While most developers tend to use the holiday season to spread a message of love and kindness among their playerbase, CDPR has decided to take a little bit of a different route with Gwent. From today until December 11th Skellige and Northern Realms players are going to have to compete with each other in order to secure a fancy (and fairly expensive) premium Gold card: Madman Lugos and Dijkstra respectively.

The rules are fairly simple. You have to pick a side and win as many matches as you can with that faction. Whether you're playing in Ranked or Casual mode doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is that you are securing victories as either Skellige or the Northern Realms. Once December 11th rolls around CDPR will count up all of the wins and grant the premium Gold card to those that have dedicated themselves to the winning faction, as well as a complementary 100 Meteorite Powder to those that have chosen... poorly.

While the concept itself is brilliant and something I am definitely behind, the actual execution of it leaves a lot to be desired. For example, if you don't really care about which side wins, you have absolutely no incentive of dedicating yourself to either faction until the very end. In most circumstances this wouldn't be any sort of a problem, but for some reason CDPR has decided to create a live tracker that shows you which faction is winning, and by how much! So instead of taking a leap of faith for your favorite faction, you can just wait until the final day and go with the surefire winner. A profitable plan for us players, but also a very boring one!

Chances are CDPR will change this in future events, but for now I would suggest being a little bit patient with your 'vote', just in case. If you would like to learn more about this event, or Gwent in general, you should head over to the official website.