These are just some run-of-the-mill suggestions for Contracts and Contract-based gameplay. I’m sure these have been suggested before, and I know this is just the ones put out for the Beta, but it’s a suggestion worth repeating.
- Daily Contracts
Simple as. If the goal is to increase activity and maintain player interest, daily contracts are needed alongside weekly ones. This gives players more to strive towards and more game-given objectives, improving replayability and keeping things fresh between sessions.
As it stands, all of the ‘Weekly Contracts’ we have available to us in the Beta should honestly become ‘Daily Contracts’ because of how easy they are to complete. Things like playing 3 missions without any player deaths, collecting 10 scripts, getting 500 melee kills — all of those are way, way too easy to be Weekly challenges and give rewards disproportionate to the amount of effort needed to complete them.
- Weekly Contracts
Putting it bluntly, the current contracts available to us in the Beta are just flat out badly designed and need to be redone. It sounds harsh, but bear with me on this:
You will get contracts like ‘Kill 750 [blanks] with ranged weapons’ with a reward of 550 next to ‘Successfully collect 12 grimoires’ and ‘Defeat 10 monstrosities’ that give a reward of 200 each. That’s not to mention that the ‘12 grimoires’ challenge gives roughly the same amount in terms of rewards as the ‘5 grimoires’ contract, which—when I rerolled the 5 Grimoires and was asked for 12 instead for the same payout—is hilarious to say the least.
Likewise, the 1000 reward for completing every contract is great, but it’s a small reward when considering weapons in the store rarely cost less than 1000 for anything good.
Additionally, Weekly Contracts are just too easy at the moment; getting 500 melee or ranged kills is exceptionally easy when every mission has a total kill count of 900 - 1000 on average. You can literally complete this challenge in under an hour if you put any amount of deliberate effort into it, and that doesn’t make for a good weekly challenge.
So, my recommendation? Beef up the challenges a little, tweak the difficulty rating on them, and give them a bigger payout overall.
- Rerolling Contracts
I definitely think this is a feature that should stay, but it ought to be tweaked to make Contracts a bit more of a firm commitment.
Personally, and assuming many more contracts are put into the pool of what’s available, I would give players 3 FREE rerolls per week that can be used to reroll any contracts they receive. This may not be ideal, however, especially if the developers are looking for a money sink, in which case I would say keep the current system or, alternatively, bump up the price with the added convenience of guaranteeing a new Contract of a different type.
Likewise, regardless of the above suggestions, while I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing, overlapping contracts should be made less common. For example, receiving both ‘Kill 500 Scabs with ranged’ and ‘Kill 750 Dregs with ranged’ is kind of boring; it doesn’t compel me to play a unique playstyle for either challenges.
- Contract Store
I’m a firm believer that players shouldn’t just be handed everything from the get-go. As boring as grinding is, a little bit of it ensures that the thing players are striving to achieve or obtain isn’t too easy or require too little effort, and it helps keep the attention of the playerbase for just a bit longer for those sweet, sweet statistics.
That being said, the contract store is poorly designed. It doesn’t feel rewarding to use, and often times actually feels quite terrible to purchase from. Even the Legendary weapon available everyday can sometimes be under-leveled compared to what your current gear is, which I think is a flaw in design. That, and the selection of weapons is dismally small for something that refreshes only once every 24 hours.
This isn’t even mentioning how Legendary weapons will sometimes be cheaper than Purple tiered ones—I understand why this happens, between the weapon types, bonuses, and stats, but the disparity really shouldn’t be as bad as it is now.
My suggestion? Make the selections more expensive, double the price if you have to, with the Legendaries costing even more. In exchange though, the store should carry, at minimum, two to three legendaries, more purples with a wider range of weapon and trinket types, and every selection available in the store should be objective better than or equal to the player’s current gear in terms of scoring. If the player reaches the score cap, then the available items never dip below the highest scores available. Period.
At that point, the player has capped out. There’s no sense in forcing them to gamble every day for more than just what’s available and what the bonuses are. That alone could mean days or weeks of waiting for the ‘perfect’ weapon or trinket someone might be looking for. Any more, and it becomes tedious and a detriment to the game.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.