Marathon got deadlier overnight, and some think yesterday's sound change is the culprit

Did anyone else just have an off night in Marathon? Mine was a bloodbath: nonstop fights, third-party ambushes, and sneaky Assassin solos sending me back to the menu. While I'm happy to chalk that up to the random nature of competitive FPSes, matchmaking working itself out, and generally not being good at Marathon, I hadn't considered that the uptick in intensity could be related to this week's patch.

If you missed it, yesterday's Marathon update made a grip of changes to sponsored kit ammo, thermal scope effectiveness, and UESC bot health. That was the stuff I was focused on, but the Marathon community has honed in on a particular bullet point that I totally missed:

• Increased the range gunfire and explosions can be heard from

That would explain a lot. It seems like every time I dare to make noise now, be it a scrap with a bot grunt or shooting down a loot drone, another player shows up immediately after. The same kept happening on a larger scale in trios: two teams start a fight and before you know it another squad jumps in.

Sound changes are a hot topic on the Marathon subreddit today, which doesn't mean the adjustment is universally negative, but detectable enough that many think it feels off.

"Every match has become a third party fest now, you can hear gunfire too far away with how small the maps are. It was fine before, why was this changed?" wrote Reddit user Impossible-Finger942.

"I thought gunshot sounds were already kinda high. Now it genuinely feels like half the server congregates wherever the first shot is fired then the winner does PvE for 20min and pops the occasional Rook," added another commenter.

Solos RN from r/Marathon

To echo that experience: I was also pretty happy with how far sound traveled before the update. You could reliably hear fights breaking out from around one compound away—far enough to pick up a scent of players you were already trending toward, but dampened enough that Marathon's modestly-sized maps still have some privacy. I'm hearing a lot more gunshots than usual now, so the range increase could be significant.

"It's awful in solos, can't shoot a single bullet without free kitted Assassins third-partying me in succession," wrote Pirulete in another top post today. "I guess I just gotta play Assassin as well and try to knife my way through the robots."

Maybe it's just the human-hearted commiseration speaking, but yea, that's pretty much where I'm at. Assassins were already the most popular solo shell by far, but now that making sound carries an ever harsher penalty, cloaking past bots feels like a must.

Folks are curious why the change was made in the first place: There was no dev note to explain it like there was for the economy and Rook adjustments, so the natural assumption is that Bungie wanted to crank up PvP encounters. Acknowledging that one day isn't long enough to fully judge the patch, I do hope this is the sort of tweak that can be quickly reversed.