XBL Players

[Blu_LED]

I have a question for all you XBL Rock Band players.

1. Is it true you can hear the other person sing when you play online?
2. Is it true there are ranked and unranked matches on XBL?
3. Is it true the game keeps track of your win/lose record online?

[Frederf]

1. Sort of. If the singer decides to hold down the "voice chat" key while singing I will hear their vocals in a lovely shade of tin and about 900ms delayed. I have a 79% success rate of tracking them down and murdering them with the RB microphone cord. The other 21% of the time I have to use another implement.

2. No idea, don't play competitive.

3. Yes.

[dfjdejulio]

1. This is up to the singer. If they hold down one of the trigger buttons on their controller, their voice is broadcast to everyone else. It turns out to be an awful experience whenever anyone does this, because there is always lag and it is never in sync with the music. It's painful, and I wish nobody would do it. But they can do it, and some people do.

2. There are ranked and unranked matches. The unranked matches are called "player match". I believe they work exactly like what PS3 folks experience. For the ranked matches, you pick difficulty level before you are matched up with anyone. Then they match you with someone at the same difficulty level, and try to match you with someone of equal skill (using a matching technology built into the XBox Live network). Then the song is chosen randomly, and you play.

3. Depends on what you mean. With ranked matches, the servers keep a bunch of statistics (in support of the Microsoft player-matching technology), but most of it is not reported to the player -- the player just sees a rank. But there are also achievements for winning 5 matches in a row or 20 matches total. But I have not seen an exact win/loss ratio listed anywhere.

[ClinTrojan]

I like to hear people sing over the mic....It might not be intime but it is fun to hear them. Also what is the point in singing if no one can hear you?

[Blu_LED]

1. This is up to the singer. If they hold down one of the trigger buttons on their controller, their voice is broadcast to everyone else. It turns out to be an awful experience whenever anyone does this, because there is always lag and it is never in sync with the music. It's painful, and I wish nobody would do it. But they can do it, and some people do.

2. There are ranked and unranked matches. The unranked matches are called "player match". I believe they work exactly like what PS3 folks experience. For the ranked matches, you pick difficulty level before you are matched up with anyone. Then they match you with someone at the same difficulty level, and try to match you with someone of equal skill (using a matching technology built into the XBox Live network). Then the song is chosen randomly, and you play.

3. Depends on what you mean. With ranked matches, the servers keep a bunch of statistics (in support of the Microsoft player-matching technology), but most of it is not reported to the player -- the player just sees a rank. But there are also achievements for winning 5 matches in a row or 20 matches total. But I have not seen an exact win/loss ratio listed anywhere.
Thanks a lot. I have the PS3 version and I don't understand why we can't have the ranked/unranked game matches with stats. I like playing the game online, but its almost pointless without stats.

[dfjdejulio]

Thanks a lot. I have the PS3 version and I don't understand why we can't have the ranked/unranked game matches with stats.

Well, in the case of XB360, Microsoft does the work for 'em.

http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=1361

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Live#TrueSkill

The infrastructure for this is built into the XBox Live Network, so developers don't really have to do much work to use it. (It's one of the reasons it costs us like $8 a month instead of being free.) If it cost HMX more to do it on the XBox, I'm sure we wouldn't have it either.

[Blu_LED]

Well, in the case of XB360, Microsoft does the work for 'em.

http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=1361

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Live#TrueSkill

The infrastructure for this is built into the XBox Live Network, so developers don't really have to do much work to use it. (It's one of the reasons it costs us like $8 a month instead of being free.) If it cost HMX more to do it on the XBox, I'm sure we wouldn't have it either.

Ahh I understand now. Seems reasonable on HMX's part. It would be nice for us to see something like True Skill for PSN sometime this year. It seems like Sony is trying to shape it up, but nothing amazing has been seen yet.