Season 2 of Marathon kicked off earlier this month, and thus far it’s been a season of ups and downs. Things started badly, with Bungie’s traditional launch woes undermining its free-to-play week. But new features like the Night-time Dire Marsh map and its Sponsored Survival quickly proved hits popular with the community.
A few weeks in, however, new problems have emerged. Basically, progression in Marathon has become too easy, which is ironic considering the game’s formidable reputation. Where you felt lucky to extract with anything of value in Season 1, Season 2 players have apparently been hoovering up so much loot that their vaults are overflowing with goodies, throwing the game’s economy into disarray.
Earlier this week, Bungie published a Steam post explaining what had gone wrong, and what might be causing it. “Out of the gate in Season 2, progression and access to power moved much faster than the previous season,” the developer wrote. “For reference, the average wealth in week two of Season 2 is similar to what we saw in weeks 11 and 12 of Season 1. And while we did want to increase progression speeds, we didn’t land at a place that’s healthy for the game.”
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Oops. As for what’s causing this issue, the answer appears to be a combination of factors. For starters, there were several contributing bugs that Bungie says it’s now fixed, such as “guaranteed gold drops in places that shouldn’t have them”. The rush of Sponsored Kits at the start of the season also gave progression a boost, as did a combined issue with “Sponsored Survival grind” and a valuable chest in the Complex Control area, with players milking Marathon’s mostly PvE mode for all it was worth.
The primary factor remains somewhat elusive, however. According to Bungie, there’s an issue making higher rarity loot proliferate through the game. But the team doesn’t know exactly what’s causing this. “This isn’t something we’ve seen in our internal playtests, and we’re still unravelling the source.” Curious.
While it investigates this, Bungie has made some other “tweaks” targeting progression, such as turning off boosted containers and nerfs to Cradle XP rates. But these are temporary measures, which Bungie plans to “reverse later in the season when we have other solutions in place.” Hopefully the team will figure out the root cause of the problem soon, though I’m sure there are some players who don’t mind having a slightly easier time of it on Tau Ceti IV, at least in the short term.
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