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Originally Posted by cowboys282

AJ do you have any idea how flawed you argument is? Did you even read my post? Answer me this how many people do we know disagree with the nerf? How many people do we know agree with it?

You should do some research yourself. Do you know what a Gallup poll is? go to there website. the first poll you will see is about the entire USA. They took a poll of 1,025 Americans and it reflects all 315,131,667 of us. Now ask yourself, why does the #1 polling company in the world use 0.000003% of the population to come up with results representing 100% of the population?

Now answer me this. What do we know. We know there is about 70 unique users in this thread. Those are people who play Blitz enough to notice there was a change in Flame notes. They took the time to find out why and found this forum. Than they took the time to post on this forum. Out of the 70 about 5 said they were for the nerf. That means out of this forum 93% of the people are against the nerf.

Now what data do you have otherwise that shows any difference? It is the same question I posed in the earlier post if you properly read it. We have seen no data in anyway that shows that 93% is not accurate. You make assumption and your assumptions go against the facts that you already know.

How can you say the community who does not post is for or indifferent to the Flame note change when from the data and facts you do have 93% are against it. You base your opinions on no fact. You, Harmonix, or anyone else can come at me with real numbers. Real facts that I am wrong. But until you do your opinions are based on nothing but assumptions. I will continue to work with the facts.

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Your Gallup poll point is good, but you cannot say with certainty that we're a representative sampling group. Their methodology is different and robust, and we have unknown variables: dissatisfied people are more likely to opt into participating, and there is a much lower casual-to-pro ratio among forum users versus non-forum users.

However, we do have signs and a priori arguments suggesting that the nerf does more harm than good for all players. It would be better to stick with them than to take such a hard line with yours.

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Originally Posted by JCirri

I keep coming back to the same point, but that exploit is only possible for 4-lane songs. With less than 4 lanes anyone who can manage a streak can keep flames alive continuously. For 5-lane songs, playing every note in 2 lanes still isn't good enough, and without proper reaction flames will very quickly die out. It's also much more difficult to keep pinball alive in 5-lane songs for long periods.

This is why I believe the best solution for everyone involved would have been selecting 5-lane tracks for the 30 tournament songs while potentially figuring out a better long-term fix.

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I'm only now hearing about the nerf because I stopped playing Blitz a while back, but JCirri's on the right track here.

The problem children in Rock Band Blitz, from what time I've spent with it, were Pinball (stupendously overpowered if you can keep the pinball in play, made obvious on 1-lane songs), Road Rage + Blast Notes (slightly inconsistent and situational, but allows you to sleaze multipliers early on several instruments on songs that would otherwise not offer the opportunity with hardly any skill and a ton of luck involved), and of course Jackpot + Flame Notes for reasons discussed ad nauseam in this topic.

I think Jackpot is a bit overpowered, at least in the sense that it more or less makes Point Doubler a complete waste of time. To my knowledge there are no practical cases where you could theoretically score more points with Point Doubler than Jackpot. So that's one problem (a small one, but important in the context of the way Flame Notes operate).

The other problem is the way Flame Notes operate. Because of the point tripling effect of Jackpot being applied to Flame Notes, it allows you to tremendously spike scoring in sections where only one or two instruments are active.

So what ends up happening is that for many, many songs, if you're a good player, there really aren't any viable alternatives to Flame + Jackpot for a maximum score (unless you're a heavenly pinballer, but that's just abusing another skill scoring exploit). Even on 5-lane songs, you can always hope to get lucky on the flame note spawn pattern, so identical runs with identical activations might still produce wildly different scores.

In summary:

* Pinball is overpowered and should have been limited in how many points it could provide per note struck.

* Jackpot makes Point Doubler obsolete if you're after leaderboard scores, because if you can't hit the combo in a section you're probably not in a position to go after a top score anyhow. Making Point Doubler burn OD significantly slower (33% slower, so it lasts 1.5 times longer) than Jackpot might fix this problem, however.

* Flame Note score accumulation should never have been allowed to stack with Jackpot (Pinball doesn't, why does Flame Note?).

Of course, saying all that now is way too late, as there are all these inflated scores from people who were using these methods to get to the top of the leaderboards. A leaderboard reset doesn't make a whole lot of sense because the people who might play in any tournament would be the people whose scores got reset off the top.

At its heart, this isn't really an issue of casual vs. dedicated players. It's a fundamental game balance problem.

P.S. I'm extra surprised that this sort of move was made when HMX has had a long history of not caring about exploited scores. I know, tournament for prizes, yadda yadda yadda, but still.

You'll probably get rebuttals from folks on a few of your thoughts that were discussed earlier, so I'll just summarize 'em.

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Originally Posted by Icemage

I think Jackpot is a bit overpowered, at least in the sense that it more or less makes Point Doubler a complete waste of time. To my knowledge there are no practical cases where you could theoretically score more points with Point Doubler than Jackpot. So that's one problem (a small one, but important in the context of the way Flame Notes operate).

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A lot people here were comfortable with this because of the risk aspect of Jackpot. You don't want to drop Jackpot, it takes more skill, and it's more stressful. Point Doubler felt like the perfect introductory power-up when I first got it, and it is.

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Originally Posted by Icemage

(unless you're a heavenly pinballer, but that's just abusing another skill scoring exploit)

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You might not want to toss around the word "exploit" so loosely, which has also been an interesting and open topic. Design of the game versus intention of the design, blah blah blah.

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Originally Posted by grace_pressure

A lot people here were comfortable with this because of the risk aspect of Jackpot. You don't want to drop Jackpot, it takes more skill, and it's more stressful. Point Doubler felt like the perfect introductory power-up when I first got it, and it is.

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That's a terrible excuse for an underpowered mechanic. The whole point of Blitz (besides giving you something to do with your Rock Band catalog other than plastic instruments) is scoring, and at that one task, Point Doubler fails.

The whole argument that "more skill/risk/reward = more points" is entirely questionable when you're looking at what are effectively two identical powerups, except that one is clearly superior to the other for anyone serious about the game. Considering how few powerups Blitz has, it doesn't have the luxury of throwing one away just for newbies and still maintain depth (which is what the whole point of the Flame Note nerf was, yes?).

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You might not want to toss around the word "exploit" so loosely, which has also been an interesting and open topic. Design of the game versus intention of the design, blah blah blah.

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I don't see how using the term "exploit" to describe Pinballing a 1-lane song like Moonlight Sonata or Song of the Century is either spiritually or factually incorrect. The term itself refers to abuse of a game mechanic without cheating but that derives a benefit far beyond the intent (compare and contrast to words like "glitch". I think this certainly qualifies.

Yes, I know HMXPope has commented in the past that Pinball's super-scoring mechanic on 1-lane songs was known about and accepted, but frankly from a game design standpoint there isn't a whole lot of difference between deliberately ignoring imbalance and accidentally introducing imbalances - as seems to be the case with Jackpot + Flame.

I'm not implying that people are cheating when they do things which are clearly sanctioned by the game mechanics. I am implying that the design of the Pinball scoring mechanic was not well thought out. It's very original, and it's fairly fun, but the use of Pinball only ever comes in two general flavors: very powerful, or completely useless. On any song with 3 or fewer lanes, Pinball becomes frighteningly strong. On 4 lanes, it's questionable unless you're VERY good at Pinballing, and even then only on songs with high note density. On 5 lanes, it might as well not exist for the vast majority of players, and for those rare individuals who are really good at it, it's so good that Blitz becomes Pinball: The Game because no other powerups even matter or impact Pinball in any appreciable way aside from Bandmate.

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Originally Posted by Icemage

I don't see how using the term "exploit" to describe Pinballing a 1-lane song like Moonlight Sonata or Song of the Century is either spiritually or factually incorrect. The term itself refers to abuse of a game mechanic without cheating but that derives a benefit far beyond the intent (compare and contrast to words like "glitch". I think this certainly qualifies.

Yes, I know HMXPope has commented in the past that Pinball's super-scoring mechanic on 1-lane songs was known about and accepted, but frankly from a game design standpoint there isn't a whole lot of difference between deliberately ignoring imbalance and accidentally introducing imbalances - as seems to be the case with Jackpot + Flame.

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o_0 You only talked about 1-lane songs in a single sentence three paragraphs before the quote, which was about "heavenly pinballers" (i.e. playing a regular song).

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Originally Posted by Icemage

Yes, I know HMXPope has commented in the past that Pinball's super-scoring mechanic on 1-lane songs was known about and accepted, but frankly from a game design standpoint there isn't a whole lot of difference between deliberately ignoring imbalance and accidentally introducing imbalances - as seems to be the case with Jackpot + Flame.

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I really don't think the detractors are having a problem with JP-Flame. There are many songs where that combo doesn't really work well. The problem is with Bandmate-Flame and being able to play 2 lanes simultaneously along with the BM.. And of course the Pinball wizards. I hate pinball because I like to play the songs but now I can't beat my own scores after the nerf of flames and it's quite disheartening.

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Originally Posted by AJayN85

Only the entire sample can be 100% accurate. You know who has data for the entire sample? Rock Central. And if Rock Central says there weren't a lot of players out there using Flame notes to begin with -- i.e. they preferred using Blast, Runway, or Pinball over Flames -- then nerfing Flames was NEVER a problem for those players. It's that simple.

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how DARE you come in here with logic and sound reasoning?!

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Originally Posted by grace_pressure

o_0 You only talked about 1-lane songs in a single sentence three paragraphs before the quote, which was about "heavenly pinballers" (i.e. playing a regular song).

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Sorry, maybe I wasn't being clear. I consider Pinball to be a broken mechanic. It's fascinating, it's innovative, and it's fun to watch, but still broken. It's far too powerful on songs with few instruments, and virtually useless for most players on 4 and especially 5 lane songs. For those rare people who are actually able to make good use of Pinball even on a 4/5 lane song, it tilts back towards overpowered.

Worst of all, Pinball makes you ignore pretty much all of the other game rules (maintaining Blitz combos or even making anything except mashing buttons to maybe hit notes as you pass them).

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Originally Posted by Icemage

Worst of all, Pinball makes you ignore pretty much all of the other game rules (maintaining Blitz combos or even making anything except mashing buttons to maybe hit notes as you pass them).

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The argument here is that so does exploiting flames/bandmate.
And to a far lesser degree, runaway notes...when they are actually buffed.

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Originally Posted by charliesmile

how DARE you come in here with logic and sound reasoning?!

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Logic and sound reasoning? How can certain people continually make assumptions on here and try to pass them off as fact? The truth is no one on here has any clue what the real numbers were. The only facts we have are that the majority of posters on this thread are overwhelmingly against the nerf of Flame notes.

No one knows exactly why Harmonix did this when they did. My guess is that it was for legal reasons. When you start giving out actually prizes you are opened up to legal obligations. Whose to say someone wouldn't have made a stink during the tournament claiming those winning were cheating?

If I were to "guess" on why they did this I remember Pope saying they would revisit this decision after the tournaments. That means this decision was directly related to the tournaments. And before someone claims that it gives other players a chance it did not. The same people are winning the tournaments that were dominating before the nerf.

But please do not starting calling guesses logic and reasoning. Lets stick to the facts. And in the end after the tournaments are over we will see who was right. If they make a change allowing Flame notes to be relevant again than I guess the majority was against it just like the "FACTS" that we have to work with showed.

I agree with your sarcasm though. We need some more logic around here instead of guesses, assumptions, and inferences.