Bungie promises "zero tolerance" for Marathon cheaters with new reporting tools

The highly competitive nature of Marathon means fair play is at the top of Bungie's priority list. In the wake of fresh public outcry around cheating and toxicity, the developer has responded with the promise of continued investment in its cheat detection methods, reporting tools, and more long-term features to deal with both cheaters and negative behavior in the sci-fi extraction shooter. It's also just deployed a new Marathon update targeting the potency of its Bubble Shield, and reducing the effectiveness of knife combat.

"We've seen the conversation about cheaters, toxicity, and competitive integrity in Marathon," Bungie writes. Having recently taken some initial steps to nerf its most powerful weapon, the team will be keen to ensure players don't feel like they're wasting their time against cheaters. There's no shortage of great multiplayer games right now, and even just the perception of a problem can be enough to drive people to other options.

Bungie states it has a "zero-tolerance policy around cheating," and is "actively banning confirmed cheaters, and expanding our telemetry and detection methods to better catch the aforementioned cheaters." It explains that some of these changes have already gone live, with more improvements due to roll out in the coming weeks. "Anti-cheat is a continuous cycle of monitoring, improving, and responding," it notes, promising to "continue to invest to protect the integrity of your runs."

To start with, Bungie is working on making it easier to flag any suspected cheaters both in game and via its online reporting system. It'll be offering more options for reporting Code of Conduct violations, such as harassment, and is considering follow-up messages delivered to your mailbox to let you know if a report results in action.

For the longer term, Bungie is "investing in better voice chat moderation tools to help more reliably act on repeat abusers in proximity and team chat." It's also aware that stream sniping is proving "a real pain point, especially in ranked," and is working to solve this through the typical suite of protective tools such as name privacy settings.

In the meantime, Bungie has deployed Marathon update 1.0.5.3, and the two big changes are to the strength of melee attacks and the Bubble Shield. A reduction to both maximum lunge distance and the width of the targeting angle will make the knife feel less like a Halo Energy Sword, while bonus damage from the Melee Damage stat has been sliced down to a cap of 50% against enemy Runners (this doesn't affect other targets).

"Melee in Marathon is intended to be a high-risk but potent method to contest close-quarters weapons like shotguns and submachine guns," Bungie remarks, but notes the breakpoints to hit kill thresholds have been too easy to reach. Its goal for the two changes is "that the knife remains a powerful backup tool, but requires more thoughtful play - both in and out of run - to be most effective."

As for the Bubble Shield, its rarity has been raised from Deluxe to Superior, making it less widely available. The health of the bubble has dropped by a third, but it's no longer vulnerable to Volt Weapon damage, and has 17% more resistance against UESC damage. Those changes are live now, so you should be able to start feeling the effects immediately.