Dev Diary: Introducing a new Team Select and Map Preview Screen Flow

Greetings Summoners!

My name is Kabam Zero, and I’m excited to introduce myself and talk to you about our upcoming changes to the team select flow, plus a bit of the current focus of the Genesis team.

At Kabam, my title is Front-End Engineer, meaning that I’m one of many engineers responsible for creating and updating our many screens and user flows in The Contest. Some Features I’ve worked on are Auto-Move, the Restart Quest Button, and Caching Filters in the Arena and Upgrade ISO-8 Stash. I also recently updated the Champions Ability Page UI, allowing you to view Signature Abilities that have yet to be unlocked. Besides that, I’m also an avid Marvel Contest of Champions player currently sitting at Cavalier on the road to Thronebreaker!

If you remember our Roadmap update earlier this year, we mentioned something called “Project Genesis”. Project Genesis is a game-wide modernization initiative to update, refresh and rework huge parts of The Contest bringing it up to the standard we all expect in 2021 and beyond. To that end, we’ve done a lot of user testing and have found that new Summoners especially struggle with what we call “the core-fight-spine.”

This includes everything from when the player selects their team to the point before entering into a fight.

MCoC has a growing number of deep and engaging RPG mechanics which can be punishing for players without prior knowledge of Champions/Nodes or proper planning through Quest Maps. As beginners, I'm sure many of us have shared the same experience-fighting a Champion like Iceman, and being totally unprepared for it. As MCoC evolves, our team is focusing a great deal of energy to make it easier for players to pick up the RPG/Strategy aspects of the game

We’ve got a bunch of changes we’re currently working on to make this better, but something we found that we could get working and out the door to you quickly was what we call “Team Select Preview”. One pain point we’ve noticed is that currently when planning your team for a particular path or quest, the best way to do that is to start the quest, take a look around to figure out who you need then quit out, go back to the team select and finally pick your team. That’s a lot of steps, so starting in v32.2, launching August 30th, we’ll be enabling a preview button for our Event Quests that you can find in the Team Select screen.

Clicking on the preview button will load up the quest while still having the team select screen up, like so.

From here you are able to pan around the map and tap on boss portraits to see buff node information just as if you’re on the map normally. On the right side, there are menu buttons that will help you navigate the map. All of these buttons except the last one existed previously in the quest map but for thoroughness sake, I’ll explain them below:

Boost Button - Access your boosts
Portals Button - Shows all the portal lines, disabled if no portals exist on the map.
Linked Node - Shows all the linked node lines, disabled if no linked nodes exist on the map
Center On Player - This existed previously and would center the camera wherever the player is. In preview, however, it centers the camera on the starting location. This button is disabled if camera movement is locked.
Center On Boss - New Button that centers on the end boss. If there are multiple bosses, it will center to the end node. This is also disabled if camera movement is locked.

Besides the side buttons and the map now being here, you can still do all the things you could typically do on the team select screen.

While this may not solve every concern or difficulty our players may experience in the “Core Fight Spine”, we believe it’s a nice start, and one we were able to get to you relatively quickly. We’ve got a couple more exciting things coming that I think will be far more impactful but they’ll need a little more time in our metaphorical development oven.

While we are only releasing this initially in our Event Quests, we want to expand further. We are taking it a bit slow to properly handle all the many different types of quests we have and make sure there are no weird edge case scenarios before we let the floodgates open. Our v1 will not show any path-based rewards on the map, but that is something we will be adding in the future.

That’s all for now. Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I hope to do another one of these in the future.

Cheers,
Kabam Zero

Comments

Boss_Starling_217_

This addition looks nice.

I am speed.

The_Sentry06

Definitely a nice quality of life change!

Squirrelguy

I’ve always wanted to thank the person that added in descriptions to locked signature abilities. Thanks!

This new feature seems pretty intuitive and super useful. Can’t wait to try it out!

BitterSteel

The restart quest button is a godsend, this preview feature seems like a great addition too!

Typhoon

Have you guys thought about having a "Loadout node" similar to incursions that allows you to change your team once you're in the map? This would avoid the need for a preview button altogether.

unknown

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Fit_Fun9329

Great ideas and improvements! I still love the auto move feature, it saves so much time! Hyped for more such innovative ideas, keep it up dude ! 😊

Kabam Zero

Have you guys thought about having a "Loadout node" similar to incursions that allows you to change your team once you're in the map? This would avoid the need for a preview button altogether.

I think there is something similar to that in act 7 but nearer to the boss. Haven't got there yet so not 100% sure. There are a couple of other considerations though,

1) Moving to that node would cost energy which would somewhat be a waste of energy for many players
2) On the technical side of things it would involve manually editing all quest maps which is a somewhat tedious task

Typhoon

Have you guys thought about having a "Loadout node" similar to incursions that allows you to change your team once you're in the map? This would avoid the need for a preview button altogether.
I think there is something similar to that in act 7 but nearer to the boss. Haven't got there yet so not 100% sure. There are a couple of other considerations though,

1) Moving to that node would cost energy which would somewhat be a waste of energy for many players
2) On the technical side of things it would involve manually editing all quest maps which is a somewhat tedious task

Yeah, there's a node in Act 7 before the boss that allows you to change out one champion, and in incursions a node at the beginning that allows you to do the same. Just a thought. Thanks for the response.

Gamer

Luck very nice wil help for cavalier node a bit better

Colinwhitworth69

I specifically asked for the ability to preview maps, as I am sure many did, so I am stoked. Thanks!

Furious_Fighter1

Hey Zero, Thanks for all the cool QOL updates/features you have put in and will be putting in the game.
For us you are a Hero.

rockykoston

Dude, I want to thank the Kabam team and especially you for putting in that Restart Quest button and the Auto Fight.

I am sure this new feature will be very useful too.

MagicBenton

Thanks for your work, all of the stuff you outlined has been great QOL improvements, especially the Restart Quest button. In a similar fashion, we could really use a "Duel Again" button after a duel finishes. It would be REALLY helpful.

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Ercarret

This looks really nice. I always have to back out of Cav EQ because I find out that my class loadout was all wrong. Being able to immediately change will be super useful.

Championcritic

The improvement we never knew we needed so bad, well done. Just gotta make sure there are no bugs and that all features work as intended and we can say kabam did good.

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X_Factor

How is this going to work in 7.1 where all the bosses are spread out sporadically? There isn’t exactly a center node for those if I’m not mistaken.

VanillaCoke

Ladies and gentlemen… Zero

StevieManWonder

Awesome!

Doomsfist79

Please no.. this is just going to add onto all the existing problems..

SpideyFunko

You’re the guy who gave us the godsend of a restart button? Thanks a ton mate

Thanks_D19

Omg this is so amazing. Thank you good sir doing cav EQ and having to sit through a bunch of load screens to figure out which class I needed to use was such a pain before

Horror_punk

And for the Sake of Players please insert a “Skip Sp3 Animation Button” this would be a good QOL change

Ghostboytjie

The Man , The Myth Zer0!!

odishika123

Restart button was a 1000 IQ play
Thank you for your various improvements to the contest

Kabam Zero

How is this going to work in 7.1 where all the bosses are spread out sporadically? There isn’t exactly a center node for those if I’m not mistaken.

So the way it will work is the button will center on the end node of the quest.

unknown

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Real_Madrid_76_2

Looks good, @Kabam Zero welcome to the community