My two long cents about contracts

For me the contracts are the best part of the game , don't get me wrong getting to the harder areas of the map with a squad only to find another squad had the same idea and now everybody is fighting for the same rare loot is awesome.

But the priority contracts journey was amazing. And I'd like to have that feeling again from time to time.

That being said. in my mind priority contracts are lore quests. thats what they are for me they unlock fundamental progress in the game too, but the biggest thing I think they do for players is immersion, its the first and honestly the primary way players interact with the lore of the game. And this game does a very good job of immersion, and it is important to keep it that way.

Why am I saying all of this then? Well I think it is a general opinion(maybe not, but it is in my circle) that everybody hates the sekgen questline. It 100% hits you very hard very soon in the game. I am all in favor of the game being hardcore don't get me wrong, but I don't think we should be gating people from the immersion and progression behind that kind of priority contracts. Its new players first objectives and what they aim for for basic progression in the game.

I am going to give an example. for most players Parasitism 1/5 is very diabolical, it took me an insane amount of tries and recently helping my friends to do it after the destryoed wing entrance puzzle being removed, has been a chore.

To me this quest now feels close to endgame, well maybe not that far but you get my point.

I think lorequests should be lorequests, and priority contracts clearly should be designed to make the player absorb it, force them to go around the maps and interact with early mechanics. getting to pinwheel base center isn't very basic.

That being said my suggestion would be to unburden priority contracts from certain areas of the map. to free it from some difficulties. make them challenging but always doable for new players.

in order for contracts also not feel boring after you compelte the priority quests we need more levels of contracts.

So my thinking is:

common contracts being the basic, with the very easy and generic tasks that we already have.

introducing two new degress of difficulties of random contracts you can complete for factions. uncomon contracts and rare contracts which can have the reroll mechanic as well at a higher cost rar contracts could be all in a single run types. and they could have the difficulty bigger than Parasitism 1/5 has.

leave priority contracts just for lore sakes, challenging but not so crazy, to progress new players every new season and get their immersion going and make sure that they can always finish them so they can finish the progression to help them keep playing and move along the game. think of MMOs no lore quest in MMOs are very challenging they are there to entice you and make you engage with the world and mechanics, but you are looking forward to the endgame where the deepest mechanics are. I am not saying we need to make priority contracts unfun. but if they become an incredible pain in the ass to complete then they should not gatekeep your progress then.

introduce weekly rotating contracts for a chosen faction with bigger rewards and huge risks, acting as global events, inducing pvp.

and finally introduce high level contracts that would act as end game kind of contracts. something akin to maps in poe. where each contract can only be done once. if you fail you would have to loot this contract once again somewhere. esentially making this contract as a drop item, giving a lot of meaning to loot hunt after you been around for a long while during the season.