r/MarathonGame

Was reading "Introducing Seasons in Marathon" article at Bungie.net and picked some of the most interesting quotes about what is coming in season 2, besides Night Marsh and new runner shell :

1. UESC bots are getting a buffed

"Your activities on the lost colony have not gone unnoticed, and the UESC are stepping up their security measures and responding in force to your criminal activities."

2. The new Cradle system for the Shell statistics

"We're also working on brand new systems that will change the way you play, plan, and progress throughout a season. For example, NIGHTFALL will introduce the Cradle, a new system designed to give you more autonomy over your Runner shell's statistical strengths and weaknesses."

What do you guys think? What is your favorite season 2 change ?

People put way too much stock into concurrent player charts without really understanding what they measure.

Concurrent players only tell you how many people have the game open at a specific moment. That’s useful for gauging matchmaking health, and yeah, Marathon definitely has some regional matchmaking issues right now. But beyond that, concurrency alone doesn’t tell you much about the actual size of the playerbase.

It doesn’t tell you:

• how long people are playing
• how often they come back
• how many unique players are active overall

Those variables matter because they’re what determine the size of the actual active player base, which is the metric publishers care about when evaluating retention and long term viability.

Active players are the people who potentially buy cosmetics, season passes, and expansions.

Live service games survive on sustained engagement across an active population, not just raw concurrent counts.

Estimating Active Players

You can actually estimate active players pretty easily. It requires you make a few assumptions, but the beauty of it is you don't have to rely on my assumptions alone - you can fiddle with the numbers yourself and come to your own conclusions.

p = (24 / x) * y * (7 / s)

Where:

• x = average playtime per session (hours)
• y = average concurrent players
• s = average days played per week
• p = estimated weekly active players

Using what I think are pretty reasonable assumptions for Marathon::

• ~2.5 hour average sessions
• ~2.5 play days per week
• ~13k average concurrent players over the last month

That gives you roughly:

~350k weekly active players

DAU using the same assumptions lands around:

~125k daily active users

Not Cope, Just a Heuristic Approach to Better Understanding the Health of Marathon's Playerbase

Before everybody starts foaming at the mouth calling this cope, no, this doesn’t mean Marathon is secretly thriving or exploding in popularity.

It just means “Steam charts low = dead game” is an extremely shallow way to analyze a live service title.

The interesting thing is these estimates actually line up reasonably well with outside sources too. PlayTracker estimates are in the same ballpark, and Paul Tassi mentioned Marathon peaked around ~470k DAU with averages closer to ~380k during periods where concurrency was around ~35k.

The broader point is that concurrency is one metric in a much larger retention and monetization equation. People treat it like the entire autopsy report when it’s really just checking the pulse.

You can find the pack here: https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/4499555254/120-digital-brutalism-icon-pack-ios?ref=listings_manager_grid

I know this feels like an advertisement, but I genuinely love the aesthetics of marathon and also "digital brutalism" graphic art, and so I wanted to create a more original style icon pack that combines both, so I did it! It took me over a month, but it's finally over phew! I made over 120 icons, and 3 wallpapers to go with it. If you'd like to check it out then DM me :)

First of all, I don’t know these people (Amniya and Raposo);

These guys simply rushed the location of every player who was in different parts of the map and killed them all; it was a massacre. I got suspicious within 2 minutes of the match, when they went up to the roof of Processing and wiped a squad without me even realizing there were people there; then they ran to Flight Control and killed another one. That’s when I reported and blocked both of them.

After that, they called the elevator to enter Pinwheel Base, but I got knocked down and stayed hidden. The two of them massacred everything and everyone up there, and I kept hiding. I found a group of Rooks and started talking to them, since I was alone. Then the rest of my squad came down and killed everyone.

Eventually, a rook who wasn’t with us killed me; after my team finished everyone off, they left me there and didn’t revive me. Since I didn’t care about the match anymore, I stayed watching them shooting with zero recoil on their weapons. They went back to Pinwheel, killed a few more rookies, and extracted.

I hope you don’t end up playing with or against these assholes in your matches.

******************
It seems I didn’t express myself well sorry.
Correction: I meant that I queued solo, and they were a duo.

Bungie I literally beg you bro fix matchmaking for lower level people. I’m barely level 37, my teammates around the 20-40 level area too yet we get skinned alive by people with OVER level 200. On Perimeter out of all maps too

Wouldn’t it be wiser to just introduce a new matchmaking system if the player count is low? Make the game a little more forgiving for new players

hmmmmmm