Marathon Season 2 loot economy is broken and Bungie doesn't fully know why

Marathon Season 2 launched earlier this month, and while the Night-time Dire Marsh map and Sponsored Survival mode landed well with players, a serious economy problem has crept in: progression is moving way too fast, and Bungie admits it doesn't entirely know why.

The numbers are stark. By week two of Season 2, average player wealth already matched what players accumulated by weeks 11 and 12 of Season 1. Bungie has identified several contributing factors — bugs causing guaranteed gold drops in places that shouldn't have them, a rush of Sponsored Kits at season start, and players grinding Sponsored Survival alongside a high-value chest in the Complex Control area. Some of those bugs have already been patched. But the main culprit, an issue causing higher-rarity loot to proliferate across the game, is still unexplained. "This isn't something we've seen in our internal playtests, and we're still unravelling the source," Bungie wrote in a Steam post this week.

As a stopgap, Bungie has turned off boosted containers and nerfed Cradle XP rates, but the studio is treating these as temporary fixes — it plans to reverse them later in the season once proper solutions are in place. The irony is hard to miss: Marathon built its reputation on punishing extraction runs where walking away with anything valuable felt like an achievement. Season 2 has flipped that entirely, with vaults overflowing and the in-game economy thrown into disarray.

Bungie is still investigating the root cause, and the community response is predictably split — some players are happy to enjoy the easier progression while it lasts, while others worry about the long-term health of the game's economy if the underlying issue isn't found and fixed quickly.