Scratch Mark Customization Proposal: Assign Colors Per-Map

NotJared · October 25

Hi! I had thoughts on the PTB announcement and wanted to get some thoughts out into the community early.

Likely like you all, I was really excited by the announcement of Scratch Mark customization. This is a great feature!

I wanted to get ahead of the PTB and share some additions I believe this feature could have and I'm confident would be used, based on how the developers have shared they intend this feature to be utilized and how I am confident players would like to use this feature to fit their individual needs.

On stream yesterday, it was demonstrated that the scratch mark customization options can be changed mid-match, which is great! Not every color is going to work the best for every map (imagine using White Scratch Marks on Ormond!), and this fact was acknowledged by Diego and devs on stream. It has also been a long-time vocalization of many players over the years in response to colorblind concerns, and realms such as Decimated Borgo and Dvarka Deepwood.

Everyone can pick the color that works the best for their needs on each map with this feature, and maybe we can worry a little bit less about creating maps that have reddish color schemes!

However, players do not like having to stop their games and waste precious match time falling behind while fiddling through the settings. It can be time-consuming, tedious, and difficult to remember which are your favorite settings for which of the over-forty maps currently in active rotation!

A solution I'm proposing (and I will likely revive this post under PTB discussion once we've had a chance to get hands-on with the PTB in November and more eyes will be perusing the PTB Feedback section of the forums) is the ability to choose a default universal Scratch Mark color, with the additional capability to assign specific Scratch Mark colors on a per-map basis. Assigning a color to a map would override our default-chosen universal color. Otherwise, if a map is left unspecified, you'd just see your default-chosen color (to make it easy to adjust all 40+ maps in bulk, rather than adjusting every individual map one at a time)!

Using the previewed UI/UX changes from yesterday (and existing assets), I've drafted a quick rough mockup of how I think this could look like in-game, in a way that's user-friendly, quick to use, and intuitive.