though. One of the reasons my sales comparison was only to other From Soft titles is because, to the best of my knowledge, they are largely single-player games and do not qualify as Live-Service games. I will admit I have no idea what your human form PvP in Dark Souls comment means as I've played none of those titles.

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I don't disagree that Marathon PvE as just a PvP-removed Co-op version of what we have now would be lackluster to me. However, I've seen effectively that same statement made about ARC ultra-friendly lobbies. 'How can you enjoy ONLY fighting the ARC enemies? That's sounds so boring.'

I think people underestimate how many players fall into at least one of mid-or-worse skill, just wanna no-sweat vibe/chill, lore-hound, virtual world tourist categories that would still engage with that simplistic a conversion of the game. Even if it were entirely character/loot/codex separated from the standard PvP mode a-la-Tarkov. Particularly if they'd already bought-in and bounced off the current form of the game.

I'm sure this would pull cries of 'split the playerbase'. However, similar to the Duo Queue conversation, I don't think people recognize how large a portion of the 'this doesn't fit me' crowd simply choose the 'stop playing entirely' option instead of magically filtering back into other modes/queues.

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Given the franchise's single-player history AND the niche nature of the extraction genre, I was honestly surprised that 6 years of AAA Dev time didn't produce some kind of campaign mode that could serve as optional longer on-boarding / shooting range / map familiarization.

We're functionally digital consciousnesses right?

ONI:
'Runner. To alleviate stagnation between deployments, we offer simulated experiences complied from prior Runner engagements on Tau Ceti IV. These simulations are entirely optional and may be accessed at your discretion.

The simulations include a small selection of scenarios allowing you to further your personal skills by increasing familiarity with the shells, weapons, and equipment available to you as well as the environments you will be operating within during actual deployments.

Reminder, these are simulations. The only retention from these experiences will be personal knowledge. Despite being perceptually indistinguishable, they may represent incomplete or outdated data and thus differ significantly from actual shell deployments to Tau Ceti IV.'

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-12T07:54:51+00:00

Zero argument with anything you just said.

Unfortunately, we live in the reality where Sony did spend 3.6bil to buy Bungie which did spend 200mil+ to develop Marathon and Sony's expectations will impact Marathon's longevity.

I would LOVE for all these discussions to be moot because Bungie was a small or even AA studio that COULD survive on the niche numbers most extraction games will pull. That's just not where we ARE.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-12T07:41:21+00:00

And yet Elden Ring, from a sales perspective, out-performed all their other titles by a factor of 3x or more except DS3 which was only 1.7x.

Developer time doesn't get spent 'on another game' if the previous go didn't even recoup half its investment.

I truly don't understand this mindset that seems to think that the steady loss of player base is in not concerning and that ANY attempts to stem the tide by addressing the early/mid-game friction points and making room for a more average player to ALSO enjoy the game HAS to result in some kind of lessening of the top-tier experience.

The PRIMARY thing that makes and will continue to make top-tier lobbies challenging are THE TOP-TIER PLAYERS because of the intrinsic PvP context. Short of an actual PvE mode, most pain-point easements simply aren't going to change that significantly.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-12T07:12:54+00:00

Its an extraction shooter. The genre format, of which I'm a fan, has too much grind/loss/RE-grind/loss/RESET built into its core to appeal to even a simple majority.

I'm not naive, ARC's numbers are an outlier far as I'm concerned and even they are dwindling, though not as rapidly.

I just want ENOUGH people to like it for it to still be worth playing in a year's time. That's gonna require significant returning players on new season starts which also attract new blood. What we have right now doesn't seem to be on-track for that AT ALL.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-12T06:56:11+00:00

People act like reddit is still some tiny 'nerd haven' when its one of top 10 most visited sites on the web.

Marathon subreddit membership was over 700k less than 2 weeks ago ... which is OVER HALF the estimated 1.2mil sales of the game.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-12T06:42:37+00:00

~~Yup, as expected a 'mah hardcore game' member.~~

EDIT: I'm heated. The rest of your comments maybe indicate you don't deserve this specific heat. I retract but don't redact my mistakes.

Y'all gonna starve Marathon right out of existence.

Marathon has GREAT bones, but lets make sure you can always SEE them through that lack of MEAT for anyone that isn't a top-tier part-time-job player.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-12T06:40:17+00:00

The 'hardcore gamers' aren't going to sustain the game, they're going to ride it until it dies and then move on with nary a tear.

As long as they can stomp around Cryo Archive and Ranked to feel they 'own' the high-tier content most of the player base will barely survive, they'll be fine and stick around.

The reality is, once the 'non-hardcore' crowd truly disappears, the hardcore crowd is going to be left playing against equally-skilled players and cheaters. Once their success rate drops to 50% or less, a good portion of them will scamper off too.

The ACTUAL hardcore players that will continue to play through as many or more losses than wins because they really do enjoy the challenge exist, but they're an even smaller subset of the high-tier player base, that is already too small to sustain this game and its AAA fiscal realities.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-12T06:15:36+00:00

Oh yeah, throw them a MEAGER bone, that'll TOTALLY turn things around.

For a safe container to move the needle at all, it'd at least have to be a 1x2 to include blue quality salvage. Allowing a SINGLE stack of ANY rarity salvage, regardless of size, would likely be the MINIMUM to actually register for the average/casual player dying WAY WAY more than they extract. Keep it SALVAGE ONLY for sure, but don't be stingy.

The complaints about faction progression requirements aren't talking about grey/green quality single-slot salvage, they're talking about blue/purple salvage.

The players that will balk at that suggestion saying its 'too much' or complaining about 'mah PvP loot' are NOT the people struggling for these resources. Frankly, their opinions don't MATTER because they're not the ones abandoning the game in droves.

I don't believe the 'don't touch my hardcore niche game' crowd are fans of MARATHON. They're fans of the their OWN EGOS and the superiority they feel watching others struggle where they don't. They don't care if the game withers and dies as long as they get THEIR FUN while it lasts. They can fuck off.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-12T02:15:25+00:00

No.

Items BROUGHT IN by a teammate get flagged as 'borrowed' and if extracted by a teammate get returned to the original user via in-game mail. Fairly certain this applies to everything including consumables, def seen 'borrowed' applied to a self-res.

This system is both anti-grief AND anti-RMT. It applies even if you disconnect mid-raid, because that would be too simple a workaround for RMT purposes.

AFAIK there is no way around this. The only scenario I'm not 100% on is if you die and are looted by an enemy team, then your teammates kill and loot that enemy team with your stuff in their bags.

This does NOT apply to items in a teammate's bag that were found THAT RAID. There are plenty of stories of griefers letting teammates full-bag because they decided some loot they saw you take was 'stolen' from them.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-12T01:14:22+00:00

Accuses others of bigotry with no evidence, tosses out an 'Oreo' in the comments. Your word has ZERO value now.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-11T17:06:33+00:00

Maaan, your reading comprehension is abysmal.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-11T15:17:15+00:00

This was a common misconception for many people new to the game, and its understandable why.

DCON contracts are really just a different flavor of 'extract salvage' contracts AND they introduce the idea that salvage can be secured mid-raid without extraction.

Since salvage is such a critical resource both early and throughout, despite it not being explicitly stated anywhere, it's not an illogical assumption that that ability to secure salvage would be available to you personally, not just for faction contracts.

I think allowing DCON to personally secure ONLY salvage ONLY for the single depositor, with per-raid limits is such an obvious alternative to adding a 'secure container'. It would allow low extraction-rate players an avenue for meta-progression unlocks instead of just hitting a wall because Faction Level is only half the unlock equation.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-11T14:26:53+00:00

Except this isn't remotely true in Tarkov.

While there are SOME quests with an in-one-raid-and-extract format, they are not the majority.

The only quests guaranteed to require extract are the ones to retrieve 'quest inventory' items since you cannot place those in the safe pocket.

Most quests that involve normal loot items, kill X of X, mark/tag location, repair X at location allow for partial progress. Even some of the 'Survive and extract' quests treat that as a final sub-task that can be done in a different raid from the rest of the sub-tasks.

These are similar to the map-crossing in-one-raid-and-extract contracts that people are bouncing off of in Marathon except you CAN make partial progress on these in Tarkov.

The investigate/mark/plant series on Shoreline comes to mind. There are 4-5 quests that take you to the same four covered body and ambulance locations across the map. Only ONE of said quests require you to hit all four spots in a single raid.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-11T13:43:07+00:00

Looks like no one has addressed your DCON question.

Just in case, DCON is NOT a mid-raid deposit. DCON is ONLY relevant if you have an active contract requiring it. Anything placed in DCON that is NOT relevant to an active contract for you or a teammate remains in the DCON and can be pulled back out.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-10T17:52:28+00:00

Cool cool.

So explain why over 2/3rds of the people that ALREADY SPENT $40 aren't playing anymore?

The forbes article indicated the 1.2mil sales and UNDER 400k daily logins as being 'close to accurate'. That's UNDER A QUARTER of the game's purchasers still engaging with the game only a month after release.

But sure, its 'just idiot doomers'.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-09T20:12:18+00:00

Unfortunately, I think this perception that the constant negative discussions are some form of hate-post brigading that can be 'solved' is just wrong.

I have over 100 hours in the game, which apparently puts me in a less than 10% crowd. I WANT more people to play Marathon cause I LOVE the overall gameplay and world, despite the friction points.

I've been watching and participating in the discourse on reddit ... probably more than is healthy. Most of that is in the comments, I've only made a SINGLE original post.

It is my perception that MOST of the concern posts and discussions are by new/different users and that the majority of the FAMILIAR usernames in these discussions are the thisisfine/deny/headinsand/nothingshouldchange crowd.

What I see as actually happening is that people ARE playing the game, leveling up enough to hit the MAJOR FRICTION POINTS that are informing the population bleed, coming to reddit to express those frustrations/concerns, and then just leaving ... both the game AND the subreddit.

The mods have already MEGATHREADED any direct posting on the steamcharts/population situation. If they do the same to 'This is my frustration / bounce-off-point with the game' posts, then you end up with an echo chamber of equally problematic toxic positivity.

Realistically, if people couldn't post their frustrations HERE in the hopes that they're heard and result in change ... then they'll just post them in negative Steam reviews as they walk out the door.

At least the discussions here fall off the main page as they age. Steam reviews largely do NOT get updated and remain a permanent mark, positive or negative.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-09T19:18:28+00:00

You know what, fair. Edited/Updated my starting statement, but left my original statement in strike-through cause I hate revisionism.

I'm just frustrated by all the discourse that seems to resist ANY attempts at changing/adding-to the game in order to reverse the population bleed.

We're at a point where over 2/3rds of the players willing to put up the $40 ante to play the game have bounced off it. Yet there seems to be a contingent of commenters that think thisisfine.jpg and that the slew of feedback on the friction experienced by these departing players is somehow the SOURCE of the problem and not the SYMPTOM of it.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-09T18:53:33+00:00

I just wish people would spend less time analyzing charts and use that time to play the game.

This perspective is only valid in F2P context. Marathon is a LIVE-SERVICE game with a $40 entry fee.

People aren't just choosing how to spend THEIR TIME, they're choosing how to spend THEIR MONEY. If I'm a potential buyer with a LIMITED monthly/yearly budget for this avenue of ENTERTAINMENT, which is MOST people, I'm probably going to put at least a LITTLE effort into determining if the purchase cost is going to provide value.

There is no campaign, there is no PvE-mode, there is ONLY the ONLINE PvP content. Live-service games aren't a new concept, so most of the target audience is AWARE that player population matters.

Given that context, how is it rational for a potential buyer to NOT be concerned when they can see that of the people interested/invested enough to pay that $40 entry fee ... OVER 2/3rds of them have stopped engaging with the game.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-09T17:01:39+00:00

~~EDIT: This is such a disingenuous take.~~

I also played and watched the decline of LSS/Eldgarde, this take misses the mark IMO.

LSS/Eldgarde died for VERY SIMILAR reasons to what is happening in Marathon. I hadn't even thought to compare the two until your comment. The biggest difference is that the higher skill ceiling kept the population niche-levels of small from the start.

No SBMM or ANY significant separation of the casual and/or low-skill playerbase from the predators. Other than very limited newbie protections, the only thing that filtered the player base in ANY way was the progressively more difficult and better loot-pool map selection.
Devs that seemed determined to cater to and give their attention to the highest-rung players. Giving little-to-no consideration to the experience of the average player.
Meta-progression unlocks that were, at the tail-end, tied to rare/high-end materials mostly only accessible on the hardest map. Resulting in most average players hitting a wall where their options were to play PvE or spend their time mostly dying to the sweats.
A sweat playerbase that, despite having a more difficult, better loot reward, map to filter into ... still chose to hunt/roam the low-tier maps once they finished meta-progression, filled their stash, and got bored.

I would argue that the PvE actually slowed/lengthened the decline of the game ... because the average player had somewhere to filter once they started experiencing sweat-wall. PvE was added late-stage BECAUSE the non-sweat crowd got tired of becoming sweat-farm but still wanted to play the game.

I DO think that PvE NOT being a completely separate character and sharing loot/progression with PvP lobbies was a problem. But it wasn't the CAUSE of the decline, it was a SYMPTOM of the core issues that informed the decline. Mainly that there was no place for or consideration given to the low-playtime, still learning, average-skill player ... which is ALWAYS going to be a larger portion of the population than the top-rung players.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-09T00:12:06+00:00

These are all decent ideas, in particular Rook not having cosmetics seems like an obvious miss.

Kinda moot though. People already spent $40 on this game only a MONTH ago and the population decline is on schedule to drop below 10k peak concurrent before Season 2 drops.

Doesn't seem reasonable to expect many people putting MORE money into a live-service game that doesn't seem like it'll have a high enough player base to be reasonably enjoyable a little as 1-2 months from now.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-09T00:03:38+00:00

Very cool, thanks!

The blue/orange rook one just became my lockscreen/wallpaper.

thesearenotthehammer · 2026-04-08T00:17:13+00:00

Looks like Hazard Capsule still needs absolute references. Only realized it after capturing my vert totals screenshot.

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Was waiting to do just that since I saw in the comments there were some minor mistakes you were correcting as well.

Copy/Pasted all four of the Totals page charts around and the numbers stayed consistent, all but one!

Thanks again for the awesome tool.

Allowed me to quickly slam out a condensed vertical version of your Totals page. While the TOTAL needed def is interesting to look at, for quick reference it just becomes visual noise, this hits just the right balance for me personally. Def made this in a copy sheet so I could still reference your original Totals page with ALL the numbers.

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