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

AsimDXB

First of all, it’s nice to see a new face interacting with the community. I have hopes of seeing similar useful changes implemented in near future 👍🏼

Since your core work is based on “ease of life” features @Kabam Zero , I’d like to bring two things to your attention and see if something can be done.

1. Additional “Restart” button - It will greatly help if a Restart button can also be added on K.O screen after a fight ends. If not on that screen, then on the fight preview screen. This will save our time from going back to main quest screen to restart active quest.

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.

Both the above will save us a lot of click clicks 😉

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Burrito2525

^^^you sound fun at parties

MavRCK_

Bravo!

Sergeant_

This looks so insanely cool! Hats off to you Zero, thx for your amazing contributions to the game till now!

TheBoogyMan

@Kabam Zero welcome to the community. First post and you already have a few disagrees...lol

kenadroid

Will the boosts also be rearranged? It's so painful to scroll attack boosts down to health and champion boosts lol

kenadroid

Also not related to your post but related to QOL, please put all the quest energy help before arena help lol

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BitterSteel

Just need it to get back to a state where it is playable

Well I for one am absolutely certain that you having a go at someone who has no control over the issue at hand has brought the fix forward by at least 3 weeks.

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Vivavenger

It's just fantastic we can choose champions without entering the quest by preview thanks for this new idea

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Thekiller8967

Kabam zero is the hero the contest needed

Giuliameij

This looks very nice and is a very welcome addition. Good job.

Setanta77

This looks really good. Well done Kabam Zero.

SHIELD4AGENT

Can you also make it that when we Autoplay a quest, the game actually selects to take the unexplored path, instead of just stopping when there are a number of paths to choose from.. that will also save alot of time... while we are doing some chores we can just autoplay with a quest and be done with both the quest and the chores maybe at same time.

Pulyaman

Since you have worked in the autofight, can we get an explanation as to why the next champ is not selected when we lost the fight. This is specific to rol. It would be a huge help if the fights continued till the whole team is dead.

Pulyaman

Can we also have an option to edit the team when we give next quest in eq? The next quest button takes you to the next quest, but we are supposed to use specific classes for each chapter. It would be very helpful if we can preview rhe map and select rhe team once we hit the next quest button.

demonslayer5

great addition, i would also like a button to restart the fight with another champ without any cost. some times we tend to bring the wrong champ in a fight. this can be used once in a quest

Fit_Fun9329

From zero to hero

Skiddy212

Awesome news. Awesome feature, i like that this is a slow rollout throughout the contest starting with just the event quest first.

Welcome to the forums. Looking forward to hearing from you again.

AATT

Looks amazing, but please don't implement it until you have test it months. Parry school was a mess and current state is still bugged. I don't wanna sacrifice gameplay for new features

Kabam Zero

Since you have worked in the autofight, can we get an explanation as to why the next champ is not selected when we lost the fight. This is specific to rol. It would be a huge help if the fights continued till the whole team is dead.

The initial goal of auto-fight was to allow players to finish content they were way over-leveled for without much effort. In this frame of mind, if a champion did get killed, the thought was that player needs to come back and help steer the ship again. Auto fighting through RoL in its entirety was not something we were thinking about when making the feature. That being said I've really enjoyed videos showcasing the power of certain champs and them being able to complete the entire RoL with a single champ plus synergies and I think that is a kind of neat outcome of the restricton.

Colonaut123

Awesome QoL changes! Appreciated!

A_rock007

Your changes are the best gift to the community ever. Imagine doing the summer of pain without a restart button lol, many of us would've just given up.

More ideas for QoL updates: 1) Re-Duel button and 2) Auto 'Ask-for-help' in the arenas

thanks4playing

First of all, it’s nice to see a new face interacting with the community. I have hopes of seeing similar useful changes implemented in near future 👍🏼

Since your core work is based on “ease of life” features @Kabam Zero , I’d like to bring two things to your attention and see if something can be done.

1. Additional “Restart” button - It will greatly help if a Restart button can also be added on K.O screen after a fight ends. If not on that screen, then on the fight preview screen. This will save our time from going back to main quest screen to restart active quest.

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.

Both the above will save us a lot of click clicks 😉

Your changes are the best gift to the community ever. Imagine doing the summer of pain without a restart button lol, many of us would've just given up.

More ideas for QoL updates: 1) Re-Duel button and 2) Auto 'Ask-for-help' in the arenas

I want to echo these suggestions: restart button in the fight screen and a re-duel button.

Also, can there be a button where we can easily see global nodes like we do in AQ?

Otherwise thank you for all of the improvements that you've already implemented and for taking the time to actually reach out to the community!

It's also really cool that you're a player just like us. Who are you thinking to r3?

Kabam Zero

It's also really cool that you're a player just like us. Who are you thinking to r3?

Really don't have many great options and still have to complete the rest of act 6 so will hopefully get some better options by the time I get there.