Contracts: Integrity, Motivation, Reasonability

[SentryOmega]

It's time to talk trash about some contracts.

Let me comfort you - not all of them! I didn't come here for hate. I love the game. I have deep respect for the devs. You have truly impressed me as a player by making this game better after a questionable and sub-optimal start. However, some issues with contracts keep me awake at night.

Motivation

I will focus only on one specific contract here (you all know it): Mill 100,000 cards.
Contracts must be completable, no exceptions. I totally see many people start challenging this statement now, like "it's okay to have a contract which you are slowly progressing, yada yada, its for a long-term goal". Now - cut the crap. Be reasonable here. Be realistic. This is bullstuff. This is NOT OKAY to have a contract which requires opening 20,000 kegs (equals 2,000,000 ore OR 20,000 DAILY QUESTS). It's not okay, because you aren't slowly progressing it - you are not progressing at all. It's NOT OKAY, because there is no long-term goal, unless you intend to play daily for about 25 years. It's NOT OKAY to have a contract that requires milling and crafting one card PER SECOND for 27 (!) HOURS STRAIGHT during full-mill value event. It is NOT OKAY to have this contract, because having an unrealistic goal kills the motivation to pursue it.
Math: I played daily for 5 month since HC, and milled 2100 cards, or about 2% of the contract. Which will take me about 20.83 years to complete it.
Comparison: play 100,000 cards - after 5 month I'm at 21,000+, or about 21%, so I can get it in about two years - NO COMPLAINTS.

Reasonability

What is the reason for Assimilate, Harmony, and Bonded / Poison being valued on the same scale?
During a match, you can easily have 4 Harmony dryads on the table, and by playing ONE card you trigger it FOUR times PER TURN. With assimilate, you can have up to 3 units realistically, all of which are triggered by cow carcass and create - EVERY TURN.

Now take a look a Bonded: you must have one copy on board, and play another copy to trigger it ONCE. That's ONE time PER GAME considering that you draw the necessary cards! Can somebody tell me why the heck does both contracts require 1,000 triggers?

Same with poison! Instead of 4 per turn, you get ONE per TWO TURNS; providing that the target is not purified. And remember - cow carcass doesn't count towards your poison, because Sh#t dies during your opponent's turn (confirmed).

At least you saw reason in making a 500 contract for Purify (which by the way has way more cards). Why Poison and Bonded was treated differently?

And don't start "there will be more bonded cards in the future". It doesn't fn matter okay? Because you still can't trigger it more than once in two turns.

Also, in not un-related news, why Cintrian Royal Guard doesn't have bonded? It's Bonded: boost self by 2. Instead it is spelled out. How come?

Integrity

I'll keep it short.

Where is the Thrive contract when there are contracts for all other basic game mechanics?

Now that reveal is reworked, what happens to the reveal contract? If it stays, how do we complete it? If its gone, what about people who already started and/or finished?

 

[tulamide]

I see it similar. People often argue "but they are optional", as if that would qualify contracts you can't realistically fulfill. Yes, contracts are optional, but if they are part of Gwent, they need to be reasonable. If there's no motivation to fulfill them, because of unrealistic goals, why then introducing such optional content at all?

Would people buy a car that says "you'll get a gallon of gas when your car lasts 160 years"?

 

[DRK3]

I actually took a more careful look at contracts today - my current goal is to reach 50% contracts, im very close - and checked all the contract categories, and noticed that one you mentioned first and thought the same thing!

Milling 100k cards is ridiculous, as if there wasnt already enough contracts i'll never fulfill like being top 200/500 on all 12 season or whatever. Im at nearly 2k, just like OP, and this involved a lot of milling when HC launched and now when crimson curse hit, because otherwise i wouldnt have milled so many in 6 months.

 

[4RM3D]

Contracts must be completable, no exceptions.

I am not disagreeing here, but in terms of attainability, isn't the "be in the top 200 at the end of a season" a pipe dream? Compared to that, milling 100k cards can eventually be completed. One takes skill, the other takes time.

 

[SteveTheRotfiend]

I am not disagreeing here, but in terms of attainability, isn't the "be in the top 200 at the end of a season" a pipe dream? Compared to that, milling 100k cards can eventually be completed. One takes skill, the other takes time.

Yes, but this specific milling contract takes an unreasonable amount of time. Like OP stated, other long term contracts can take years (depending on the player of course) but this would would take literally several decades. 20k would be more reasonable and would still take a very very long time.

 

[rrc]

I am not disagreeing here, but in terms of attainability, isn't the "be in the top 200 at the end of a season" a pipe dream? Compared to that, milling 100k cards can eventually be completed. One takes skill, the other takes time.

@4RM3D, a small correction (just for fun). One takes skill, the other takes seven lifetimes.

 

[scheuchevogel]

I almost fully agree with the first post, aside from "It's time to talk trash about some contracts."
How about keeping it more constructively? A lot of them could be fixed with the support of a seasonal event and/or special arena mode. I'm below trying to suggest ways to make them possible. Would love to put a new, dedicated topic for this, but I was so far only lurking so I can't start new topics yet. My suggestions how to enable currently impossible contracts:

Trigger bonded 1,000 times:
I agree it's currently incredibly demotivating to work towards that. I tried, but gave up seeing that the progress is way too slow. Having to play only NR and monsters basically, and running the bonded units in all decks of them even if they don't fit into the deck strategy. But can be fixed with a seasonal mode which based on the "bonded" theme would fit perfectly into the Season of Love:
- All units in Seasonal mode have the additional ability: "Bonded: Repeat the deploy ability"
Problem solved.

Trigger poison 1,000 times:
It's sad that Season of the Viper has been used differently, this would be the perfect season to fix this. In a very similar way, actually. Needs to be in a different season then. Giving all units a poison ability would be incredibly un-fun though, as the person with most/highest immune units would win - period. But that can be fixed if we also enable counter measures at the same time. So the seasonal mode would be:
- Whenever a unit damages another unit, give the target unit poison.
- Whenever a unit boosts another unit, purify the target unit.
Could end up in interesting mind games about the right combination of damage and boost in a deck...
Also enables the purify contract at the same time

Mill 100,000 cards:
Forget that one, there is no way to fix this unless you want to buy an insane amount of kegs and then spend insane amounts of time to open all. Let's instead look at the lower limits like "Mill 1,000 cards". Milling is incredibly time consuming unless you mill all cards at once, which I personally don't want. For example I might want to keep 2 copies of a non-premium gold card to at one point transmute one of the two. And milling cards one by one takes an eternity. We need in the detail view of each card a "Mill all excess copies of this card" to speed this up.

Fill a row with artifacts in an arena match:
That one's tough. Currently impossible, the odds of having an artifact as choice in the majority of card choices is pretty much zero. So would in theory need an arena special mode in which you draft only artifacts. But then again, most games would then end up 0:0 with no unit on the board, as most artifacts can't generate units unless there are already other units on the board. Unless leaders are limited to choices which can in this context bring units to the board. I guess only four of them can do that:
- Arnjolf (Sounds OP in this mode at first, but Arnjolf can only give you a unit in one round. And you need to win two...)
- Arachas Queen
- Gernichora
- Eldain (Might be a good choice if you have enough traps among the artifacts)

Make an arena deck with at least 10 copies of the same card:
The odds of card choices enabling that are very much zero, unless you have an extremely limited card pool. Maybe a special arena mode in which you only draft cards with provisions of 11 and higher would make it possible. (But still not easy.)

Make an arena deck with only bronze cards:
Needs a special arena mode where you draft only bronze cards. Otherwise its very, very unlikely to ever happen. And your choices don't even matter, as soon as even one choice has a gold card, all 4 choices will be gold cards. You can't actively avoid them.

Make an arena deck with only special cards:
Needs a special arena mode where you draft only special cards. The chances to have a special card in each and every choice is pretty much zero. While specials (unlike artifacts) have ways to spawn/create units on an empty board, it will be hard to keep any of them on the board as there will be tons of removal. I would guess that usually the one with last say will as last card spawn a unit on an otherwise empty board, and thereby win. Gernichora might be the strongest leader for this, as removal can be undone each round.

What do you think? I'm thinking about also entering this in the suggestions section of the technical support (unless CDPR already reads the post here), but maybe you have ideas to improve the modes further before I do.

 

[SMiki55]

… are you aware that there is an option to mill all unnecessary cards at once, right?

 

[scheuchevogel]

Yes, and I even mention above that there is. And one of the reasons why I prefer to not use it.

 

[DRK3]

Its the name of a contract in Gwent... but not just any contract, a quite infamous one:

As you can see here, its the only contract i have left in the collection section of contracts.
It requires 100.000 milled cards.
Today, i did the previous checkpoint, of milling 10.000 cards, earning an "amazing" 5 reward points!
For those who need some perspective, i got 1500 hours of Gwent Homecoming... plus another thousand from the betas, which gave me tons of resources to craft and mill enormous amounts of cards, right from the get-go of HC launch.

So yeah, all this and im at 10% of this brilliant contract. I've talked with some users and there are actually players who have it, but only through exploits.
Im not even complaining anymore, just want to 'burst the bubble' in case any player was intending to go for 100% contracts, they have "this" to do

(EDIT) Thanks to the mod who moved this post to this thread, i did try to find it before i created a new one, but wasnt able to find it, you guys must have some insane search skills

 

[DRK3]

So, i come here with a suggestion for new contracts. It doesnt really warrant a new thread just for it (but if there's a better suited one, feel free to move it mods, thanks)

I find it really weird that there are no contracts and respective trinket for obtaining a full collection. Its very anti-climatic, you finally get your last card and dont get anything in return, not a border/avatar/title, not even some RP.

I would suggest new contracts, with trinkets associated to their fulfillment:

-one for obtaining every card in the game, no matter the quality

-one for having a TRUE full collection (which i achieved today), which is having all cards, x2 every bronze x1 every gold, in both standard and premium format (no more reason to open kegs for me now, only to get powder for future expansions i guess... )

These contracts wouldnt need to be adjusted with every expansion, it would be ok to do them considering the current collection, then add new contracts for further expansions.

 

[wonderboy870]

Veteran triggers 12 times just by getting to round 3. That means you need to play 84 games to finish the veteran contract. Flaming rose footman doesn’t count transformations. You can only spawn around 5 per match. Trying to go beyond 5 may compromise the integrity of your deck or your ability to win. Assuming 5 you need to play 200 matches to complete the contract. The same goes for conspiracy (which is a little easier to ping but also requires more deck resources.) Talk about unbalanced contracts.