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

Kabam Zero

2. When playing Book 1, if I restart or complete any quest, by default the screen get pushed to Book 2 (those who have it enabled). We have to press Back, click Book 1, select the Act and again dig that quest or the next one. Please make the screen stays at that same Act/Quest and not jump to Book 2.
This sounds more like a bug to me so thanks for letting me know about it. Made a ticket for it and I think I know what the issue is.

Happy to say I managed to get this into 32.3(next month's build) so will not bother ya'll for much longer.

Bendy

I really love this feature makes cav teams easier than always goingin then quitting just to set a team for that quest of nodes.

The_Sentry06

2. When playing Book 1, if I restart or complete any quest, by default the screen get pushed to Book 2 (those who have it enabled). We have to press Back, click Book 1, select the Act and again dig that quest or the next one. Please make the screen stays at that same Act/Quest and not jump to Book 2.
This sounds more like a bug to me so thanks for letting me know about it. Made a ticket for it and I think I know what the issue is.
Happy to say I managed to get this into 32.3(next month's build) so will not bother ya'll for much longer.

That's such a nice QOL change.

unknown

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Typhoon

2. When playing Book 1, if I restart or complete any quest, by default the screen get pushed to Book 2 (those who have it enabled). We have to press Back, click Book 1, select the Act and again dig that quest or the next one. Please make the screen stays at that same Act/Quest and not jump to Book 2.
This sounds more like a bug to me so thanks for letting me know about it. Made a ticket for it and I think I know what the issue is.
Happy to say I managed to get this into 32.3(next month's build) so will not bother ya'll for much longer.

Just want to take a moment and thank Kabam Zero for being respectful, responsive, transparent, and courteous. I think some other mods can learn from you!

DNA3000

Upon finishing a chapter and you hit the 'Play Next' you are automatically taken to the next chapter without the team preview. It will help a lot specially when doing the cav difficulty
It's an odd balance to strike. The popup does already have 3 buttons there so adding a new one might just start to look cluttered. If we just changed the functionality of "Play Next", then for every quest, the preview function would happen. For many quests, I would gather people wouldn't want that functionality. If you were just clearing some of the lower-level content would you want us to force you back to preview each time between quests?

I totally see the issue though just not too sure of the best solution.

I would replace the "open crystal" button with "preview next" because a) that button doesn't really belong in the UI flow really and b) I suspect it is a rarely used button.

Typhoon

Upon finishing a chapter and you hit the 'Play Next' you are automatically taken to the next chapter without the team preview. It will help a lot specially when doing the cav difficulty
It's an odd balance to strike. The popup does already have 3 buttons there so adding a new one might just start to look cluttered. If we just changed the functionality of "Play Next", then for every quest, the preview function would happen. For many quests, I would gather people wouldn't want that functionality. If you were just clearing some of the lower-level content would you want us to force you back to preview each time between quests?

I totally see the issue though just not too sure of the best solution.
I would replace the "open crystal" button with "preview next" because a) that button doesn't really belong in the UI flow really and b) I suspect it is a rarely used button.

Agreed.

AverageDesi

2. When playing Book 1, if I restart or complete any quest, by default the screen get pushed to Book 2 (those who have it enabled). We have to press Back, click Book 1, select the Act and again dig that quest or the next one. Please make the screen stays at that same Act/Quest and not jump to Book 2.
This sounds more like a bug to me so thanks for letting me know about it. Made a ticket for it and I think I know what the issue is.
Happy to say I managed to get this into 32.3(next month's build) so will not bother ya'll for much longer.

it was this easy? we suffered this bug for months on end because the team never got the message of this? have the forum mods and admins never seen the countless threads about it?

PS : can you stay here longer? this direct communication is amazing

SummonerNR

Can that change for 32.3 (not automatically reverting to Book-2 while just doing earlier Acts in Book-1), can that be applied to not automatically reverting to uppermost Difficulty in Monthly EQ as well ?

If doing lesser Difficulties, unless you directly press Repeat or Play Next, if just going back to the Selection screens instead (maybe because want to change up roster, for different objectives, but still on Beginner or Normal) it always goes back to topmost Difficulty upon finishing a quest.

Fit_Fun9329

@kabam Zero, can you explain why the asking for help process in the arena takes sometimes longer or shorter ?

For example: in the current build (and the one before I think), you always have to wait until the green “help requested” animation disappears before you can click on the next champ.

In the build before the last one, you could “spam” clicking on the green help-“cross” which was way way faster. It’s like the helping animation was simply skipped somehow. Do you know why this happens and whether or not there are some plans for the future of this process? There is Definitely room for QoL changes.

Thanks 😊

Kade7175

This is awesome. It has been a huge qol improvement for me. I love this feature. Thank you to the team that put this together its amazing!

JimmyG_1980

I've spent so much Money on this game. And yet u continue to screw US. I just spent 60 on the Archangel bundle and got 9 3* and 1 4*. Tell me how is that fair to me. Why are the 3* even in the crytals. That's not cool at all.

Kabam Zero

Can that change for 32.3 (not automatically reverting to Book-2 while just doing earlier Acts in Book-1), can that be applied to not automatically reverting to uppermost Difficulty in Monthly EQ as well ?

If doing lesser Difficulties, unless you directly press Repeat or Play Next, if just going back to the Selection screens instead (maybe because want to change up roster, for different objectives, but still on Beginner or Normal) it always goes back to topmost Difficulty upon finishing a quest.

You're ruining the surprise but I believe this should also be fixed. I know for sure it will be in story and I'm like 90% sure it will carry over to event quests.

Fit_Fun9329

Kabam zero drops one bomb after another

Kabam Zero

Upon finishing a chapter and you hit the 'Play Next' you are automatically taken to the next chapter without the team preview. It will help a lot specially when doing the cav difficulty
It's an odd balance to strike. The popup does already have 3 buttons there so adding a new one might just start to look cluttered. If we just changed the functionality of "Play Next", then for every quest, the preview function would happen. For many quests, I would gather people wouldn't want that functionality. If you were just clearing some of the lower-level content would you want us to force you back to preview each time between quests?

I totally see the issue though just not too sure of the best solution.
I would replace the "open crystal" button with "preview next" because a) that button doesn't really belong in the UI flow really and b) I suspect it is a rarely used button.

This sounds like a solid option. Will run it by our UX guys to see if we can make it happen.

unknown

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Kabam Zero

@kabam Zero, can you explain why the asking for help process in the arena takes sometimes longer or shorter ?

For example: in the current build (and the one before I think), you always have to wait until the green “help requested” animation disappears before you can click on the next champ.

In the build before the last one, you could “spam” clicking on the green help-“cross” which was way way faster. It’s like the helping animation was simply skipped somehow. Do you know why this happens and whether or not there are some plans for the future of this process? There is Definitely room for QoL changes.

Thanks 😊

My guess without having done a deep dive is it would depend on how long the server call takes. Each time a help request is made it sends a request to the server and then the server has to respond back. Until the server gets back we lock the interface to stop the game from getting into a bad state. So depending on how long that server call takes it could take a bit longer or shorter to do them. Hope that explains it.

Typhoon

Upon finishing a chapter and you hit the 'Play Next' you are automatically taken to the next chapter without the team preview. It will help a lot specially when doing the cav difficulty
It's an odd balance to strike. The popup does already have 3 buttons there so adding a new one might just start to look cluttered. If we just changed the functionality of "Play Next", then for every quest, the preview function would happen. For many quests, I would gather people wouldn't want that functionality. If you were just clearing some of the lower-level content would you want us to force you back to preview each time between quests?

I totally see the issue though just not too sure of the best solution.
I would replace the "open crystal" button with "preview next" because a) that button doesn't really belong in the UI flow really and b) I suspect it is a rarely used button.
This sounds like a solid option. Will run it by our UX guys to see if we can make it happen.

Where have you been for the last 6.5-7 years? We love you.

YungLampshade69V2

Oh good, there's a bug that breaks the fundamental mechanics of the game, but instead of exhausting all resources possible on fixing it, you guys wasted effort on a small feature that's extremely unnecessary given the circumstances.

AverageDesi

Oh good, there's a bug that breaks the fundamental mechanics of the game, but instead of exhausting all resources possible on fixing it, you guys wasted effort on a small feature that's extremely unnecessary given the circumstances.

yeah. let's send the art team and UI team to fix a game engine issue

AverageDesi

@kabam Zero, can you explain why the asking for help process in the arena takes sometimes longer or shorter ?

For example: in the current build (and the one before I think), you always have to wait until the green “help requested” animation disappears before you can click on the next champ.

In the build before the last one, you could “spam” clicking on the green help-“cross” which was way way faster. It’s like the helping animation was simply skipped somehow. Do you know why this happens and whether or not there are some plans for the future of this process? There is Definitely room for QoL changes.

Thanks 😊
My guess without having done a deep dive is it would depend on how long the server call takes. Each time a help request is made it sends a request to the server and then the server has to respond back. Until the server gets back we lock the interface to stop the game from getting into a bad state. So depending on how long that server call takes it could take a bit longer or shorter to do them. Hope that explains it.

can we make more suggestions? i'm a person who never asks for arena help. is there a way to disable it? it's tiring having to wade through all the used champs to get to the champs that can fight. asking for help takes too much time and is not worth it

Pulyaman

@kabam Zero, can you explain why the asking for help process in the arena takes sometimes longer or shorter ?

For example: in the current build (and the one before I think), you always have to wait until the green “help requested” animation disappears before you can click on the next champ.

In the build before the last one, you could “spam” clicking on the green help-“cross” which was way way faster. It’s like the helping animation was simply skipped somehow. Do you know why this happens and whether or not there are some plans for the future of this process? There is Definitely room for QoL changes.

Thanks 😊
My guess without having done a deep dive is it would depend on how long the server call takes. Each time a help request is made it sends a request to the server and then the server has to respond back. Until the server gets back we lock the interface to stop the game from getting into a bad state. So depending on how long that server call takes it could take a bit longer or shorter to do them. Hope that explains it.
can we make more suggestions? i'm a person who never asks for arena help. is there a way to disable it? it's tiring having to wade through all the used champs to get to the champs that can fight. asking for help takes too much time and is not worth it

People have been asking to remove the help mechanic for a long time. Either make it automatic or just remove it altogether. A filter to just view the usable champs will be an awesome addition. No more asking for help if you don't need to. Just filter out usable champs and keep grinding. Please look into this feature too. A filter in the items tab is something I have requested for some time to filter out class based ag, sig stones, boosts and so forth. Just a class based boost would be so helpful there. Just extend the filters we have for champs like star and class and it will be much more easy to navigate.

AverageDesi

@kabam Zero, can you explain why the asking for help process in the arena takes sometimes longer or shorter ?

For example: in the current build (and the one before I think), you always have to wait until the green “help requested” animation disappears before you can click on the next champ.

In the build before the last one, you could “spam” clicking on the green help-“cross” which was way way faster. It’s like the helping animation was simply skipped somehow. Do you know why this happens and whether or not there are some plans for the future of this process? There is Definitely room for QoL changes.

Thanks 😊
My guess without having done a deep dive is it would depend on how long the server call takes. Each time a help request is made it sends a request to the server and then the server has to respond back. Until the server gets back we lock the interface to stop the game from getting into a bad state. So depending on how long that server call takes it could take a bit longer or shorter to do them. Hope that explains it.
can we make more suggestions? i'm a person who never asks for arena help. is there a way to disable it? it's tiring having to wade through all the used champs to get to the champs that can fight. asking for help takes too much time and is not worth it
People have been asking to remove the help mechanic for a long time. Either make it automatic or just remove it altogether. A filter to just view the usable champs will be an awesome addition. No more asking for help if you don't need to. Just filter out usable champs and keep grinding. Please look into this feature too. A filter in the items tab is something I have requested for some time to filter out class based ag, sig stones, boosts and so forth. Just a class based boost would be so helpful there. Just extend the filters we have for champs like star and class and it will be much more easy to navigate.

wow. never seen people ask about this before good to know.

there is a small workaround to this that is somewhat effective. in the featured arena i sort champs to 6*s and then click availability. pushes the usable champs to top and you wont see help button

Pulyaman

@kabam Zero, can you explain why the asking for help process in the arena takes sometimes longer or shorter ?

For example: in the current build (and the one before I think), you always have to wait until the green “help requested” animation disappears before you can click on the next champ.

In the build before the last one, you could “spam” clicking on the green help-“cross” which was way way faster. It’s like the helping animation was simply skipped somehow. Do you know why this happens and whether or not there are some plans for the future of this process? There is Definitely room for QoL changes.

Thanks 😊
My guess without having done a deep dive is it would depend on how long the server call takes. Each time a help request is made it sends a request to the server and then the server has to respond back. Until the server gets back we lock the interface to stop the game from getting into a bad state. So depending on how long that server call takes it could take a bit longer or shorter to do them. Hope that explains it.
can we make more suggestions? i'm a person who never asks for arena help. is there a way to disable it? it's tiring having to wade through all the used champs to get to the champs that can fight. asking for help takes too much time and is not worth it
People have been asking to remove the help mechanic for a long time. Either make it automatic or just remove it altogether. A filter to just view the usable champs will be an awesome addition. No more asking for help if you don't need to. Just filter out usable champs and keep grinding. Please look into this feature too. A filter in the items tab is something I have requested for some time to filter out class based ag, sig stones, boosts and so forth. Just a class based boost would be so helpful there. Just extend the filters we have for champs like star and class and it will be much more easy to navigate.
wow. never seen people ask about this before good to know.

there is a small workaround to this that is somewhat effective. in the featured arena i sort champs to 6*s and then click availability. pushes the usable champs to top and you wont see help button

Only issue is it will sort according to rank and that's actually quite a bother for me. I usually just click help and move on. But, the last few weeks the game gets stuck and I need to restart to continue to play. So, I just stopped arena for the most part. Only do the milestones and for the objectives.

dot_ditto

so I've noticed something with this, and not to be trying to complain about a great option .. but

I've used preview a few times .. made my team selection, started the map .. get into the map .. only to notice a tempting/choice item (ie revive) on a path I wasn't planning for at the moment ... so .. exit .. re-select team .. re-enter, and go for the revive.

As a developer, I can easily guess why the items on the path don't show up during preview .. but just wanted to point it out .. perhaps a future enhancement?

BitterSteel

so I've noticed something with this, and not to be trying to complain about a great option .. but

I've used preview a few times .. made my team selection, started the map .. get into the map .. only to notice a tempting/choice item (ie revive) on a path I wasn't planning for at the moment ... so .. exit .. re-select team .. re-enter, and go for the revive.

As a developer, I can easily guess why the items on the path don't show up during preview .. but just wanted to point it out .. perhaps a future enhancement?

Zero actually addressed this earlier! He talked about it when someone asked a question about why can’t we begin the quest and move to the fight, from the preview screen instead of having a begin quest button.

“ This is one of those things that is sadly not as easy as it seems. To accomplish what we currently have I retrofitted the AVE map preview tech which has a cached version of the map data but is not the same map data that you get when you actually start the quest. This is why things like path rewards don't exist in the first implementation as that data is currently only received when the quest is started. If we were starting from scratch in designing the flow, this in my mind would be the ideal flow but would likely require large-scale changes in our server quest flow which would take a while and have a fair deal of risks to it bug-wise.”

Kabam Zero

so I've noticed something with this, and not to be trying to complain about a great option .. but

I've used preview a few times .. made my team selection, started the map .. get into the map .. only to notice a tempting/choice item (ie revive) on a path I wasn't planning for at the moment ... so .. exit .. re-select team .. re-enter, and go for the revive.

As a developer, I can easily guess why the items on the path don't show up during preview .. but just wanted to point it out .. perhaps a future enhancement?

As BitterSteel mentioned it is a technical limitation rather than a design one that is blocking path-based rewards from showing. We are investigating solutions for this but may not be a quick fix.

LilMaddogHT

@Kabam Zero - I quite enjoy this new feature but please consider deploying it into the older Book 1 & Book 2 story quests and the Back Issues quests soon. Thanks again and great work 🤘🏼

Chikel

@Kabam Zero - I quite enjoy this new feature but please consider deploying it into the older Book 1 & Book 2 story quests and the Back Issues quests soon. Thanks again and great work 🤘🏼

Do people not read the thread? Someone has already said that and he answered that doing so involves redesigning every single quest. Not an easy thing to do.

dot_ditto

so I've noticed something with this, and not to be trying to complain about a great option .. but

I've used preview a few times .. made my team selection, started the map .. get into the map .. only to notice a tempting/choice item (ie revive) on a path I wasn't planning for at the moment ... so .. exit .. re-select team .. re-enter, and go for the revive.

As a developer, I can easily guess why the items on the path don't show up during preview .. but just wanted to point it out .. perhaps a future enhancement?
As BitterSteel mentioned it is a technical limitation rather than a design one that is blocking path-based rewards from showing. We are investigating solutions for this but may not be a quick fix.

ahh, gotcha .. did a quick search, but didn't find/see it ...
as I said, as a developer, that doesn't surprise me ... without reading the explanation, I kind of already figured how you were doing it

heh

all good ..
Thanks!