Bungie has pulled another lever in its ongoing battle to fix Marathon’s runaway reward economy. The studio has temporarily disabled the CyberAcme Prime Time III standard contract after discovering that it was handing out way more rewards than it should for a task that barely required any effort.
The Marathon Development Team confirmed the change in a short statement posted on X. According to Bungie, the contract has been switched off while the team reconfigures it, since it was offering significant rewards for a relatively trivial challenge. The contract will return once the numbers have been adjusted to something more reasonable.
Bungie Disabled the CyberAcme Prime Time III Contract
The short version is that the risk versus reward math was completely broken. Players quickly figured out that Prime Time III asked very little of them while paying out like a contract several tiers above its difficulty. In an extraction shooter where the entire loop is built around earning your loot the hard way, a contract like that becomes free money, and free money breaks everything around it.
Rather than letting players farm it until a proper fix arrives, Bungie decided to take it offline entirely. But, doing that might frustrate anyone who was mid-progress with CyberAcme, although Bungie clearly thought it was the safer call. Every day a contract like this stays live, the gap between players who abused it and players who did not gets wider.
Marathon’s Economy Has Been a Rollercoaster Since Season 1
To understand why Bungie is being this aggressive about one contract, you have to look at how Marathon got here.
Season 1 had the opposite problem. Progression was painfully slow, and the reward economy felt stingy. Players grinded for hours and walked away with very little to show for it, and the feedback was loud and consistent. Bungie listened, and heading into Season 2, the studio deliberately loosened the taps. Progression got faster, loot got more generous, and the whole economy was tuned to respect player time.
The problem is that Bungie overcorrected, and then a pile of bugs made it worse. Bungie has admitted that its attempt to speed up progression in Season 2 went too far, with the studio revealing that average player wealth in week two of Season 2 was already similar to what the team saw around weeks 11 and 12 of Season 1. Let that sink in. Players earned in two weeks what previously took almost three months.
Bungie also pointed to several bugs and live issues that contributed, including guaranteed gold drops appearing where they should not have, the influx of Sponsored Kits at the start of the season, and an issue with the Complex Control chest, all of which helped players build up massive Vaults far faster than intended. On top of that, Bungie said higher rarity loot has been appearing more often than it does in internal playtests, and it is still unraveling the source of that issue.
The Prime Time III Fix Is Part of a Bigger Rebalancing Push
Bungie has been rolling out economy corrections almost weekly at this point. A recent patch added weekly rewards but slightly reduced the rate of Prestige drops and overall loot quality, nerfed some of the gear enemies were spawning with, and reduced the XP earned from certain gear discovered in the Cradle. Update 1.1.0.2 continued that work with more item economy fixes, including a bug where combatant reinforcements in Night Marsh could roll more loot than intended, along with rebalanced Folio and Trunk rewards.
Disabling Prime Time III fits the same pattern. Bungie is hunting down every leak in the economy one by one, whether it comes from a bugged loot container, an overtuned drop rate, or, in this case, a contract paying out far too much for far too little.
If you were relying on Prime Time III for easy CyberAcme progression, that door is closed for now. Bungie has not given a timeline beyond saying the contract will be re-enabled after adjustments, so expect it to come back with either tougher requirements, smaller rewards, or both.
Expect more of these surgical fixes in the coming weeks. Prime Time III almost certainly will not be the last contract to get benched.
