Buying Contracts in the auction house is useless

[killakrok]

Right now it seems that buying contracts in the auction house is completely useless as contracts are cheaper when you purchase them from the no contracts popup you get when attempting to start a game with a player that has no contracts.

For some reason purchasing contracts from the popup is 1/2 price if you currently have no contract cards left. If I use up all of my contracts then try to start a game it currently costs 400MT to purchase 5 contracts from the menu for an amethyst player, but a 5 contract card in the auction house goes for about 500-600MT, so why would I ever buy them from the auction house? Maybe the prices from the menu will be a little higher for diamond players but they will still probably only be about 450-500MT, which is still lower than the auction house price.

I also don't get why purchasing contracts are 1/2 off if you don't have contracts in your inventory. It's probably that 2K knows the contract system isn't great and their way of making it possible to play the mode without getting caught in a loop where you can't play games because you have no contracts but you can't earn money to buy contracts because you can't play games, but why not just have one lower price across the board?

Also, why are contracts even in the game anymore other than to burn players MT? There is now a salary cap which was added to bring more balance to teams, so having a higher cost per game for higher tier players, which is the only semi intelligible reason to have them in the first place, isn't an issue anymore.