What Happened to Flame Notes In Rockband Blitz?????

[cowboys282]

I guess i'd consider myself a casual player. I only play the game every couple of weeks, and only managed to gold star a few of the Blitz songs.

It was certainly a lot easier and more fun when the game first came out (I played it daily then), but now that they've crippled the power-ups, i'm actually struggling to get 4 stars on some of the songs that I gold starred.

It's sucked all the fun out of it. I think I could practice til the cows come home and will still find it incredibly difficult to ever 5 star/gold star all of the Blitz songs to get the final few trophies (achievements).

When I first bought it, I thought, great, this will be the first Rock Band game i'll actually 100%, but that's rather unlikely now.

And yet another "Casual" player has found the forums and disagrees with Harmonix's decision to nerf Flame notes. An informal poll of this forum would find (my guess) that maybe 85-90% of the people who posted in this thread are against the Flame note nerf.

Are we really suppose to believe that this trend is reversed for all Non forum posters. That somehow all of those people who do not post on the forum were happy with the nerf?

No one on this forum has seen any evidence anywhere that this was a move favored by the majority of the community. All we have to go off of is these forums and this thread which is overwhelmingly against the decision to nerf flame notes.

It's not often I see a game company go against what the majority of their players want. There has been no evidence that the majority wants Flame notes nerfed. there is evidence that plenty of loyal, faithful, Harmonix customers do not agree with the decision to nerf flame notes.

[Epsilon82]

Somebody beat me to it, but yeah...Alabama was like Harmonix with a massive fire hose and Notre Dame was a stinking pack of Flame Notes. Holy crap, what a beatdown. Not like I didn't see it coming. I personally saw them make my Mizzou Tigers look like a high school JV squad.

Anyway, MaximusDM, I understand your point with respect to the leaderboards, but I think that ship has sailed at this point. It goes without saying that pretty much anything Harmonix does to address the exploit directly is going to have to result in a few scores being theoretically unreachable. But let's not forget that if anything requires a Leaderboard reset more than anything else, it's having Flame Notes at 350 points while everything else is untouched. My point was just to illustrate that Harmonix could have done any number of things that would have far less drastic negative impact on the game as a whole, whether the Leaderboards are reset or not.

Frankly, I don't mind at all having the Leaderboards reset if that's the price we have to pay to turn the game back into something resembling a music game rather than the Arkanoid clone it is now.

But make no mistake: if I were in charge, the solution would be this: have some intern bring me a cold bottle of beer, and then make him change that number from 350 back to 1500 and press Submit. To the extent that the exploit is a problem, I'm largely convinced that it's almost entirely theoretical, and as JCirri has pointed out time and time again to no official acknowledgment, using 5-lane songs for Tournaments completely eliminates the issue from that end.

It might be different if there were some public clamoring from a lot of people demanding something be done about the exploit, but for days before this change these boards were dead as a doornail except for the "help me on the goals" threads. This whole fiasco seems to have arisen from a small cadre of very high-level Blitz players poking at the edges of the system and airing it out in a forum topic. I don't see any evidence of some massive discontent festering that justified, well, doing something that has created the massive discontent we're seeing right now.

[jibjqrkl]

Let's see how long it takes for someone to mod a controller so that it will move along all the lanes so fast that it will always hit pinball even on 5-lane songs.

exploits will always be somewhere

[metalkorn]

Anyway, it's time for football. Sorry, Metalkorn, I meant no offense.

None taken

[CJHobbes]

Ideally, I would like to see both Flame Notes and Pinball both get nerfed.

Have you ever played any sort of MMOG or action RPG?

Maybe I'm more sensitive to talks of nerfing because I'm an MMOG veteran, but frankly: nerfs absolutely suck. Unless an item or power is *extremely* overpowered, nerfing rarely does anyone any good, and it only serves to upset a large portion of the current player base. Then as you nerf items, other items pop up as overpowered, and those get nerfed; it's a slippery slope into an abyss of bland gameplay and frustrated players.

Here's the thing: you will never, ever, ever get a balanced set of power ups while keeping game play unique and interesting. It just won't happen because of the very nature of math and games. And quite honestly, it shouldn't be balanced. There should be a possibility of two, maybe three, load outs that can be used for the scoring experts to battle for the #1 spot; the rest should be fun, entertaining, and varied for casual players to use in score wars against friends or just chill alone.

Because here's the other thing: No matter what you do, there will always be one or two load outs that are the most efficient for scoring; and those are the powers that the elite players will use to top the leaderboard; and no matter how much nerfing or scaling they do, those players will always be #1, #5, #10, top%. It used to be flame notes/bandmate, now it will be pinball/sync. If it's not pinball/sync, it will be another one.

I don't mean to point this directly at you, charlie, but you keep commenting on how you want a fair playing field to compete for decent leaderboard positions. What do you deem "decent"? Top 5? Top 50? Top 100? The nerfs you're asking for are only giving you an illusion of "fair" because at the end of the day those elite players will always score higher. Flat out, it's not a matter of exploiting, it's a matter of someone being better at the game than you; and I think you over estimate the amount of people who used this technique to gain high scores. The players are just better.

--

Add me to the list of casual players that don't like the nerf. Partially because I don't think it was necessary, and partially because I dislike the trend of companies nerfing things in response to public outcries of "foul". I do realize using bandmate/flames in this way was an unforeseen consequence of the loose hit boxes, and you wanted to correct the issue before these tournaments started, but I just disagree with this as a solution. Still, thanks for listening to everyone's feedback.

I barely use flame notes, but my want to use them is even less now that they're worth pretty much nothing. I'll use them every so often on a whim, but when I'm trying to gold star a song, I'll always go back to road rage/blast notes, or jackpot + anything else.

Side note: This is another reason why I suggested in the Suggestion thread about having a tournament with a specific loadout required.

If you want a truly "fair" game, then you have to do what FPSs do. You take away every variable there is save for player skill. So what you really want are load out specific leaderboards and tournaments.

Question for Pope/Henry: Was it a big drain on the DB to keep loadout specific stats? It seems like it would make the most sense to have an overall leaderboard, and then leaderboards for each specific loadout. I know I'd be more inclined to play runaway or rockets if this were the case.

[MaximusDM]

If you want a truly "fair" game, then you have to do what FPSs do. You take away every variable there is save for player skill. So what you really want are load out specific leaderboards and tournaments.

Thing is everyone here has a different definition of what they believe is the exploit at hand here.
Some think that juggling 2 lanes is an exploit in itself. So playing tournament songs with no power ups or fixed power ups these "exploiters" are always going to be on top because they can play 2 lanes and other people can't.

Maybe HMX should just remove all power ups. Remove lane juggling. Bring down the gold threshold to accommodate no power ups. Buff blitz mode or remove it. And then reset all of the leaderboards. Although without some of these things achieving checkpoint multipliers for all players might not be fair. So remove multipliers and checkpoints well to be perfectly balanced for everyone.
Not everyone can hit solos either, so take them out to be safe and most of all, fair.

Edit: Without power ups some goals are unachievable to just scrap Rock Band World goals.

[AJayN85]

It's not often I see a game company go against what the majority of their players want. There has been no evidence that the majority wants Flame notes nerfed. there is evidence that plenty of loyal, faithful, Harmonix customers do not agree with the decision to nerf flame notes.

You really need to get off of this argument, that the people in the forum represent the majority of Blitz players. http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/anecdotal

The forum is a small sample, but is not the entire sample. I've gone over the math before -- it's not even a statistically significant sample.

Say there's now 70 unique posters on this thread, and 100% of them hate the nerf. According to the Rock Band World FB app, the average number of people who have played each of the core Blitz songs is roughly 31,000.

70/31000 = .002. That's 0.2%. Not even 1%.

A vocal minority of 70 people CANNOT be an accurate representation of 31,000... let alone the 207k people who have played Death on Two Legs, or the 219k people who have played These Days.

You want the smallest possible sample? I own a handful of DLC but have exported all the previous RB games. Doing a quick browse, the song with the least amount of unique players is Letterbomb from GD:RB with 1,211 players. 70/1,211 = .058. Congratulations, we are now at 6%! That means 94% of the player base is still unaccounted for!

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.

However, this is NOT to say that there isn't a problem, or that we aren't important to Harmonix. Obviously, HMX is listening to the vocal minority and trying to find some way to placate us while not making all other players angry. For that, I am grateful. It seems like all the reasonable arguments have been posed and are being debated internally.

At this point, we just have to wait.

[CJHobbes]

Some think that juggling 2 lanes is an exploit in itself. So playing tournament songs with no power ups or fixed power ups these "exploiters" are always going to be on top because they can play 2 lanes and other people can't.

Well, that's exactly my point. You can nerf everything and the elite players will still be on top because, well, they're better than everyone else. All you're doing is shifting the power from one loadout to the next, which seems to be pinball/sync.

I'm curious how many casual fans even noticed the change in flame notes, and if there was an increase or decrease in playtime after the nerf went in. Are flame notes underused now? What loadouts are being used for top scores? From what you guys are saying, nothing competes with pinball/sync now.

It would be interesting to get even an inkling of these stats.

[grace_pressure]

You really need to get off of this argument, that the people in the forum represent the majority of Blitz players. http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/anecdotal.

I'm glad to see someone else using this site, XD.

[cowboys282]

You really need to get off of this argument, that the people in the forum represent the majority of Blitz players. http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/anecdotal

The forum is a small sample, but is not the entire sample. I've gone over the math before -- it's not even a statistically significant sample.

Say there's now 70 unique posters on this thread, and 100% of them hate the nerf. According to the Rock Band World FB app, the average number of people who have played each of the core Blitz songs is roughly 31,000.

70/31000 = .002. That's 0.2%. Not even 1%.

A vocal minority of 70 people CANNOT be an accurate representation of 31,000... let alone the 207k people who have played Death on Two Legs, or the 219k people who have played These Days.

You want the smallest possible sample? I own a handful of DLC but have exported all the previous RB games. Doing a quick browse, the song with the least amount of unique players is Letterbomb from GD:RB with 1,211 players. 70/1,211 = .058. Congratulations, we are now at 6%! That means 94% of the player base is still unaccounted for!

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.

However, this is NOT to say that there isn't a problem, or that we aren't important to Harmonix. Obviously, HMX is listening to the vocal minority and trying to find some way to placate us while not making all other players angry. For that, I am grateful. It seems like all the reasonable arguments have been posed and are being debated internally.

At this point, we just have to wait.

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.