MARVEL SNAP: What’s Next?
Hey, welcome to our first development roadmap update for 2023! We’ve been having a blast exploring the Savage Land, Quantum Realm, and time-traveling to the… Past? Future? We’re not sure. We’ve had some great seasons, launched a BUNCH of new Series 5 cards, balanced some metagames, and some of us even got to Infinite Rank. Whoa. But, we’re ready to talk about what’s next for MARVEL SNAP!
COMING SOON
Items listed here are in the final phase of development, and these features are almost ready to release to players! We’re cleaning up, polishing art, and squashing bugs. Our Quality Assurance teams scrape over all the little details to ensure we have as smooth an experience for players as possible. Once features are “Coming Soon,” we can start to plan release dates, timelines and share some insight with players.
The team is hard at work putting the finishing touches on a few much-anticipated features:
- New Competitive Mode – Conquest
- Card Acquisition Improvements
- Token Shop Revamp
- Ranked Mode Improvements
- Infinite Rank Revamp
What is Conquest?
Conquest takes the Battle Mode format you know and love from Friendly Battles to the next level! In Conquest, players will queue up against other players to face-off in Battle Mode to earn rewards. Winning a series of battles without a loss unlocks tickets to higher leagues against tougher opponents… culminating with Infinity league at the end of each season. Players will battle their way to the top to claim ultimate victory – and the best rewards.
When you queue up for a Conquest match, you’ll start by choosing which league to compete: Proving Grounds, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Vibranium, or Infinite. Proving Grounds is always available to play, but players need the corresponding ticket to access higher tiers. Tickets are earned by winning a league series in the previous tier – for example: winning your Silver series will earn you a Gold Ticket. Players win a league series by defeating three consecutive opponents.
In addition to Tickets for higher leagues, each victory grants Medals that can be used in the Conquest Shop to unlock exclusive rewards. There’s a brand new Conquest Shop every season with new cosmetics, including a seasonal exclusive variant that can only be unlocked in the Conquest Shop.
We think that Battle Mode is a super fun way to play MARVEL SNAP and Conquest lets you play Battle Mode whenever you want, against the best competition, for the best rewards! The team is actively developing Conquest and we ran our first company-wide playtest last week. We’re hoping to release Conquest in June!
Card Acquisition Improvements
Every new card released in MARVEL SNAP should be exciting and impactful. We want players to wonder how that card could unlock new possibilities for fun or to win matches–and be able to actually play out those dreams. We’ve heard your feedback that we’re not meeting these expectations right now. It’s time to change that! We’re increasing the rate that all players earn Tokens, including a huge boost for Series 3 players that brings them in-line with Series 4/5 players. These changes will give all players equal opportunities to unlock brand new cards for themselves–whether you’re in Series 3 or beyond.
- More Tokens: We’re increasing the amount of Tokens earned on the Collection Level Track for all players who have not yet collected all Series 4 and Series 5 Cards. Starting at Collection Level 500 players will be able to earn between 200-600 tokens in Collector’s Caches and Collector’s Reserves regardless of whether they have completed Series 3 or not. This is an increase of 4X for players who have not yet completed Series 3! Once a Card Series is complete, caches that would have contained a card from that Series will now be replaced with 100 Tokens. All of these changes will result in more tokens for more people!
- Choose Your Card: Series 3 cards now have their own section in the Shop! Once per season players who haven’t completed Series 3 will be able to claim one free Series 3 card to help them fill out their favorite deck and take a step closer to completing their collection. Now you can save your tokens for Series 4 and 5 cards!
You don’t need to wait long for these updates, both of these changes will be in our next patch!
Token Shop Revamp
Token Shop is an awesome way to target the cards you want most, but we think we can do it even better. We’re dividing the Token Shop into a few different sections that will allow players to target new and desirable cards faster. We’re also revamping the look and feel of the Token Shop so you can swipe through to see what’s new.
- Weekly Spotlight: When a new Series 5 card is released, it will be immediately featured in its own section for its first week in MARVEL SNAP. Once you buy the Weekly Spotlight card, this section will be hidden until the next new card is released. If you want the newest cards at release, here’s what you’ve been waiting for!
- Series 4 & Series 5: This section functions nearly the same as previously, but only features Series 4 and Series 5 cards. This section will feature a card you don’t own from all currently available Series 4/5 cards and rotates every 8 hours. Series 5 cards will be added to this section once they leave the Weekly Spotlight.
- Ultimate Variants: Ultimate Variants are some of the most epic variants in the game. We felt they deserved their own section too! We’re moving Ultimate Variants out of the way of seeing Series 4 and 5 cards and into their own rotation for those of you who want to make your decks that much cooler.
We’re aiming for these changes to make our April patch!
Ranked Mode Improvements
We’ve been hearing your feedback about Ranked Mode and we agree it’s time to make some changes. Ranked Mode is a tough feature to get right and we want to find the right balance through some additional iteration. We’re making a few updates before our next season that will address issues with some players feeling unable to progress or players that feel they are not facing worthy opponents.
- Matchmaking Algorithm: We’re improving our matchmaking algorithm to create higher quality matches for all players–including an update that will prevent players from matching against an opponent more than 30 ranks away.
- Infinite MMR Floor: When someone reaches Infinite Rank, we’ll take a snapshot of their MMR (Matchmaking Rating). For the rest of the season, their MMR cannot fall below that value. This change is to address players that could intentionally lose many games at the Infinite Rank floor to drop their MMR for the next season. You’ll still be able to increase your MMR while playing in Infinite Rank.
- Infinite vs Infinite Matchmaking: Players that reach Infinite Rank will only match against other Infinite Rank players.
We know there’s more work to be done. We think the current journey to re-climb to a previous season’s rank is too difficult. To that end, we are exploring changes to how many cubes are required per rank, how many bonus cubes are granted when a player achieves a new Tier, and potentially how much of a reset is incurred each season. These numbers are actively being crunched right now, so we don’t have more details to share, but rest assured, our goal is to deliver a satisfying seasonal experience for players who wish to get better at the game, and see their rank increase as a result.
We’ve also seen a lot of feedback around matching by MMR and why we don’t simply match by Rank. The team has been weighing the positives and negatives of both these options. In a pure match-by-rank situation, it can lead to an awful start-of-season experience, as players are matching up against opponents who are far superior to them. However, we are exploring alternate ways of matchmaking to try to deliver a more satisfying overall experience, as there are some upsides to matching-by-rank. We have some ideas that we think can capture the best of both worlds, and will be trying out updates to the matchmaker in future seasons. We’ll absolutely be sharing more as we lock in details–you’ll hear more from us soon!
Infinite Rank Revamp
For most of us, the climb to Infinite Rank has been our peak achievement… and we have great news! We’re completely revamping Infinite Rank so your experience doesn’t end at Infinite – it’s just the beginning! We want to create an exciting and fair battleground for our most skilled players to compete on the Infinite Rank Leaderboard. Once players reach Infinite Rank, they are separated into their own ecosystem that will highlight two important numbers:
- Skill Rating Score: This score is your personal skill rating score; it’s similar to your matchmaking rating. You’ll be able to see how your skill rating score changes after each match. If you’re more interested in increasing your personal skill from season to season, this is the number for you.
- Leaderboard Rank: Your friend has always claimed that they’re the Best MARVEL SNAP Player – well, now we’ll find out. This is the leaderboard number based on the ranking order of each Infinite player’s skill rating score.
We’re fine-tuning the experience and visuals for the new Infinite Rank ecosystem and currently scoping out the work, but we’re hoping to release it as soon as possible! More details on timing soon!
IN DEVELOPMENT
Game features in this section are actively being developed, iterated, and improved upon. Our production team dedicates team resources, generates tasks/timelines, and ensures we’re moving forward. Features and systems in this bucket can change dramatically – we might find our initial idea wasn’t fun OR we might discover we can achieve our goals in an unexpected way!
Here’s some features that are currently in development:
- PC Widescreen UI
- Smart Decks
- Avatars & Titles by Deck
- Personalized Shop
- Global Matchmaking
IN CONCEPT
We have BIG dreams about what we’d like to bring to the future of MARVEL SNAP! The first step towards these dreams is turning ideas into concepts through discussion, documentation, and planning. Features currently in the “In Concept” phase have been initially scoped out and given shape but have not yet had any engineering or development work done in the game itself.
This is where we’d love your feedback the most! Concepts listed in this section may be elevated in priority, rescoped, or scrapped entirely… or we might hear something completely new from the community!
Here are some of the future concepts we’re thinking about for MARVEL SNAP:
- Guilds (Social Systems)
- Collectible Emotes & Card Emojis
- Mythic Variants
- PC Controller Support
- Seasonal Audio
- Test Deck Mode
Test Deck Mode
Where’s Unranked Mode? What’s this Test Deck Mode?! We know that players want a quick-and-easy way to try out new decks or strategies. Since before Global Launch, we’ve been talking about the idea of Unranked Mode as a solution to this problem. But, as we explored this feature, we found that Unranked Mode comes with some not so great additional challenges. So, we set out to reimagine what this feature could be and Test Deck Mode evolved from there! We’re considering adding a button to the deck editing screen that will let you instantly hop into a low-stakes game against the computer. We’re still in early stages of concepting here, but we’d love to hear your thoughts on this new path.
Hopefully that provides some extra insight on what the teams been working on and thinking about. Let us know what you think, and please continue to share your ideas for the future of MARVEL SNAP!
