I think the one problem here and I'm sure HMX will openly admit it in due time is that it was a mistake to make the change during the christmas period without people available to deal with the issues it has caused.

For me, i'm indifferent to the change as topping leaderboards in this game is not something i strive for. I play for Score Wars and RB World Challenges.... or a little thing called fun.

My personal opinion is if it's possible they should eliminate scores on the leaderboard achieved with the offending combos. Yeah it will piss the people who were using that tactic off, but if they are good enough they can achieve a top score again. Other solution wipe them all. You can't nerf then have scores unachievable - however going back to what it was shouldn't be an option either.

HMX would know how many people this has affected. If 40% of people or more were using this method i doubt they would have nerfed it.

ketchupyoshi absolutely nailed it!

I've gotten really high scores on note dense songs by chasing a pinball throughout a portion of the song while spamming sync measures and occasionally deploying a powerup like bottle rockets or road rage. Pretty much my outlier Megadeth scores on PS3. This wasn't that much of an issue before because Flame Notes would overpower them and require more skill to use.

Why do I use pinball on dense songs? Because I find it a fun powerup to use in the game and it's obviously highly effective. It's blatantly overpowered and it's been like that since the beginning the game was released however since the game was released the powerup has actually been buffed instead of nerfed like it should. However for me to effectively use this strategy I have to intentionally break blitz mode so I can hit the sync measures and without having to switch lanes in the intended way.

How do you fix this? The same way we suggested that you fix band/flame abuse. Buffing Blitz Mode.

A significant buff of blitz mode would make jackpot/blast a more viable option for note dense songs and it SHOULD because it requires the most skill. Why should I use such a high risk/reward powerup on a highly dense song when the reward is far less then what I would get using other powerups?

The reason why I am bringing this up about Pinball and Sync, is because this is now the ONLY way to get the top scores on the vast majority of songs seeing how Flame Notes are completely worthless. They are so worthless that an exceptional 1st place scoring type of run would barely give you gold stars. There is absolutely no reward for the massive risks that you have to take so why would anyone use flame notes in their current state?

A buff in blitz mode would make jackpot and flame the most overpowered combo but it should because it by far requires the most amount of skill and 1 single mistake will severely damage your score. That is the risk you take for using a powerup that has such a high reward. Hence why it's called JACKPOT in the first place.

Although I can also understand variety and powerup diversity but I still think that the powerups that require the most skill should also be the most rewarding.

As others have said, I don't have much of an incentive to "Keep playing." while the values are changed, for two major reasons:

1) I was very good at Jack/Flame and Band/Flame combinations, and preferred playing those combos above others to get high scores.
2) If I want high scores now, I pretty much have to use a Pinball/Sync combo, which I personally don't find fun at all -- nothing against those that do, but if I want to play Arkanoid, I'll load up the actual game itself instead of playing a rhythm game and then completely ignoring the rhythm elements.

disapointed like most everyone else but will still continue to play as long as the leaderboards are reset. I might be in the minority but I would really like to see stars and cred reset if the leaderboards are nuked.

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Originally Posted by S1ckH4nds

As others have said, I don't have much of an incentive to "Keep playing." while the values are changed, for two major reasons:

1) I was very good at Jack/Flame and Band/Flame combinations, and preferred playing those combos above others to get high scores.
2) If I want high scores now, I pretty much have to use a Pinball/Sync combo, which I personally don't find fun at all -- nothing against those that do, but if I want to play Arkanoid, I'll load up the actual game itself instead of playing a rhythm game and then completely ignoring the rhythm elements.

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This is exactly what I have been thinking. I went on yesterday to try a few things. I always knew how to use pinball but never found it much fun. After really using it to try and get a good score I realize this defeats the purpose of the game.

While the pinball is spawned hitting notes becomes secondary. I play this game to hit notes. Using pinball takes away from this purpose. I do not have fun at all using this combo and would not play the game if this stayed the best combo.

The whole power up thing was a great gimmick. But in the end this game should be about skill and hitting notes. Like Ketchup and Zage and many others suggested the solution is Blitz Mode. Increasing the reward of Blitz mode makes hitting notes the top priority after all this is what the game was named after.

I fear they will not do this though as it will make the game harder. Whatever their motivation is it seems like they are intent on making this game easier.

Re: Pinball --

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Originally Posted by AJayN85

Pinball appears randomly and at a low frequency, but is limited to the ceiling of human skill in returning the pinball. It could be exploitable, but it's easily fixed without changing any point values by speeding up the ball past the point of human skill.

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Re: buffing Blitz mode --

I have doubts that they can buff Blitz mode. That functionality stays in the game even in Offline Mode... which means it may not be patchable through the cloud, and would require a software update through XBL.

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Originally Posted by AJayN85

Re: Pinball --



Re: buffing Blitz mode --

I have doubts that they can buff Blitz mode. That functionality stays in the game even in Offline Mode... which means it may not be patchable through the cloud, and would require a software update through XBL.

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I had a longer post that seemed to get eaten, so if this ends up as a sort of double post I apologize.

AJayN85, I'm sad to say I believe you're correct. I feel stupid for not thinking of that myself, but you're very possibly right about this. The biggest reason they completely disallow powerups in Offline mode is so they can supply the scoring values for them on the server side, allowing them to change them at will without a patch. But if Blitz mode is calculated normally within the core engine, then it's possible that they don't have the ability to adjust that without a patch.

There's always the chance that they foresaw this scenario and left themselves a hook to override the Blitz mode calculation on the server side, but if they didn't, then that better explains why they would go to the seemingly insane step of killing off Flame notes entirely. If they can't affect Blitz mode on the server side, then 3 of the 4 possible solutions to the exploit that I can think of would require a software patch.

I'm glad you came around to see the extreme nature of this change, AJayN85, but honestly, I think they would have kept Flames at a higher value if they could have. Meaning, the exploit is such that you basically have to make Flames worthless across the board in order to keep players using it from dominating 4-lane songs. If they did anything less, then the entire purpose of the change would have been defeated. It actually has a bizarre logic to it: the reason they screwed up the balance of the game so badly here is because it was (possibly) the only thing they could do to thwart the exploit without patching the game.

That said, the current state of the game is completely unacceptable. If they don't have the ability to buff Blitz mode on the server side, then IMO they need to either bite the bullet and patch the software to allow them to do so (and in the process fix a number of minor bugs and missing features that have been elaborated at length since release) or they need to simply revert the game back to the way it was. If they're concerned about the exploit ruining Tournaments, then JCirri gave them the solution: just use 5-lane songs. The exploit (in its purest form at least) doesn't work on 5-lane songs because Bandmate won't guarantee a flame spawn in one of two lanes, but rather three.

If they're worried about people using Flames in ANY situation having an unfair advantage, then I have to question the entire design philosophy of the game. If more skill-based combos aren't going to have higher scoring capability, why have scores in the first place? Why did they even put a combo like Jackpot in the game at all? Or a lesser version like 2X?

On a more general note, I'd like to emphasize the point Zage made above, and elaborate on my last rhetorical question in my previous post, which is that the existence of Jackpot, by its very definition, shows that the game from the very beginning intended to make a distinction between more skilled players according to powerup selection. The presence of 2X especially underscores that, because they are virtually identical powerups with the sole difference being that one pays out less in points in exchange for less risk.

Along those lines, any significant nerf of Flames is completely unacceptable precisely because it severely undermines Jackpot and any skill-based combinations in general.

Saying that people using Jackpot and Flame have an "unfair" advantage is like saying people who play RB3 guitar on Expert have an unfair advantage over people who play on Medium. Of course they have an advantage in potential scoring, but they should, because they're playing a harder version of the game. If Jackpot and Flame isn't at least one of the highest scoring general combos in the game, then there is absolutely no reason for anyone to use it ever. And there really wouldn't be much reason to use Jackpot at all, even with Blast Notes, unless the song has a high enough maximum multiplier (which seems to be somewhere around 18-20x at minimum) to offset the absence of getting free points by spamming fire-and-forget powerups like Road Rage or Bottle Rockets.

Epsilon: I'm glad I came around too. :)

I can understand making sure a single loadout doesn't dominate a tournament, but taking a preferred method to playing the game and eliminating its need to exist is rough, and definitely anti-fun. And I think we can all agree, regardless of the reason why we play this game, that anti-fun goes against everything ANY game is supposed to be about.

My friend and I go back and forth sniping at each others' scores, but without declaring a Score War against each other. He plays Jack/Flame, and I prefer Bottle Rockets or Road Rage (song-dependent), Blast, and Sync. Pre-nerf, we were pretty even. Now it just takes him way out of the game. Nerfing Flame took the air out of the friendly competition between ourselves.

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Originally Posted by AJayN85

Epsilon: I'm glad I came around too. :)

I can understand making sure a single loadout doesn't dominate a tournament, but taking a preferred method to playing the game and eliminating its need to exist is rough, and definitely anti-fun. And I think we can all agree, regardless of the reason why we play this game, that anti-fun goes against everything ANY game is supposed to be about.

My friend and I go back and forth sniping at each others' scores, but without declaring a Score War against each other. He plays Jack/Flame, and I prefer Bottle Rockets or Road Rage (song-dependent), Blast, and Sync. Pre-nerf, we were pretty even. Now it just takes him way out of the game. Nerfing Flame took the air out of the friendly competition between ourselves.

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That's interesting to hear about your competition situation, and that helps bring into sharp focus what exactly the problem is here. It's just fundamentally wrong for an attempt to defuse an exploit from certain usage of Bandmate/Flame to completely negate the utility of any combo that uses Flame, and the fact that you two were pretty much even before that goes to show that Jack/Flame is not inherently unbalanced. The potential scores you can get from it can fluctuate very wildly depending on how you manage your overdrive, how aggressive you are in chasing flames, and whether you manage to avoid breaking a major Jackpot. Now, even in best-case usage, it's just a completely worthless combo despite requiring a great deal of skill to use effectively.

I'm actually in a similar situation, only against myself. :-) The only person currently on my friends list that I don't consistently beat is Zage, and in fact that's quite the opposite. It's pretty rare that I can ever top one of his scores. But that's OK, because he is simply a better player than I am, and so he deserves to beat me. I actually find myself most often using Zage's scores as an indicator of if I'm doing REALLY well or not, or if my powerup configuration is totally off, and at the end of the day I've been mostly playing Jack/Flame against the Road Rage/Blast Notes scores I posted early in the game's life-cycle.

And it's the same situation with me. I know I'm better at the game now, and I know how much harder it is to do well with Jack/Flame than RR/Blast, but I simply can't compete against my earlier scores with that combo. The only chance I have to beat myself is just to do better with the RR/Blast combo, and that just isn't engaging to me anymore. Despite the vast amount of time I've spent improving my skills, I'm lucky if I can just keep Blitz mode alive longer enough to eek out a few thousand points above my existing score.

Your use of Sync also illustrates how Harmonix got this right earlier with their "buff only" policy. Sync was worthless at release, but now it's absolutely a legitimate choice, if not the best one in many or most cases. The reason I haven't used it much in most circumstances is that because of the way it hits notes for you, it's hard for me to consistently stay in streak using it, which means it's pretty much a no-go for use with Jackpot. My next project (assuming I don't have to quit the game) will be to try to get comfortable keeping streaks with Sync. It's hard to tell how much better I would score with that because the Super lane bonus gets wrapped into the Jackpot score in the end results when applicable, but I have a feeling I could improve even further if I could master Sync. But it's still pretty much all for naught if I can't use Jack/Flame.