Some of Marathon‘s most devoted players are convinced it has a major cheating problem. While most players might never notice anything amiss, those in ranked matches or the end-game Cryo Archive map might see their best gear lost to unfair matchups against people employing paid cheat tools to gain unfair advantages. Bungie’s now responded with promises to do more.
“Tried to play some ranked marathon tonight, played 7 games and got off after being blatantly cheated on in 3 of the 7 matches I played,” popular streamer AlbralelieVT wrote on X. “As much as I enjoy the game, I don’t care enough to deal with cheaters plaguing a game again and will probably stop making content on it and go back to focusing on Apex.”
He accused players of using cheats to pre-fire through walls, hitting unrealistic shots across maps obscured by fog and signal jammers, and also claimed that some of the perpetrators were players he’d died to in the past, suggesting they weren’t getting banned the first time around. “Most of the time they’ll streamsnipe you while just letting slurs fly (mostly the N word) and literally tell you they’re cheating (Makima and 2 others literally said ‘Were 6 manning cheating fuck you and bungie’) bc bungie wont do shit about it,” AlbralelieVT wrote.
I think the best part about showing clips that obviously display people cheating is the people who have the game IQ of bricks trying to explain how the people obviously cheating aren’t cheating.
— Diffizzle (@TooDiffizzle) April 7, 2026
The fact that streamers are sometimes targeted by cheaters means that certain top players might feel the effects of cheating more directly than the average Marathon player. Coming out of the extraction shooter’s second weekend of ranked play, there was more chatter than usual about a growing problem.
Streamlining player reporting
“Apparently, high ranked lobbies are just filled with blatant cheaters,” wrote streamer GJake on X. “It’s almost a guarantee you’ll match them. How is Bungie so quick with all the nerfs and changes, but they are just silently allowing these cheaters to go crazy week after week?”
“Marathon DESPERATELY needs a gear refund system when you run into cheaters + a more intuitive report system,” wrote another player who goes by Kruzer. “I shouldn’t have to go back to main menu, open up recent players, find the person that cheated and then report. There should be a report option as soon as you die. These accounts are level 150+ just cheating the whole day.”
.@MarathonDevTeam hire me to watch streams and ban blatant cheaters please ill make ranked playable 🥺
— avihra (@avihraa) April 7, 2026
Bungie responded to the uproar with a handful of ways it plans to ramp up its cheat monitoring. The studio already made a show of force back before Marathon launched by announcing a zero-tolerance policy for anyone deemed to be cheating, but it now says it will be “expanding our telemetry and detection methods to better catch the aforementioned cheaters.”
The development team said it’s iterating on streamlining the reporting process to make it easier to flag suspected cheaters and toxic chat abusers. Longer-term, Bungie plans to invest in better voice chat moderation and explore in-game protections for stream sniping, including name privacy options.
Avoiding the Cycle: Frontier cheating spiral
The studio continued, “Some of this work is live already, and more improvements will roll out over the coming weeks. Anti-cheat is a continuous cycle of monitoring, improving, and responding. This is an area that we will continue to invest in to protect the integrity of your runs.”
None of that sounds like it will do much to dramatically curb any existing cheating in the near future, but it at least proves to Marathon‘s most hardcore players that Bungie is aware of the issue and working on improving things. In the meantime, some fans are already pointing to the specter of The Cycle: Frontier, a 2022 extraction shooter that was so plagued with cheating it effectively killed the game.
Marathon has way bigger problems when it comes to retention and maintaining a healthy player count, but an out-of-control cheating situation in the endgame certainly won’t help matters.
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