This thread is either like the bandmate/flame combo where the flames and arguments never end and are going on perpetually.

Or this thread is like the pinball powerup where the subject is bouncing everywhere and people are rebounding the same arguments over and over again and the subject often gets derailed.

I feel like there really isn't anything more that can be said in this thread. We pretty much wrote an entire book on why flame nerfing was bad and covered every little detail and HMX has gotten the feedback now. The last 4-5 pages just had been a repeat of the same arguments that have little to do with balance and more to do with random statistics on who cares about the game. I think all we can do is wait by either not playing blitz or learn to live with the changes until at least the tournament is over or until HMX decides to re balance the powerups again which I have a strong feeling they will.

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Originally Posted by zage1337

I feel like there really isn't anything more that can be said in this thread. We pretty much wrote an entire book on why flame nerfing was bad and covered every little detail and HMX has gotten the feedback now. The last 4-5 pages just had been a repeat of the same arguments that have little to do with balance and more to do with random statistics on who cares about the game. I think all we can do is wait by either not playing blitz or learn to live with the changes until at least the tournament is over or until HMX decides to re balance the powerups again which I have a strong feeling they will.

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Sure, there will always be some amount of repetition in threads this long, if for no other reason than nobody can possibly expect newcomers to read the entire thing or even participants to remember every post, but I think the issue of Harmonix's justification for the nerf is a very important aspect of the whole debacle.

Perhaps despite all of the arguments as to the merits of the change in and of itself, they still believe that the change was justified on the grounds of increased participation in tournaments. The question then becomes, what makes them think that it would/did? I would like to hear a better explanation from Harmonix than we've gotten so far. Maybe there's some angle to it that isn't apparent, or they do have some kind of way of gauging casual opinion beyond just idle speculation. What they've given us so far just doesn't pass the smell test whatsoever.

I think just shutting up about the whole thing and going away is more likely just to make them think it's not a big deal anymore and to leave the game as it is.

Honestly, I wouldn't care nearly as much if it weren't for the fact that the entire game is controlled from the server side. If Blitz were like any other Rock Band game, I could just play offline and decline updates, because they would have had to make these changes with a patch. I've been playing RB3 mostly offline for years now because of the XMB crash, and have been plenty satisfied tracking my own progress and skill through my personal scores.

But none of us can do that with Blitz. And as tiresome as this whole thread might be, it's the only avenue we have to make our voices heard.

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Originally Posted by Hairlooksgreat

All this tells me is that 180k people tried the free demo and didn't purchase the game.

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Ah, I didn't know those were the free songs in the demo. Good to know!

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Originally Posted by cowboys282

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?

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Just to add in on this, the Gallup polls are designed to ask a diverse yet random cross section of the US. The RB Forums on the other hand, are self-selected members who can hardly be called a diverse yet random cross section (if only because it's 100% members of this forums, which is hardly representative).

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Originally Posted by Epsilon82

Sure, there will always be some amount of repetition in threads this long, if for no other reason than nobody can possibly expect newcomers to read the entire thing or even participants to remember every post, but I think the issue of Harmonix's justification for the nerf is a very important aspect of the whole debacle.

Perhaps despite all of the arguments as to the merits of the change in and of itself, they still believe that the change was justified on the grounds of increased participation in tournaments. The question then becomes, what makes them think that it would/did? I would like to hear a better explanation from Harmonix than we've gotten so far. Maybe there's some angle to it that isn't apparent, or they do have some kind of way of gauging casual opinion beyond just idle speculation. What they've given us so far just doesn't pass the smell test whatsoever.

I think just shutting up about the whole thing and going away is more likely just to make them think it's not a big deal anymore and to leave the game as it is.

Honestly, I wouldn't care nearly as much if it weren't for the fact that the entire game is controlled from the server side. If Blitz were like any other Rock Band game, I could just play offline and decline updates, because they would have had to make these changes with a patch. I've been playing RB3 mostly offline for years now because of the XMB crash, and have been plenty satisfied tracking my own progress and skill through my personal scores.

But none of us can do that with Blitz. And as tiresome as this whole thread might be, it's the only avenue we have to make our voices heard.

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Agreed. Also, if we stop, Harmonix will probably think that we've seen their reasoning and are ok with the nerf. I am NOT okay with it. I've basically stopped playing blitz because even with the rebalancing of a few other powerups, there are still 10 that I have played that don't have gold stars right now because of sheer difficulty, even with 1.5K flame notes. Now my guess is that half of them are impossible because all of the guides I had read required a very good Jackpot/Flame Notes run.

This does not bode well for me because the fun of the game was getting insane scores and gold starring everything. Whether or not HMX intended this to happen or not is no longer relevant. They released the game like that and many users found a lot of amusement in flame note combos. I think that video games have gotten the the point where devs are like authors of books. Once they put it out there everyone interprets the thing in various ways and enjoys it for a number of different reasons. Regardless of whether or not those messages or highlights were intended doesn't matter because it's there. The difference is that games now have patches which can potentially take away reasons for people enjoying the game as well as further enforce them. Harmonix has just done the former. They had the opportunity to please everyone by balancing everything around flame notes (they wouldn't be nerfed, but everything else would be boosted) but instead they wanted to protect the already broken significance of gold stars. Already 90% of songs are pretty easy to GS without flame notes on sight read, 8% are difficult (as they should be) and 2% are goddamn impossible even with flame notes at 1.5K per note.

Whatever you do, don't start another thread asking for a simple update from the community. Keep everything in this one unwieldy thread. Luckily I'm not a cynical person who might think bad things about forum mods and developers wanting to keep things calm and quiet in the hope it might all blow over.

"If there's already a thread about something, don't make a new thread about the same thing" is a completely standard and common forum rule on virtually every website with a forum, and is generally enforced equally in controversial and non-controversial scenarios alike.

Let's keep things civil, shall we?

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Originally Posted by Der_Lex

Let's keep things civil, shall we?

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We are about 425 posts past that point.

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Originally Posted by DaLynxEffect

Whatever you do, don't start another thread asking for a simple update from the community. Keep everything in this one unwieldy thread. Luckily I'm not a cynical person who might think bad things about forum mods and developers wanting to keep things calm and quiet in the hope it might all blow over.

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I'm about the biggest opponent you'll find of bloated threads that are difficult to navigate, but it shouldn't have taken you more than 3 seconds to find the answer you were looking for in this thread.

Even if you weren't able to suss out the current status from any of the posts on the last page or two, we have all the dev posts with updates quick linked in the OP. I've just updated that to include Pope's most recent posts to avoid any further confusion. Beyond that you can always use Advanced Search and look for posts in this thread specifically from myself or Pope if you're not willing to sort through recent posts. Beyond that, you could have also PM'd any one of the regular posters in this thread if you were just looking for a one off response, where as threads are better served for long form discussion.

We're not looking to "keep things quiet", as should be evidenced by the fact that thread remains open and we've continued to engage over the last several weeks, but we are trying to keep the rest of the forums organized. If you've got an issue with a moderation call, please either PM the dev / mod directly or report the post with your comments, as that's much more effective than posting a complaint in the middle of another thread where we may not get that feedback.