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Marathon approaching 15k CCU low (sponsored by coachmcguirk91 - still having a blast)

zaga said:
I think the implication is that 4 other teams (12 purple diamonds?) are working as a single team
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One of the complaints that has risen to the top towards the end is people using outside of game comms like in coordination on discord and queuing at the same time aiming for the same lobbies. Some people think it is cheating. Some, a cry for help.

The idea is that a community from outside the game will form and then help each other inside the game even when they con red to each other.
 
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Zacfoldor said:
One of the complaints that has risen to the top towards the end is people using outside of game comms like in coordination on discord and queuing at the same time aiming for the same lobbies. Some people think it is cheating. Some, a cry for help.

The idea is that a community from outside the game will form and then help each other inside the game even when they con red to each other.
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Seems unfair unless they used prox chat to ask the recording team if they would like to join the super team too (I assume they did not)
 
I'm already seeing a lot of it, but the complaints about not being able to find people to play with due to the low population are only going to get worse over time. In regions where the player base is already small, the game will continue to lose players at an accelerating rate, because the fewer people there are, the harder it becomes to find matches, which pushes even more players to leave.
 
I collect VHS tapes said:
I'm already seeing a lot of it, but the complaints about not being able to find people to play with due to the low population are only going to get worse over time. In regions where the player base is already small, the game will continue to lose players at an accelerating rate, because the fewer people there are, the harder it becomes to find matches, which pushes even more players to leave.
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Could also be issues wherein it can't find a match, so in the interest of speed it throws you in matches where you get curb stomped.
 
Patch seems to have done very little, so I expect the game to continue going downhill.

I don't even know if it'll generate much of a spike, if at all. It'll be short lived if so.
 
It's the first sub 4k day finally? You can tell is the server maintenance, but the next hours it got up 4k again after the new drop and then the maintenance, so here we are.

58q3mAX0FBGjHrmp.jpg
 
There's not much of a twist happening right now to this game. It's at 15k, maybe it drops to 10k or 8k by the time season 2 drops.

Budgets, expectations notwithstanding, Bungie gave Sony a cool 50 million dollar injection in March. So they live to see season 2 atleast.
 
"The people who bought Marathon are really enjoying it and are sticking with it."
"Marathon's numbers are not catering by any means"
"It will be interesting what the low level peaks will be for Marathon in next few months. 20-30k would probably be ideal at this point. Which is still a very solid user base to build from."
-coachmcguirk91
 
Danny22 said:
There's not much of a twist happening right now to this game. It's at 15k, maybe it drops to 10k or 8k by the time season 2 drops.

Budgets, expectations notwithstanding, Bungie gave Sony a cool 50 million dollar injection in March. So they live to see season 2 atleast.
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Main problem there of course being that season 2 has nothing of note to bring in players.
 
zaga said:
In fact the opposite of attracting players because people will leave after their faction progress/upgrade progress gets reset
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I expect a large bump as players who think they are good but blame gear imbalance try the game again. But an almost immediate crash as these players get fucking destroyed by the people who already have hundreds of hours in this game.
 
Hari Seldon said:
I expect a large bump as players who think they are good but blame gear imbalance try the game again. But an almost immediate crash as these players get fucking destroyed by the people who already have hundreds of hours in this game.
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But those hypothetical players could already be playing Dire Marsh Sponsored where everyone starts with the same gear.

Instead I have a 10min wait time to try to play that because nobody else is playing it (apparently).
 
I'll do a daily update later, but as a note Marathon sales are so low here's the current stat box.

It also dropped off the Weekly Top 100 list, so unless it gets back on it it'll be Unknown what rank it is now. It was #74 last week, so it dropped off a minimum of 26 spots.

vu71fGrF5vCYeaSt.jpg
 
I just found something.....and I'm not sure if I should post it here.

Apparently there is a marathon hate reddit. I'm not gonna link it but I've been down a rabbithole my boys. Mods remove this post if I didn't know I couldn't do that, lol.
 
Men_in_Boxes said:
I'm expecting strong SBMM, or anti sweat measures, to be implemented for S2. I can't imagine Bungie thinks having 10+ kill players roam the map freely is good for the game.
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See the value of the extraction genre is that it's gritty and real. There's real stakes on the line and you could lose it all, which is why we're proud to announce that we're segregating the players into ranked tiers because shit got a little too real. Our data shows that reality sucks and people kind of just want a videogame they can enjoy.

It is funny to basically watch them slowly strip the game back into an arena shooter without officially getting rid of the extraction mechanics. We need a bubble padded matchmaking tier and endless sponsored kits so our players actually have guns. I wonder how far they'll get turning it back into a traditional shooter before caving on the extraction mode sucking.
 
Cumulus said:
Ftfy
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250px-SawyerABC.jpg

Animated GIF

It's not only here it is in the zeitgeist of all of gaming to hate Sony gaas now with few exceptions. I mean....I get it, lol. Sony screwed the pooch with gaas, but I'm 100% sure somebody should have reigned in Bungie here. This is their version of a Kojima game without any oversight from anyone. They went way too niche and self indulgent.
 
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Kronark said:
See the value of the extraction genre is that it's gritty and real. There's real stakes on the line and you could lose it all, which is why we're proud to announce that we're segregating the players into ranked tiers because shit got a little too real. Our data shows that reality sucks and people kind of just want a videogame they can enjoy.
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The north star is fun. SBMM and even matches produce the highest amount of fun. It has been known in gaming for almost 30 years.
Kronark said:
It is funny to basically watch them slowly strip the game back into an arena shooter without officially getting rid of the extraction mechanics. We need a bubble padded matchmaking tier and endless sponsored kits so our players actually have guns. I wonder how far they'll get turning it back into a traditional shooter before caving on the extraction mode sucking.
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The presence or inclusion of proper SBMM has nothing to do with getting rid of extraction mechanics.
 
Men_in_Boxes said:
The north star is fun. SBMM and even matches produce the highest amount of fun. It has been known in gaming for almost 30 years.

The presence or inclusion of proper SBMM has nothing to do with getting rid of extraction mechanics.
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Sure fun should be the goal of most games. That's like saying games should be good, it's kind of a useless vague platitude. I'm just making fun of Bungie for trying to design a game that needed to appeal to a mass audience and capture casual players, but simultaneously is trying to be hardcore as fuck at every turn. More generous free loadouts and skill based lobbies just run counter to so many other purposeful design decisions they've made. It's like trying to make the red-est ball possible and every patch note is about how they've added more green to the ball, it's just funny to me.

For every 3.0 K/D player there's a 0.33 K/D player and with extraction, that guy is going to have an extra bad time. Even if you break everyone into pools to perfectly achieve 1.0 K/D ratios it's going to start to feel artificial and shitty, especially when players end up being bounced between being the lowest skilled player in a lobby and being the highest. That kind of win / loss swinging has completely ruined modern shooters for me and I don't see anybody being thrilled to to get the short end of that stick by being tossed into the sweat box as a sacrifice every now and then when their entire loadout is on the line.

SBMM tweaks might give some casual players relief in the short term but longer term it's going to make the game feel artificial and shitty for players at mid and high level skill. This might be acceptable if it was a standard competitive game with fixed loadouts and low death / loss penalty, but death in Marathon can represent days if not weeks of lost effort getting a favourite gun or other perks. Anything that makes players feel that death was unfair is going to significantly contribute to player dissatisfaction.

Arc Raiders kind of avoids this by heavily focusing on social / PvE aspects so bad PvPers have alternative gameplay options. They also to my understanding match make on aggression so people looking for that social aspect are less likely to encounter the sweatiest PvPers.
 
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Mondai said:
Men in Boxes is a savant master troll..... or solo un moron..... it's hard to tell anymore.
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I'm convinced he doesn't actually believe half the shit he says. He just loves getting showered with attention in every damn thread.

I have him ignored but it still sucks because like half the posts are people quoting and arguing with him.
 
What I find funny every week is the small percentage boost of players that jump on straight after a patch, no matter how minor it is. Who are these people who boot games up every week after a patch and then almost immediately drop the game again? Does anyone on here do anything like it? Really curious to hear the mindset behind it.
 
Conflict NZ said:
What I find funny every week is the small percentage boost of players that jump on straight after a patch, no matter how minor it is. Who are these people who boot games up every week after a patch and then almost immediately drop the game again? Does anyone on here do anything like it? Really curious to hear the mindset behind it.
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It could just be people who were waiting to play the game but couldn't because of maintenance

The patch creates a situation where 4? hours of demand gets shifted to a 1 hour period
 
I read some tweets where they were dragging Taul. I think the Marathon community has fully turned on him now. I think they are saying he is just mad that the game isn't for him and has framed the game overly negatively. They also especially on the steam forums, lol, they also have actively revolted over his insistence that the 2.2 million number included the last two days of the server slam.

They fully believe marathon is one of the most popular games, and sold really well at 2.2 million. The funniest comment I saw was, "even the fake numbers are underwhelming." They believe this is the natural lifecycle of the game, and that there's nothing wrong with the player numbers, but rather this is expected every season. There are many other interesting delusions about Taul's facts but I can't remember them all now, lol.

I think they just feel betrayed because they expected at least Taul to be in their corner. It's very clear that even he passionately hates the game, in my humble opinion. You've got to understand if you were a destiny 2 player for many years, Taul was your guy!

His last video posted a few pages back is a fun watch.
 
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zaga said:
It could just be people who were waiting to play the game but couldn't because of maintenance

The patch creates a situation where 4? hours of demand gets shifted to a 1 hour period
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Could be but the day after patches are typically higher as well, last week was an anomaly where Tuesday was lower than Monday. And the spike typically doesn't happen until 17UTC, hours after the game is back up. To me that signals there's a group of people that boot up the game after each patch to play and then drop it again until next Tuesday.
 
Code: 
| Game      | Date UTC       | Avg CCU | Peak CCU | Player-hours | DAU range      | DAU midpoint |
| Destiny 2 | Tue 2026-05-05 | 7,756   | 11,542   | 186,150      | 62,050-148,920 | 93,075       |
| Marathon  | Tue 2026-05-05 | 7,766   | 13,191   | 186,376      | 62,125-149,101 | 93,188       |

Ok, granted Marathon did have a downtime window today, but still.

The Office Pam GIF


EDIT: Note I run these tests using UTC time so Tuesday ends a bit earlier than just using west coast times for end of day.
 
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11 pm completed hour CCU. Squeaked out a small gain at 13.4k. Not unusual for maintenance day
All time peak was launch day 88.3k. Today's peak at 13.4k is -74.9k or -85%

Today vs yesterday: 13.4k vs 13.2k (+0.2k or +1.5%)

Yesterday's low 3.7k. If the rate holds, low tonight will be 3.8k

Tue vs Tue: 13.4k vs 15.7k (-2.3k or -15%). A bit better than the historic changes of -20%

Ratio method to estimate peaks and valleys
Mon-Thur 3.3:1. For example, a peak of 15k will have a low of 4.5k. For Fri/Sat, gamers stay up playing so the ratio is 2.5:1

Steam Rankings
Daily Active Users: 134
Global Top Sellers: 159
Weekly Top Sellers: Unknown. Not on top 100
Top Rated Games: 6,077 (83.82%)
 
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Men_in_Boxes said:
The north star is fun. SBMM and even matches produce the highest amount of fun. It has been known in gaming for almost 30 years.

The presence or inclusion of proper SBMM has nothing to do with getting rid of extraction mechanics.
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SBMM only in ranked

That shit needs to be out of anything casual/social
 
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