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

Kabam Zero

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

Crine60

@Kabam Zero I have 2 requests that I don't know the difficulty of implementing. The first is can you please find a way to stop the gold quest for sigil subscribers from showing up for people who aren't actively subscribed. There is so much clutter in the fight screen with all the different quests already that I don't need another pane there that I can't even use. Multiple posts have been made about this for a bit now but no moderator to my knowledge has bothered to respond to or acknowledge them.

Second, is there any way to modify the healing screen to show the actual health numbers of the selected champion instead of the bar representation. Currently I can only see my injured champion's current health in number form if I am on a node with an enemy to fight. It would be helpful if you are on an empty node to be able to see your detailed health because sometimes you have no energy to move but might have potions expiring before you can get to an enemy and it would be nice to make a more educated decision on who you want to heal.