Yesterday, Bungie revealed that both of Marathon’s endgame activities, Ranked mode and the raid-like Cryo Archive, would be limited to the weekend. More specifically, Cryo Archive runs from Friday to Monday, while Ranked runs from Saturday to Tuesday each week. This tight schedule, plus overlap between the two modes, has already proven to be divisive.

In response, Marathon’s game director Joe Ziegler released a lengthy post to expand on Bungie’s reasoning. Ziegler opens by acknowledging the feedback so far and noting that the team is “always iterating and [is] open to looking at other options in the future”. Right off the bat, it doesn’t sound like a hill Bungie wants to die on, though Ziegler took the opportunity to explain why this weekly schedule was implemented. And you know what? I think the plan makes sense (with a few tweaks), even if it’s somewhat awkward.

As Ziegler explains it, the weekend-heavy endgame schedule is structured around three core principles.

• Preparing: “Players will lose a lot of gear on Cryo and Ranked because it is intended to challenge you to your limits,” so the downtime during the week is meant for you to re-gear.
• Economy: “We have some great rewards on Cryo that kind of break the bank when it comes to economy and power gain.” In other words, if players were able to get all this top-tier loot whenever, there would be too much of it in-game at any given time. In fact, Ziegler notes that they’d likely have to adjust the drop rate of the endgame rewards as a result.
• Logistics: Because of the high level and entry requirements, it “inherently makes the amount of people in that queue at any time unpredictable.” By making both Ranked and Cryo Archive a weekend-only ordeal, “more players will show up”.

Bungie’s reasoning is clear: the weekend schedule is intended to counter power creep, give players time to prepare so it’s not just the hardcore players that can take part, and help queue times. When you think about it this way, yes, this structure is actually pretty smart. Instead of nerfing how rewarding the endgame is, Bungie’s turned it into a loop of gearing up, getting OP, inevitably losing it, and doing it all over again. The minimum gear value requirements for both modes, being relatively high as they are now, are guardrails.

However, as Ziegler points out, “there are likely some who cannot participate” in either activity simply because they both take place over the weekend, give or take a day or two. If you can’t make these days, then you can’t play the endgame. That’s a major pain point (for myself included), and I’m struggling to see a clear solution to this, other than perhaps making ranked mode last a few days longer so the overlap isn’t quite so severe. If either mode were made permanently available, it would break the loop.

Nevertheless, Ziegler confirms the team is paying close attention to the feedback, citing three main focuses that could be tweaked: staggering the two events more to reduce overlap, “changing” (reducing, surely) the minimum gear requirements, and tweaking other aspects like solos.

“We’ll be looking into what we can do to retain these considerations and potentially accommodate this in the future.”