About Contract Wars

1. Godarmour

you are able to pay money not to die.

if you shot someone with godarmour in the head, nothing happens. if that player happens to be a pro, shooting him in the head will result in you dying. I fail to come up with any sane reasoning to defend that logic.

shoot enemy's head and you die

Some will say that it is rare and an uncommon occurrence.

23,000 of the 74,000 kills I have made so far are headshots. Those are kills. It does not include headshots I made on people who then survive it only to kill me instead. 23,000 headshots is not an uncommon occurrence for me.

Shoot enemy's head and you die - I cannot accept that logic.


2. Team Stacking

It is bad game design. Contracts and Weapon Tasks asks you to complete insanely difficult challenges. Prokills, 1000 long distance headshots, - but the biggest culprit - triples.

There is no incentive to play fair and EVERY reason to fight dirty.

It is bad game design.

You are not rewarded for sportsmanship but instead motivated to make another person's game experience a misery.

Creed being Creed, many of our players may like being the underdog. Fighting to defend the newbies. I personally like the challenge for a few matches a day. But why should I honour that principle ? What tangible rewards are there for doing so ?

And the toughest thing about team stacking is that, you cannot blame the other team for stacking up against your weaker side. Why should they voluntarily go and even up the teams. Why should they make completing their contracts and weapon tasks harder. You cannot blame them. This isn't a negative player made meta. It is enforced by the game.

It is bad game design.


3. Spawn Farming

Related to Team stacking but this deserves its' own paragraph.

Farming spawns is the game meta. This, in the end, is what contract wars is all about. At high level play it is about spawn control. You want to kill as many enemies as fast as possible to get them to spawn as a group. Locate that spawn and profit.

If that was the game objective that would be perfectly fine. Say if you can trap enemies in the same spawn site for 1 minute to achieve victory and the game ends that would be cool. But it isn't. Once trapped you stay trapped. And the opposition gets to farm his kills until time runs out or until they have milked 150 kills out of it.

For players on the wrong end of that meta, they have to endure it or make an effort to break free. Some spawns on most maps make it incredibly tough to break out. Easiest method however is to not respawn until everyone on your team is dead and wait for spawn site to flip. Good luck getting that to happen with a dozen pugs on your side. I've timed out of a server waiting so many times already.

Fortunately - this is easy to fix.
Unfortunately - it isn't easy to communicate it to Dev team


5. Development

Dev team does not maintain a forum for bug reports and to collect feedback. Easy to fix game breaking problems linger. Community wants and opinions cannot constructively be discussed. Game progresses on rails and each update nothing significant in terms of gameplay happens. No improvements just new guns.


6. Value

Here is one score many reviews hardly ever make accurately. There is no industry standard. And as Free To Play games gain in prominence the need for it increases. I have a very simple system when judging a game and how much time I should / would put into it. Substitutes.

How much does a substitute cost to make me switch over.

It is accurate because the logic is consistent. The better the game, the harder it is to abandon it. Buggy games plagued with a plethora of issues is easy to drop. So how much is Contract Wars is worth to you as a player? It is the cost of what you would leave the game for.


And this was what bothered me the most about my experience with Contract Wars.

I will without hesitation end a contract wars session the second my movie download completed.

Watching a movie I had already seen on the cinema months ago *again* was good enough a reason to end a contract wars session. Initially I thought I had burnt out from clanrace, pushing 2-3 million contribution without full assist at the drop of an invisible hat. But it wasn't that.

When I resumed activity I became more aware that I was getting irritated with matches. I got irate after playing Contract Wars. Unlike other games where you are supposed to feel better after spending some time playing - Contract Wars did the opposite. I had to find something else to entertain me to undo the irritation of playing Contract Wars..

I had spent over $200 on the game

12 premium guns - owning all but 1 from set 5 and 6 -
I'm missing only the DEVGRU P90 coz I cannot make myself stoop that low.

7 premium pistols - 2 of them tasked which needed 10 prokills each

7 Credit guns perm'd including P90, 9A91, M4A1, PDR not counting pistols


- but guess what -

I would drop contract wars in the middle of a match to watch a movie the second it finished downloading.

That bothered me.

For $200 I delayed buying myself
- Titanfall
- ARMA 3
and DLCs for Star Conflict

Games I built my new PC specifically for.


And I drop CW for a movie.


7. The Future

It doesn't take much to fix CW
Godarmour, Spawn mechanics, map design, weapon tasks ... these are doable. And tweaking them would improve the game. But without proper channel of communication with the Dev team possibility of seeing a change looks bleak. Accurate community opinions regarding these issues cannot be collated properly because we lack an effective avenue to discuss them in the first place.


Thus the cancers inflicting CW will continue to linger.

Very good review. Have you posted this one the CW Kong forum? If you want to reach the devs, maybe make a vid with examples for the problems and link it to your post in the Cw forum. That should get some good attention.

^^ what Ricky says, this is stuff for the forum or the FB page

Well someone else has to post it on my behalf and omit my name lol. Downloading movies is a crime

You have a good name and reputation at CW. And dl movies isn't completly illegal. It could be a free documentary about the mating behavior of penguins.

You should post it.

I agree with Ricky.

If you want, you can add Creeds nicknames.

penguins Penguins PEnguins PENguins PENGuins PENGUins PENGUIns PENGUINs PENGUINS PENGUINSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
penguins

or change "Movie download " to "as soon as a good movie is on"

Pfft who cares, 99% of people torrent these days

Good stuff. And I think your opinion will carry some weight considering you are one of the most subscribed to youtubers.

But on the subject of shooting heads. I don't doubt that it isn't happening to you...but I really think this is your net. The only times I have ever had this problem is when I was using some crappy starbucks connection (not saying that's what you have) or playing against a player with 1-9 ping. Choosing the server that is optimal can only do so much, the rest is up your ISP quality.


EDIT: And just a thought...why not try putting the game at the lowest settings for a few matches. Begone had a similar bug where FPS boosted when set on the medium setting.

It may be lag. Or even hardware related. Could be a host of other possibilities.

But it is made possible by headshot protection being there in the first place.

And only available to those willing to pay money for it.

Necro'ing coz a couple comments on youtube hinted people might not quite get my angst with Contract Wars. I'll list out what needs doing to fix:

1. MAP DESIGN

- Dev team is awesome at shooting mechanics. CW guns are the best of ANY game I have ever played. Period. No debate. But they really, REALLY suck at level design.

- It's too easy and all too common for engineers to think that making a game is all about the tools, code, systems, mechanics, art, database and accounts. And they often underestimate how much Map Design impact gameplay and playability.

- CW Devs need to get a proper level designer onboard their team. Collaborate with several 'outsiders' even. And the saddest part is ... for alot of (semi) professionals mappers out there - a huge majority are willing to work almost for peanuts just so they can have a map published to put in their portfolio.

- This isn't a nice 'bonus'. It is absolutely essential to have optimized maps that plays great and incorporates community made meta as part of your game. See how Toxikk died simply because the maps, weapons and movement did not fit well together. It is highly unlikely engineers capable of coding a game are also talented level designers. They need to acknowledge the fact and hire specialist talent.

- Unity doesn't help make this easier too but that isn't reason enough not to overhauling ALL their maps again.


2. CONTRACTS, W-TASKS

- The number one culprit for all the team stacking and negative meta existing in Contract Wars.

- I know its namesake. I know it sounds like a cool idea on paper. But it reinforces negative player behaviour that ruins what global communities regard as acceptable fair play.

- Difficult tasks encourage unfair play. Players optimize. That is what we do. And when trying to get difficult things done, you have every reason to team up with stronger people ganging up against weaker ones.

- Contracts and Weapon Tasks what's ruining Contract Wars.

- This can easily be replaced with traditional grind or some variant.


3. SPAWN TRAPPING

- Related to map design in a big way. This gets solved when better maps are made. Until then or as an alternative to ... respawn mechanics should just be changed to simple RNG like how CS:GO does it.

ie. you respawn at the next spawn site in rotation that isn't occupied.

People will complain about unfair spawns where enemies show up behind them ... like they do in CS:GO team deathmatch. But who gives a F. It's better than how it is right now.

- Rule of thumb is this:

'A fighting chance'

That is what people expect. A chance to fight back. Insta death the milisecond you decide to respawn over and over and over and over x100 is not 'Fighting chance'. It's a meat grinder. That is plain stupid.

Do these three items and Contract Wars will hit AA.

Level design is the single most under-appreciated thing in game design imo.

There should (almost) always be places to snipe from, ambush from, flank from, defend from, fall back to, etc. There should be obstacles and buildings that fit the flow of battle across the map. The scale of the map should fit the number of players and weapons available.

In PS2, there are (were) 3 base designers. One was great, one was mediocre, one was terribad. People make excuses to fight at the good bases, even if their faction doesn't have a connection to it. That's how important level design is to games.

Mind if I use these two posts and place them on the kongregate forum, while adding my own bit? This discussion needs more exposure again since customization has somewhat taken away from the bashing (in topic only).

I'm kind of thinking a title like "from Creed to contract wars".

Patch Notes wrote:
Game Improvements

General

- Reworked the in-game Mission system

-- XP Mission values updated so Game Mode and Support are now quicker to complete

-- Removed 'Win X Matches' missions as they were incentivizing unbalanced matches

Removed 'Win X Matches' missions as they were incentivizing unbalanced matches


This is Dirty Bomb.

Only if they fucking applied it to CW.

Kine you probably have the power to get this fixed, upload a video on youtube, don't you have a crapton of CW subscribers? And then the word will spread.

Kine² wrote:

Patch Notes wrote:
Game Improvements

General

- Reworked the in-game Mission system

-- XP Mission values updated so Game Mode and Support are now quicker to complete

-- Removed 'Win X Matches' missions as they were incentivizing unbalanced matches

Removed 'Win X Matches' missions as they were incentivizing unbalanced matches


This is Dirty Bomb.

Wait, do you mean they changed CW to be more like DB? Or do you mean DB incentivizes unbalanced matches?

Dirty Bomb had a couple of daily missions that were asking players to win matches x number of times for in game currency rewards. 2 months after implementation Devs felt it was causing people to stack teams. So they scraped those missions.

As easy as that.

They didn't need players to bitch about it or for influential players to debate the issue. It's the Dev's game and they fixed their own game.

Defo wrote:Only if they fucking applied it to CW.

Max teabag wrote:Kine you probably have the power to get this fixed, upload a video on youtube, don't you have a crapton of CW subscribers? And then the word will spread.

do this

Kine controls CW.  The myth, the legend, the Kine.

im guessing the closest thing to a rework of CWS mechanics will be CWSA first. After that, it may trickle down to CWB. By that time though, I'll be switched fully to CWSA.