I understand that the philosophy behind this particular contract is to promote good team play and cooperation among players, and honestly I applaud this kind of thinking since that’s the whole point of PvE games, however I actually feel this contract ought to be removed. Hear me out:
Sire Melk’s contracts are pitched as being solo objectives for individual players to complete at their own pace over time for extra rewards. All of the contracts set goals that are achievable for each player on their own given enough time, with the exception of this one however. This contract is the only one that can be ‘failed’ through no fault of the player themselves, as it only requires one unfortunate death on the part of a teammate and progress is lost even if the mission itself is completed. This is unlike all of the other contracts whereby progress for things like killing certain enemies or collecting crafting materials is still retained even if the mission ends in failure. Granted that the contracts for simply completing missions or collecting books can’t be progressed unless you complete a mission, but at the very least you won’t lose progress simply because someone perished along the way to mission success.
I still think it’s a nice idea to have contracts that promote good teamplay, but I think this one in it’s current state leans more towards punishing poor teamplay or simply denying progress if something plainly unfortunate happens to someone, such as being thrown off a cliff by an exploding barrel (we’ve all been there).
I’d suggest perhaps tweaking it to something like “Complete x missions with everyone still alive at mission end”, as this would encourage players to go and rescue teammates that have fallen during the end event rather than leaving them for dead. Alternatively you could add some new contracts like “Provide x amount of healing from deployed medipacks” or “Enable x number of teammates to restock their ammo by deploying ammo crates”.
I’d welcome the community’s thoughts on this.