Improving the UI Element for Crystalline Conflict

[PangTong]

I see a lot of people who struggle to understand what's going on during CC games, they have trouble telling who is winning, why teams win or lose, overtime conditons, and it sometimes even leads people to say the rules don't make sense.

I think part of the reason for this is that the progress tracker UI element is confusing and hard to read. Here's what it looks like:



IMO the biggest issue is that the progress bar representing your team appears on the opposite side of your team name and progress %. When you check the progress of the match, at a glance the first thing you're going to notice is the bar. But the % right above the bar does not correspond to the bar, it corresponds to the bar on the opposite side.

I understand it's meant to represent "pushing" the crystal into the enemy's side, but I think it instead comes off as confusing especially when the scores are very close, it's easy to mistake the enemy's progress % for your own and vice versa.

Here's what I think it should look like instead:



Directly show progress percentage alongside the bar. Remove the team names so there's less confusion about whether the sides represent each team's score or their "territory". I doubt anyone remembers or cares whether they are on Astra/Umbra anyway and just goes by colour instead.

I also think the element should always be configured so that your side (blue) is trying to go right while the enemy (red) always goes to the left, so it's more consistent. Right now it's configured so that Astra is always left and Umbra is always right, but you can be on either side and it just switches colours so it's confusing.

I also made the indicator for the crystal itself a little larger. I think the numbers representing the players on the crystal are unnecessary and just get in the way of showing who is currently controlling the crystal. It should just be a large icon coloured clearly so it's easy to tell at a glance who has control. Blue for your team, red for enemy team, black for no one, and yellow or white for contested (it's currently purple but imo purple is hard to distinguish between red/blue especially for the colourblind).

If you've played Splatoon it has almost the exact same game mode (called Tower Control) and its UI element is similar to what I've drawn, and is imo better.

[Gserpent]

Yup. It's a huge design flaw and makes me think that the people/person who designed and created that particular UI element doesn't actually know much about competitive multiplayer games because it is *literally* designed backwards to the way it should be displayed.

I don't think it even needs changes to the extent you suggest - it just needs the percentage indicators where you place them, instead of above. That not only eliminates the issues with the display being backwards, it also places the progress amount on the same place you're going to be checking for progress anyway.