Given that your mark intake is capped at 100 a week, this means that every week you could: - Run yourself ragged in the crucible in order to get vanguard marks equivalent to four strikes - Play twenty strikes in order to get crucible marks equivalent to seven matches or running round the Scablands eight times - spend an hour farming spinmetals to get the same results as spending fifteen minutes farming spirit blooms You can't even use it as an inefficient way of storing marks for later, as converting them back counts towards your weekly cap.

I'm not saying that, on an individual basis, any of these is a great trade--a 5:1 exchange rate isn't actually all that favorable. The red flag for me is actually the boost to reputation gain.

There's no appreciable boost to reputation gain, though: if you run the math, marks convert to rep at 1:1, meaning if you throw away every mark you earn, you get 200 more rep a week. That's diddly-squat. You can get that in under an hour by killing eight patrol targets.

First, it's not 1:1. You can spend 50 marks to get 100 mats, which convert back to 10 marks and +50 rep. That's 40 marks for 50 rep, which is 1.25:1. (Apparently I initially screwed this up in my post, too, so we were both wrong.) Second, it's not nothing. There are lots of players who've hit the endgame and have nothing meaningful to spend their marks on anymore; allowing both buying and selling of materials gives them something to buy--another 200 rep per week before the nightfall bonus, in exchange for a currency they weren't using anyway. Finally, though, the problem is that materials drop from patrol bounties and daily missions now, at a rate of 26 per day. So it's an extra 100-125 rep per week for doing nothing at all, [i]before[/i] you factor in rep gain from spending marks. I don't know how carefully they've planned out the reputation economy, but I think it's plausible that an extra 200+125 per week might have made someone over there nervous.