Sincerely, Your Friendly Neighborhood Shill.

Good morning, it is Tuesday. As of this writing, Marathon is currently down to address matchmaking issues from last week’s update. That’s its own can of worms, but there’s a more consistent issue looming over the game: cheaters.

(This is aside from the other blog post I’ve been meaning to write about player psychology with Jamie (Sc0nesandc0ffee on Twitter), which is still coming.)

We’re in Week 7 of Marathon. It’s been a largely wonderful experience, but as the season’s gone on, cracks have started to show. If left alone, they’ll fester into irreparable fractures and further erode trust from a community that keeps giving Bungie the benefit of the doubt.

I’ve been called “toxically positive” a lot. I do enjoy the game and say so, but I’ve never avoided being critical when it matters. This is one of those times. I don’t get paid by Bungie, and I’m not muzzling myself for anyone.

I like making edits, memes, and jokes, and being generally positive about something I enjoy. That’s not a crime. If anything, it’s loserish to think it is. And while I get to tag the dev team in shitposts, that comes with a responsibility to surface what’s actually happening on the ground, which are otherwise complaints that get scattered through the algorithm and obscure their pattern.

I’m not the best player, not even close, but I’ve ended up playing with just about every skill level. People new to extraction shooters, decade-long Tarkov veterans, players still under Season Level 50, and players over 200. I’ve seen the whole spectrum, and the disparity is jarring.

So when high-level players like Mori, Angelika, Pijinn, Lord Bugz, Chirayu, Cynthia, Marathonaire, and others at the top say their lobbies have been full of cheaters since Week 1, “Well I haven’t seen any” isn’t a real response. I’ve been in those lobbies as a Level 80. You’re not seeing cheaters because they’re not in the average lobby. They’re 200+ levels in. When Diffizzle says he fought off cheaters from Diamond to Pinnacle, it’s because that’s where they are. They’re not in Bronze, Silver, or Gold.

Regional matchmaking and playerbase splits have made this worse. Higher-end lobbies are more saturated with cheaters. They’re not wasting time in Perimeter or Free Kit Frenzy, they’re in ranked and Outpost all week, and gutting Cryo Archive from Thursday to Sunday.

It’s one thing to get outplayed. It’s another to get repeatedly run over by someone visibly cheating, and then see that same player still around a month later.

Bungie made hard promises. When they announced that BattleEye would be their anticheat, people familiar with it rolled their eyes; It doesn’t stop cheats the way it claims to.

The fog of war system works, but it doesn’t cover everything. Locking the front door doesn’t stop someone from climbing in through a second-story window.

We’re not far removed from a YouTube account openly posting hacking montages. No guarantee they’ve even been removed. And even if they have, it’s probably because they were loud about it, unlike most cheaters.

I don’t know why people choose to cheat, aside from accessing a crumb of validation they’ve been denied their entire lives by people around them to the point where the only solace they can retreat to is lying to themselves about fictitious success. I sometimes wonder if it’s even a semi coordinated attempt at sabotaging the game, would anyone be all too surprised?

But there are no ghosts here. This isn’t mass hysteria being shared by a specific subset of players, it is certainly not another “they turned on SBMM” situation. It would almost be better if it were new cheaters, but it’s seemingly the same 10 - 15 players constantly in Cryo, Outpost, and ranked, untouched despite repeated reports. Cheating is hard to solve, it’ll always evolve in the vein of technological Darwinism. But when people are openly promoting cheat tools in legitimate players’ comments, it’s a serious problem.

I hold the belief that this game will succeed in the long run, that its numbers are not quite as concerning as many would have you believe, that its budget is critically out of context, and that many many efforts to decry that title stem from personal grudges and not about the quality of the game itself.

But cheating is a major problem, made worse by splitting the playerbase across modes. This week alone: Perimeter, Dire Marsh, Dire Marsh Frenzy, Dire Marsh Ranked, Outpost, and Cryo Archive. With around 20,000 PC players, that’s five-way splits, with lower levels concentrated in Dire Marsh. Higher-level players are left in smaller pools with a higher chance of running into Level 300+ cheaters in Outpost, Cryo, or high-elo ranked. This has been documented extensively.

It’s even gotten to the point where some lower-level players suggest that cheaters might be a good mitigation tool as they scare off better players. That’s complete bullshit. Learn to lose. You can’t punish people for being better at PvP without gutting the game. Risk is part of the experience. And you’re almost certainly not facing Level 200+ players anyway, the matchmaking doesn’t work like that.

To the team, you’ve been excellent with response times on most critical issues, and I appreciate the effort to expand the game without compromising it. But this needs action now. Players shouldn’t be fighting for a World’s First Pinnacle in lobbies full of known cheaters.

I have gathered testimony from some high level players who were willing to share their experience. They were asked to fill out the following fields:

1) Account name

2) Account level

3) What happened

4) If they remembered any specific offender’s accounts

Example 1:

T4Tthief - Level 184 (Plat 1)

“Ranked became infested with cheaters when hitting high gold, same names popping up over multiple weeks, names that also have appeared on famous content creators streams. Last week that bled out into normal games, still the same names from ranked”.

Alleged Offenders listed: Apeng, JackHelps, Wish for World Peace, Suxarik, OnlyEmpathy, B, M

Example 2:

DireMarshFan223 - Level 219

“We only began to notice around April 7th I think, during Outpost ranked while we ourselves were high gold rank. First day it was one team of cheaters, undeniable weird gameplay and when we died weird steam accounts with prior recent game bans etc. Second day it was also only one run-in with cheaters. It has not stopped since that third day of us playing Outpost ranked. [Both] In Normals in Cryo in Ranked (obviously much less-so in normals). It’s the same names a lot of the time. After each match I could check my recent players list and see a blocked player in 90% of ranked matches. Ranked was just unplayable for us. Perimeter was laughable we would be sitting somewhere completely unmoving no noise and be pre-naded into death (pre-recon buff so we know we weren't scanned or anything, further it was of course always weird steam accounts.) The only solace was found in queuing with low ranked players and even then it didn't stop it sometimes, nor is that a fun or engaging way to play the game, feels cheesy. We were actually in that game that garnered so much attention, the one where Ottr played FTL then botwalked around Hauler and got gunned down and uninstalled. I saw far too many dismissive people clowning on him for it. Yeah he played it like shit, he was tilted and playing FTL yes. What people neglected to see was visible in the video, the name Suxarik killed him. Suxarik has been a prolific cheater known by just about any high ranked player at this point. If I was already tilted and believed there was a banwave or something with an update, then got gunned down by Suxarik, I begin to see why Ottr reacted the way he did and you should too. The problem is rampant and it frankly feels insulting to run into so many of the same names over and over, reporting them each time knowing that Bungie doesnt do jack fucking shit to these cheaters. I don’t care about them leaving them unbanned to gather data or whatever, its not worth killing the game for the most dedicated players”.

Alleged Offenders listed: Suxarik, Jackhelpseu, 2 redacted names that we could vaguely recognize the numbers of due to the amount of run-ins, OnlyEmpathy, WishForWorldPeace, WhoashkinTTV, [Accounts with] Chinese lettering in a squad with someone whose name is just purely numbers.

Example 3:

Marathonaire - Level 166

“Ranked, we had just spawned, we were on top of quarantine looking towards intersection. team sprints towards us and from 150m out starts sniping at us through pretty thick fog, they continue w keying us, we get one but as soon as it becomes cbq they just prefire like crazy with bullies, legit like 0.5s before we peak. everyone on the team has multiple thousand hours in fps games at a high level (26k premier cs2, multiple thousand hours in tarkov, radiant in val) and we all believe very strongly they were cheating. any angle we tried to take was immediately prefired. Highest level in our team was 228, lowest was 108 [avg. lvl 167].

Alleged Offenders listed: kakaCalenphisxxxi, d1maNN, m2.


I did not solicit these testimonies to put any players on blast, I did so with the specific intention of pointing out that the people voicing their concerns about the cheating are ones that have otherwise spent the last 2 odd months of their lives promoting and singing the praises of this game as loud as they possibly can because they want to love it. They spend 10+ hours a day sinking their soul into it. They are not trying to tear it down, they are trying to warn people of what’s going on at the front of the pack. They don’t want the climb to have been for nothing.

A few days ago I said that it was very comforting that Diffizzle was the first player in the world to reach Pinnacle 1, not because I have a specific affinity for him particularly (I barely know him, if at all), but because there was a genuine possibility that some low life two bit sack of shit cheater beat him to it. Say what you want about grenades and meta spamming and exploits, those are all issues that still must be addressed, but flat out cheaters going unchecked for weeks is inexcusable, especially when there are seemingly time gated rewards for seasonal progress (such as the Pinnacle 1 Repeater skin that may not be available in season 2), and the seasonal clock is only getting shorter. All of that progress is being stunted by cheaters instead of simply better players.

To lean into a Marathon themed analogy here; The people leading the race are warning the people in the middle that there is someone literally tripping runners along the pathway up ahead, and that if it is not addressed, the people at the middle will eventually stumble into them. You can’t see it because you’re not there, but you will get there eventually, and you will be upset that you ignored the warnings. You can say they’re exaggerating, that they didn’t prep enough, but that will not magically dematerialize the very real asshole tripping people at the front of the pack.