The History Of Duo Queue
At launch, Marathon had two queues - trios and solos. Many, many, players, myself included, quickly asked Bungie to add a duo queue alternative. This was exactly what happened in Arc Raiders on its release, so I was honestly surprised that Marathon launched without duos in the first place.
Bungie responded by adding what they called an “experimental” duo queue to the game. It started on Perimeter before moving to Dire Marsh and Outpost. For me and for many others, this queue was a huge boost to the game. As an older player with friends that have busy lives, it’s hard enough to get one friend to join me in the game let alone 2, so duos became the main way I played the game.
However, despite the large amount of duos players, Marathon game lead Joe Ziegler announced yesterday that the duo queue experiment in Marathon will be wrapping up on April 8th at 1PM EST. While Ziegler said they gained a lot of useful information around duos, he said that the permanent queue will be coming in Season 2 - which doesn’t launch until June.
Why Remove Duo Queue From Marathon?
As a software engineer, I fully understand running tests to see how users may interact with a certain feature of your product to help inform you on how you may be able to improve that feature down the road. But what I do not understand is then ripping that feature out of your product even when tons of users were enjoying it.
To me, it makes no sense to remove the duo queue, even if it isn’t in its final state. It would be perfectly fine to leave the duo queue on a rotation, and update it based on the data collected for Season 2.
But that begs the question… what are they even going to update? What are they going to change about it? It seems pretty damn simple to me - it’s the normal, unchanged game, but with squad of two instead of three.
Call me crazy, but from my perspective it seems that Bungie designed Marathon around groups of 3, and they really don’t want to add duos as that isn’t their design philosophy with the game. And don’t get me wrong, I fully understand that, but if that’s the case then the marquee features of the game - Cryo Archive and Ranked - could absolutely remain trios only while still giving us a permanent duo queue option.
I have been very please with Bungie so far when it comes to how they’re managing Marathon, but this decision is the first baffling one they’ve made. Hopefully they realize that Runners around the world won’t be too stoked on this change, and they walk it back.
Fingers crossed - see you on Tau Ceti!