I hope you can quickly add the items on the paths in the preview view because I choose which path to run when there are items based on which path has the best items.
Absolute legend, really love all the changes you've brought to the game already! This map preview feature is unexpected but interesting. Hopefully it loads fast or I don't see myself using it much.
Also I'd like to reiterate that a simple change we could really do with is a reorganized boost menu, either shuffling the most used boosts to the top (Sooo much scrolling right now) or giving us a couple boost categories we can navigate through with the standard headers you use in other menus.
Could be active for the next monthly event quest on Wednesday.
The 30th was Monday... Wednesday is the 1st of September..
There is so much broken in the game currently, I am hoping they don't add this.. at least for a while.. we don't need more things that don't work properly..
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.
Also for the rest of the suggestions from everybody, no promises on anything but I do like a lot of the ideas and will see if I can get a couple of them in.
Just to confirm what other people said is the feature will only be active on the September Monthly Meta so not currently visible. Tomorrow, when the quest goes live, should be visible then.
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.
Also for the rest of the suggestions from everybody, no promises on anything but I do like a lot of the ideas and will see if I can get a couple of them in.
Man, sometimes it can be so easy. Talking with you is like a mega shortcut to many technical problems or ideas - quick responses, enlightening statements. This is how communication between the company and the customer should be. Thanks for this experience!
Just to confirm what other people said is the feature will only be active on the September Monthly Meta so not currently visible. Tomorrow, when the quest goes live, should be visible then.
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.
Also for the rest of the suggestions from everybody, no promises on anything but I do like a lot of the ideas and will see if I can get a couple of them in.
Man, sometimes it can be so easy. Talking with you is like a mega shortcut to many technical problems or ideas - quick responses, enlightening statements. This is how communication between the company and the customer should be. Thanks for this experience!
Yeah can we get Zero back every few months to report these front end annoyances we have lol. Like automatically going to Book 2, or only one type of rank up gem being visible.
The Preview featured is nice. Particularly that Boss button... Do you know how long I lost scrolling the whole map for him over the years? Kudos, Kabam Zero!
Nice addition for sure when starting a quest but it will be nice if you can also have the preview button when going to the next chapter immediately from the sequence below too
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
At the end of a quest the 'Play Next' is better act as your Preview button. At cavalier the next quest We always had to change the team... This will cut some clicks...
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.
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.
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 can see that you trying to maintain a balance, which is good. And your changes are certainly a step in the right direction. I've been a part of various phases of the sw development lifecycle, so incremental changes to something that has been longstanding are usually the best approach.
The preview button now makes the original/initial screen obsolete. We should remove the original/initial screen b/c it no longer presents any unique information to the user. Instead, when you click on a quest, it should go directly to the preview screen.
As far as the discussion above, I wonder if the preview screen should even have a "begin quest" button. The map is there, so if the player wants to start, then s/he should be able to make a move on the map. Once that occurs, then the "edit team" button is removed and the player begins the quest as normal.
If there is fear that the player would be confused and think that s/he can make a move and later "edit team" during the quest, then the game should present a pop up dialog when the player makes the first move: "You are about to begin the quest, so you will no longer be able to edit your team. Please click yes to confirm." This pop up dialog should have a check box where the dialog never appears again.
EDIT: can't say enough how much we appreciate your changes, the fact that you are actually playing the game, and how you are reaching out to the community. Makes me feel 100% better about the game. So thank you very much.
The preview button now makes the original/initial screen obsolete. We should remove the original/initial screen b/c it no longer presents any unique information to the user. Instead, when you click on a quest, it should go directly to the preview screen.
Certainly worth consideration. Right now with the partial implementation(Some quests have it, most don't) Might feel weird, so it probably couldn't happen until it's a more universal thing. Another consideration would be that thematically there is some player satisfaction in setting up their team and then seeing them assembled before going into the quest. While not particularly intriguing to me, the amount of Reddit posts of people showing off their assembled teams does tell me that it does hold some value to others.
As far as the discussion above, I wonder if the preview screen should even have a "begin quest" button. The map is there, so if the player wants to start, then s/he should be able to make a move on the map. Once that occurs, then the "edit team" button is removed and the player begins the quest as normal.
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.
The preview button now makes the original/initial screen obsolete. We should remove the original/initial screen b/c it no longer presents any unique information to the user. Instead, when you click on a quest, it should go directly to the preview screen.
Certainly worth consideration. Right now with the partial implementation(Some quests have it, most don't) Might feel weird, so it probably couldn't happen until it's a more universal thing. Another consideration would be that thematically there is some player satisfaction in setting up their team and then seeing them assembled before going into the quest. While not particularly intriguing to me, the amount of Reddit posts of people showing off their assembled teams does tell me that it does hold some value to others.
As far as the discussion above, I wonder if the preview screen should even have a "begin quest" button. The map is there, so if the player wants to start, then s/he should be able to make a move on the map. Once that occurs, then the "edit team" button is removed and the player begins the quest as normal.
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.
I just want to say thank you for walking us through your design and decision process. It’s really cool and informative to have a peek behind the curtain.
Not just saying this isn’t possible but explaining why is really nice to see. And thanks for listening to our recommendations too!
As far as the discussion above, I wonder if the preview screen should even have a "begin quest" button. The map is there, so if the player wants to start, then s/he should be able to make a move on the map. Once that occurs, then the "edit team" button is removed and the player begins the quest as normal.
Remember, Kabam Zero has said it is not a fully populated map. Without seeing where potential drops are for Potions/EnergyRefills, you may not have wanted to go down the path you initially clicked on from the start.
And it's already a pain scrolling/scouting out the map and having one of your swipes get interpreted as a press onto a Green dot node and then you’ve suddenly moved (maybe onto the wrong path).
The preview button now makes the original/initial screen obsolete. We should remove the original/initial screen b/c it no longer presents any unique information to the user. Instead, when you click on a quest, it should go directly to the preview screen.
Certainly worth consideration. Right now with the partial implementation(Some quests have it, most don't) Might feel weird, so it probably couldn't happen until it's a more universal thing. Another consideration would be that thematically there is some player satisfaction in setting up their team and then seeing them assembled before going into the quest. While not particularly intriguing to me, the amount of Reddit posts of people showing off their assembled teams does tell me that it does hold some value to others.
As far as the discussion above, I wonder if the preview screen should even have a "begin quest" button. The map is there, so if the player wants to start, then s/he should be able to make a move on the map. Once that occurs, then the "edit team" button is removed and the player begins the quest as normal.
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 I'm certainly thankful that you are very responsive and willing to discuss the thought process with us regarding the game and how it can be improved/why a suggested solution may not be feasible. O rarely see any other @kabam that is willing to talk through with us on issues that we see, at the very least we usually only get any official reply after like days where comments have already piled up and it becomes too troublesome to keep up. Kudos to you, here's to hoping the other kabams can emulate your willingness to discuss with the community in a respectful way 😀.
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.
The preview button now makes the original/initial screen obsolete. We should remove the original/initial screen b/c it no longer presents any unique information to the user. Instead, when you click on a quest, it should go directly to the preview screen.
The team select view is still useful, I sometimes use it to see completion and exploration rewards when the button is not available in the quest select screen.
The preview button now makes the original/initial screen obsolete. We should remove the original/initial screen b/c it no longer presents any unique information to the user. Instead, when you click on a quest, it should go directly to the preview screen.
Certainly worth consideration. Right now with the partial implementation(Some quests have it, most don't) Might feel weird, so it probably couldn't happen until it's a more universal thing. Another consideration would be that thematically there is some player satisfaction in setting up their team and then seeing them assembled before going into the quest. While not particularly intriguing to me, the amount of Reddit posts of people showing off their assembled teams does tell me that it does hold some value to others.
As far as the discussion above, I wonder if the preview screen should even have a "begin quest" button. The map is there, so if the player wants to start, then s/he should be able to make a move on the map. Once that occurs, then the "edit team" button is removed and the player begins the quest as normal.
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.
I just want to say thank you for walking us through your design and decision process. It’s really cool and informative to have a peek behind the curtain.
Not just saying this isn’t possible but explaining why is really nice to see. And thanks for listening to our recommendations too!
I see that you are still so appreciative for this whole topic here like me 😅 I think it’s a really great example how the forum should/can be used best.
The developers show us the machinery behind the curtain. Only with this, we can understand why some decisions are made and where the limitations are. There are very few threads like this here - it’s rare and a good example how we should communicate with each other.
Comments
Also I'd like to reiterate that a simple change we could really do with is a reorganized boost menu, either shuffling the most used boosts to the top (Sooo much scrolling right now) or giving us a couple boost categories we can navigate through with the standard headers you use in other menus.
Keep those changes coming!
The 30th was Monday... Wednesday is the 1st of September..
There is so much broken in the game currently, I am hoping they don't add this.. at least for a while.. we don't need more things that don't work properly..
Also for the rest of the suggestions from everybody, no promises on anything but I do like a lot of the ideas and will see if I can get a couple of them in.
Love the preview mode. Hopefully, it will be rolled out for side quests that require a token to play.
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
At the end of a quest the 'Play Next' is better act as your Preview button. At cavalier the next quest We always had to change the team... This will cut some clicks...
Best Regards
IgHeid11
I totally see the issue though just not too sure of the best solution.
The preview button now makes the original/initial screen obsolete. We should remove the original/initial screen b/c it no longer presents any unique information to the user. Instead, when you click on a quest, it should go directly to the preview screen.
As far as the discussion above, I wonder if the preview screen should even have a "begin quest" button. The map is there, so if the player wants to start, then s/he should be able to make a move on the map. Once that occurs, then the "edit team" button is removed and the player begins the quest as normal.
If there is fear that the player would be confused and think that s/he can make a move and later "edit team" during the quest, then the game should present a pop up dialog when the player makes the first move: "You are about to begin the quest, so you will no longer be able to edit your team. Please click yes to confirm." This pop up dialog should have a check box where the dialog never appears again.
EDIT: can't say enough how much we appreciate your changes, the fact that you are actually playing the game, and how you are reaching out to the community. Makes me feel 100% better about the game. So thank you very much.
Not just saying this isn’t possible but explaining why is really nice to see. And thanks for listening to our recommendations too!
And it's already a pain scrolling/scouting out the map and having one of your swipes get interpreted as a press onto a Green dot node and then you’ve suddenly moved (maybe onto the wrong path).
The developers show us the machinery behind the curtain. Only with this, we can understand why some decisions are made and where the limitations are. There are very few threads like this here - it’s rare and a good example how we should communicate with each other.
*mic drop*