Marathon 2025 - Bungie's new AAAA Extraction shooter

creaturestorm said:
Blizzard is the same way, they don't nerf by like 10% its often 150%. How they can say something is totally fine and then in retrospect it needs a 100% nerf is beyond me. How they arrive at these numbers is baffling.
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Their way of balancing is switching power between character/skills. Relevant comics:
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P.S. Not sure how to correctly insert images, I hope I did it right.
 
creaturestorm said:
Blizzard is the same way, they don't nerf by like 10% its often 150%. How they can say something is totally fine and then in retrospect it needs a 100% nerf is beyond me. How they arrive at these numbers is baffling.
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Gearbox is pretty bad for this too, which is especially dumb now that I don't think Borderlands 4 even has PVP (if it does I didn't find it) and if it does nobody plays it because it's not what the game is about.
 
Zenos Yae Viator said:
by the end of the nerfing of these abilities, you couldn't even begin firing your gun before they were out of the freeze
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Yeah you had to be really quick.

The worst thing about the stasis nerfs was how it made the abilities feel slow, delayed and strangely clumsy. The usual intuitive good-feeling D2 gameplay took it to the chin.

First, they develop the thing, animations, controls and everything working together in tandem, a lot of work from a lot of people. Then they bring the nerf crew to just to kick it in the shin from all directions, with not much regard to how it feels to play afterwards. They let stasis ruin PvP for half a year without a worry, and then one day, in addition to finally nerfing it, just made it feel shitty to play. At least warlocks and titans felt really awkward for the longest time. Weird delays and shit everywhere.
 
The Doom Slayer said:
Gotta post this because it's utterly demented. Had to triple check if it was a parody or something.
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Always a good sign when your boss thinks "Player vs Environment" means "Player vs fauna and flora". Is this guy retarded? Rhetorical question, no need to answer this one.
 
Good morning my fellow Mara-Miggers, it’s your lovely effort poster/marathon hater/titan main/professionally unpaid steam chart watcher/faggot, Steven here. While downloading Payday 2 mods and checking out Battlefield 6 season 3 update notes and watching dear feeders (very gay and late) stream, I decided it would be entertaining to see what the steamDB charts say about our favorite game, Marathon and the games with similar player numbers! I found some very funny results as a part of this half assed research, and the results are below.


Currently, marathon is at 12k players on a Sunday morning. Horrific! What’s even more horrific is that there are more people playing some anime gambling slop, some cartoon indie game, and making blender porn, than playing marathon as of this moment.
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Some even funnier results, in terms of multiplayer shooters; of which marathon likes to parade itself as (while being balanced like a child’s sandbox nerf battle). There are more people playing Battlefield 1, a (very good) multiplayer shooter from twenty fucking sixteen.
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But my favorite of this category is that the original counter strike currently has a thousand more players. Unfortunate!
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And finally, the thing that made me laugh like a fat kid in a candy store;



Bloons 6, a mobile tower defense game that was ported to steam, is currently beating a game released by the studio who created halo and Sony, a multi-billion dollar gaming company that is currently winning the last two console generations by miles. Very-fucking-sad.

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I’ve had some people I know both online and offline ask me, “hey dude, why do you care so much? You don’t like the game, why obsess over its failure?”

Because, maybe I’m a faggot and a goyim consumer, but I fucking loved halo as a kid. In fact, Halo Infinite is my guilty pleasure. I ADORE Destiny 1 and 2. Flaws and all, they have some of my favorite gaming memories growing up and into adulthood. This company has raped or allowed the raping of my two favorite franchises for years, and got away with it because the majority of the gaming consumer base is gay, full of niggers and trannies, and so autistic it will forgive being blatantly lied to and scammed for years. Bungie, and specifically Jon Jones, has deserved what is coming to them ten times over for years now, and now it’s FINALLY happening and I couldn’t be happier. I’m going to savor this, and grave dance as much as I want to because this shit feels personal, like they specifically hate me and people like me for liking their previous games.

Fuck’em.
 
Dead Lion said:
At this point it's pulling worse numbers than any of it's competitors. 1k under tarkov at basically any time. Hunt and Arc Raiders are leaving it in the dust.
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Most of Tarkov's playerbase (anyone who bought it in the ten years leading up to release) didn't bother buying the game again, since BSG refused to give out Steam keys for anyone who already owned the game, and even edited it out of a promo image that said people would.
Shit on Nikita all you want (he deserves it), but Tarkov's actual player count is even higher than what Steam lists, and probably by a good margin.
Marathon is getting bodied by Tarkov even harder than it initially seems.
 
Vhailor said:
Their way of balancing is switching power between character/skills. Relevant comics:
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P.S. Not sure how to correctly insert images, I hope I did it right.
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I've always despised modern nerf culture. Like... just build your game properly, once, then leave it the fuck alone. Yes, some gear and abilities end up more powerful than others. That's the fucking reality of literally any situation in existence. It gives a game soul and character.

I honestly don't know if it is the woke DEI devs catering to every single crybaby complaint received, or an entire generation of crybaby gamers that were raised to expect a diaper change with the slightest grievance, but nerf culture is extremely fake and gay.

Balance should be achieved naturally, by the advancement of skill and strategy by the player, and a well designed game should accommodate this process. Starcraft was a perfect example of a masterfully balanced game. Just when everyone was complaining about Zerg being OP, some badass Terran player comes in and swipes the block. Then when people cry about Terran being OP, some badass Protoss player comes in and wrecks everything. And when inevitable complaints of Protoss being OP come in, some mastermind Zerg player destroys everyone. All without a single nerf ever having taken place.

It's called a Meta. And is what any good game has as its natural balancing agent. When DEI devs constantly nerf shit, it destroys the emergence of a natural, therefore actual, Meta.
 
Pimozide said:
Most of Tarkov's playerbase (anyone who bought it in the ten years leading up to release) didn't bother buying the game again, since BSG refused to give out Steam keys for anyone who already owned the game, and even edited it out of a promo image that said people would.
Shit on Nikita all you want (he deserves it), but Tarkov's actual player count is even higher than what Steam lists, and probably by a good margin.
Marathon is getting bodied by Tarkov even harder than it initially seems.
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tarkov is a star citizen scam project that accidentally ended up good through the ss13 autism principle, and it just so happened to become the most popular game of the 2020 summer season because of covid, securing him infinite funding from the kremlin. really the game is just an excuse so nikkita can handle extremely unobtainable military hardware - because the only way they'll let you look at it as a civilian is if you're going to model it in a game that makes them look cool. the game's nonsensical and often contradictory goals and patch directions make a lot more sense as a means to an end rather than the result of some kind of gestalt of design, it's a dumping ground for a bunch of assets he's acquired through his larping activities and has to occasionally update the game to keep the facade going

the game's got 5 minute queue times and it used to be instant. game probably used to have over a million players, now i'd wager it's probably got like 15k
 
BoomerSperg1922 said:
We're reaching weekend lows of ~5k and sub 5k last wednesday and thursday. Is it over?
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Unironically, yes. I think it is, but how over is it is relative. We truly don’t know with how retarded Sony acts. This is the same publisher that ritualistically murdered Blue Point just to save a few bucks.
 
It's wild to me how after months of the game being released that most of the player base still don't understand how to play this fucking game. It's baffling.

I've had so many team members insist we play passively instead of playing aggressively, in the time it takes for you to loot a room the other team could have completely traversed the map to reach your location. You simply can not play this game with out alerting another team of your location, the reality is that this game is more like an arena shooter skin walking an extraction shooter and if you don't take advantage of another team compromising their position they will not spare you when you're time comes to open a door or kill a bot. This is a kill or be killed game and if you're head on isn't straight for it you're going to be a total rape victim. Worse yet it seems like everyone still doesn't know that spawns are fixed and rushing into some one else's spawn will result in immediate death if you are looking to loot instead of a fight. I will jsit in a queue to join teams that immediately run to their death, totally absently minded. Being mindful of spawns is a day 1 Tarkov lesson, the 'Ground Zero' map bashes that into your head quick.

I am starting become pretty paranoid of cheaters, the one thing that this game had over Tarkov.

There was a raid where we had to sit in the corner of map while we waited on team mate to handle an IRL situation, we sat still in that spot for a good 6 minutes before along came a fully kitted squad to pvp us. Nearly 200 hours of marathon and I had never once stood in that spot before, never seen it either, but here are some purple and gold geared fags ready to fight.

Tarkov looking better every day.

I dont know... The current player base, what is left, just doesn't fit the game that exists. It's a fucking strange thing to see.
 
Fat Camp Intern said:
I've always despised modern nerf culture.
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It slides right in with DEI and libtard thinking -- someone's whining because they're losing? Punish the victor (nerf). Never do anything to raise up (buff) the side deemed "too weak." It's always "weaken the strong" rather than "strengthen the weak." It's like there's some unspoken understanding that actually making things better might reveal other, more personal weaknesses (lack of skill/talent, etc.).
 
moocow said:
It slides right in with DEI and libtard thinking -- someone's whining because they're losing? Punish the victor (nerf). Never do anything to raise up (buff) the side deemed "too weak." It's always "weaken the strong" rather than "strengthen the weak." It's like there's some unspoken understanding that actually making things better might reveal other, more personal weaknesses (lack of skill/talent, etc.).
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Also in line with leftist dogma of making sure everyone is as miserable as possible.
 
moocow said:
It slides right in with DEI and libtard thinking -- someone's whining because they're losing? Punish the victor (nerf). Never do anything to raise up (buff) the side deemed "too weak." It's always "weaken the strong" rather than "strengthen the weak." It's like there's some unspoken understanding that actually making things better might reveal other, more personal weaknesses (lack of skill/talent, etc.).
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Credit where credit's due, over on the Destiny side of things, Bungie hasn't been swinging the nerfbat very hard lately. In a nutshell, after the disastrous response to The Edge of Fate and its many problems, the devs took a stance of not nerfing anything for the foreseeable future unless it was wildly out of band, the reasoning being that it would be absolutely retarded to chase away players any more than they already had (not exactly their words but that's the gist of it).

As an example, a warlock exotic armor piece had an unintended interaction that allowed them to delete whole chunks of a boss's health with a single grenade, and since they could easily build into having grenades up very frequently, they were basically unparalleled for damage. Bungie left that bug unfixed for months and told them to have fun, only finally addressing it when the Guardian Games event happened since they didn't want warlocks to have an unfair advantage (they still won anyway).

Thing is, in a game with as many moving parts as most live service games, nerfs are almost always a necessity at some point. Even if you take the lightest touch possible with buffs, their effects will add up over time, and that can cause issues with the actual game design as well. Again, with Destiny, a frequently cited example is the Reckoning bridge from Forsaken, where because players were practically unkillable with their toolkits at the time, Bungie had to violate some of their encounter design principles to actually give players a challenge: putting players on a narrow bridge that was easy to fall or get knocked off of, spawning tons of snipers on faraway ledges, spawning in boss-level enemies behind the group, and making the entire encounter timed such that messing up even once would effectively end the run. And if you weren't playing one of those overpowered classes at the time? You were pretty much dead weight no matter how good of a player you might be. (As a titan, I had to hope that I got matched up with a couple warlocks and a hunter. Multiple titans? Yeah, we weren't making it.)

So yeah, as long as nerfs aren't so heavy-handed that they completely kill things players enjoy, and as long as they're paired with some buffs too, I don't mind them. And oftentimes, I can see how a nerf is all but inevitable; for one more Destiny example, the lightsaber is far too good at everything that it's pretty much guaranteed to be nerfed in a future update. At the same time, chucking a nerf at something because you want to try and get players to use something else (a tactic Bungie does use quite often) is retarded. Let players discover the things you want them to look at and decide for themselves whether they want to use them. Usually, the reason they don't isn't because it's not good, but because it's not as good in some way. Maybe it's as simple as it doesn't deal as much damage as the preferred option, or maybe it's more complicated, like it can technically deal more damage but the rotation just doesn't feel good to use. In the latter case, nerfing the popular easy option's damage won't get people to move over to the other option, it'll just make everything feel worse.

I dunno what exactly my point is with all this. I guess it's to say I don't envy a game designer's job one bit, honestly.
 
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