Contracts

Contracts are a new multiplayer feature in Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Mechanics
Contracts are available to purchase with CoD Points. Different contracts have different goals, such as achieving a certain number of killstreak rewards or getting a certain amount of kills with a specific weapon. Completing a contract will yield more CoD Points than the player paid for the contract itself; certain contracts also reward experience upon completion. The higher difficulty of the contract, the higher payout upon completion. The old Challenges system are still in place; contracts are just an addition.

Contracts expire eventually. Once players accept the contract, they have a certain amount of time to fulfill it. The time counted is the time passed while alive in matches. I.e. time spent dead waiting for the next round in S&D or a HQ to be destroyed is not counted.

There are three different categories of Contracts: Mercenary (primary weapon kills, killstreaks, etc), Operations (match related wins, kills, etc), Specialist (headshots, secondary kills, etc). Players can have no more than three Contracts, one from each category, active at any time. Selecting a new Contract removes an existing (incomplete) Contract of the respective category without refund. The available set of Contracts changes daily at 00:00 UTC. Purchased Contracts can still be completed after this daily update (as long as the time spent alive in-game has not run out).

For example, the Mercenary Contract, "SPAS Cruelty", is bought for 50 CoD Points and requires the player to get 25 kills with the SPAS in 40-minutes of time alive in-game. The reward for completing this particular Contract is 250 CoD Points.

Mercenary contracts
Contracts for getting kills and killstreaks.

Operations contracts
Contracts for specific game modes and playlists.

Specialist contracts
Contracts for headshots, secondary weapons, Grenades, and special objectives.

Trivia

 * The contracts available to be purchased changes every 24 hours.