Hopping into Marathon's server slam last week, I was surprised when I saw that we could still only have one contract active at a time. People have had much bigger complaints about its hard to parse items, confusing UI, and fast TTK, but for me, the grindiness of Marathon's faction system was a bit of a turn off.
It's something people complained about in the original beta way back, so I was pretty dumbfounded as to why Bungie didn't decide to tweak it to let us have more than one contract at a time, even if it was just a priority contract and then a repeatable side one as well. After all, a lot of the side contracts don't have specific location-based objectives and are usually about collecting items or killing UESC and other Runners.
Alas, it was not to be, but it does make Marathon's faction rep system a bit grindy at times. Since you can only do a single contract, from a single faction per run, the rep gains are a bit glacial at times. This is even more the case if contracts are the only thing you're doing. Take it from me, the best way to quickly level up your factions isn't via contracts (though they help), it's by completing their Reputation Gain actions.
Each faction has a list of things they like you to do, including items that will give you rep if you exfil with them. If you select your faction and click on the 'Agent' section, you'll see this list of actions, including events they like you to participate in. The rep gains for these actions aren't massive by themselves, but if you're also completing contracts at the same time it goes a long way to making the rest of the run after the contract feel more lucrative.
I was trying to rank up NuCaloric, so I was doing contracts for them on Perimeter, but I realised that they really like it when you loot Tick Nests, which usually spawn in the same places. After I did my contract, I'd head for the Tick Nests in the Data Wall and in the infested building in the Columns. For each of those I looted, I got 10 extra rep, which added up to a nice tidy sum on top of my contract.
You might not always be able to complete a contract every run, but as long as you remember what your faction's reputation actions are, you can easily keep progressing their rep no matter what you're doing. This helps make Marathon's onecontract system feel a little less grindy.
