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

[jibjqrkl]

In a game where the focus is to achieve high scores, I rather restart or quit out of a song then continue playing a butchered run especially if it's a lengthy song.

I'm aware of your personal preferences. Just no reason to not put that in that list as well

[Epsilon82]

I wouldn't resort to this kind of grinding and because of this "blitz cred boosting" if it wasn't for the horribly flawed coin system where the only way to get reasonable amount of coins is to do goals and play new songs. With this method, it only takes like 12 minutes to amass 6,000 coins and 1,200 blitz cred, which is IMO faster than doing goals.

Well, if they ever add a coin gifting feature to RB World, you'll never have to worry about them again. I could literally give you a million coins and still never have to worry about them myself. If that doesn't speak to how unfair the coin system is to people who aren't lunatics with nearly 2,000 songs in their libraries, I don't know what would.

and boosting the point value of the useless Blitz Mode scoring won't make GSing songs any easier for players who are completely incapable of holding a streak and can't even 5* a song with a full loadout. They will do just as bad as they do now. What a boost in Blitz Mode will do is make Jackpot/Blast and Jackpot/Flame more competitive against bandmate/flame and pinball. Gold Starring songs right now is incredibly easy compared to the main Rock Band games that you can't really put much value into them other than some outlier songs. (Most were mentioned in the hardest song to GS thread) and those songs are hard to GS because they break the scoring algorithm(impossible checkpoints like cascade effect, won't get fooled again, child in time) or rapid checkpoints that are impossible to get +3 (Five Magics)

Excellent point. It's amazing how utterly backward so many of these rationales are.

1) They nerf Flames because they don't want it to dominate tournaments and suppress participation. But in reality, all nerfing Flames did was force high-scoring players exclusively into Pinball (which probably would have happened anyway if people really wanted to win tournaments) which almost certainly caused fewer people to participate than would have otherwise. Many have seemingly outright quit the game entirely.

2) They use the punitive coin system to try to force players to do Goals (and/or buy more songs), but all it's really done is caused players who don't want to mindlessly grind short songs over and over to quit the game in frustration.

3) They don't want to buff other powerups or Blitz mode because they're afraid it will devalue Gold Stars, but not only are Gold Stars already devalued by the algorithm itself, but as Zage says, Blitz mode in particular not only has the potential to be a huge equalizer but also will do very little to affect GS creep anyway.

It's like they are actively discouraging people from playing their game. It's completely baffling how they could let these situations fester as long as they have.

[zage1337]

I just feel like this game was entirely designed with "short term" in mind. Because the way Rock Band Blitz is designed..it works well on your first few weeks or so with the game.

The coin system works great for your first few weeks because you will always have songs to play and get 1200 coins per song and had a large selection of goals. Also people haven't figured out the ultimate scoring combos so Blitz Mode and jack/blast was enough to get 1st place scores. Gold stars on most songs was reasonably challenging because most people haven't got quite a gripe on the mechanics yet because they just got the game. It took me quite a few hours before I was able to GS a few songs and took me over a week to 5* Through the Fire and Flames(right now im cross plat 1st on it).

Score wars also worked well because everyone was playing the game and most people were in the same boat as you. Now the score war system is completely broken and it always selects people from my friends list who only played on the first day.

I feel like it was never designed to be a hardcore score chasing game like they advertised it as such. It seems to be a casual arcade once in a while thing with how the design choices are made with this game. Harmonix really needs to take this game back to the drawing board and think how to make this game work better for long term use.

[Santa Claustrophobia]

Did these guys playtest this game at all?

No. They just dumped it out on an unsuspecting public, laughing gleefully at all the rubes who spent money and must now contend with a horrid, broken game experience totally devoid of fun or merit.

QA is something that happens to other games. HMX clearly cannot be bothered to care.

[MaximusDM]

I gave up on this game when Harmonix did.

Even if they did revert flame notes back, I honestly don't think I'll go back to playing it.

Now I have a huge backlog of goals along with all the new songs since then I now need to play and you can't even keep track of them because of the 1000 song star reset its a chore in itself to be juggling facebook and the game to know what I played and didn't play.

Whatever skill I developed with lane juggling has probably eroded to a point where I can't just hop back on the horse without working for it. And that what it would be, work.

At this point, it would be more work than fun to be honest to try to get back into this game.

[Drokthir]

I gave up on Blitz roughly around New year, and although I still regularly boot up RB3 at least twice a week, I haven't brought any DLC since new year, (where as before this change I was normally buying 2-10 tracks a week from the back catalog plus the new releases, mostly to complete the goals in blitz.) I can't compete in the tournaments because I don't live in the good old US of A, and secondly due to the backtracking of HMX on the original stance of power-ups only getting buffed (I am confidant I remember a post from either Pope or Henry stating that they would never nerf a power-up, but having spent over 30 min searching for said post I can't find it, so if anyone else remembers this or can just point me to a similar post that I might have got confused with this instead, it would help with me not thinking I'm imagining posts that don't exist. I'm pretty confident it was around when Sync first got buffed,)

Anyway here's looking forward to when the tournaments end and hopefully flame notes end up being restored to some semblance of being worth while again, I still want to beat some of my old scores. without having to play Arkonoid

[Bront20]

Did these guys playtest this game at all?

Given how many months it took for these issues to come to public light, it's hardly fair to blame HMX for not playtesting. The scoring issues are at the extremes, which are hard to test if you can't get people to not only think of them but to be able to exploit them. Beyond that, some of the exploited synergies simply are the extreme examples, and when not used in the extreme examples (IE, playing multiple tracks at once and riding pinball to the extreme and ignoring notes) things looked a lot better in the initial release.

I think they need to come to a happy medium at some point, and either boost everything else and give up on GSs being even difficult for average players but leave the leaderboards in tact, or readjust pinball, synch, and flames, and reset the leaderboards. Better fixes require a patch, and that isn't happening.

[Epsilon82]

I think they need to come to a happy medium at some point, and either boost everything else and give up on GSs being even difficult for average players but leave the leaderboards in tact, or readjust pinball, synch, and flames, and reset the leaderboards. Better fixes require a patch, and that isn't happening.

Given the fact that actually fixing the underlying problem requires doing something they're unable or unwilling to do (patch the game), the obvious best solution is to simply put Flames back to where they were. Especially now that it's become abundantly clear that Pinball has always been able to compete with even the highest level Flame play on every song. There is no longer any reason to fear that Flames will exclusively dominate leaderboards. So why make things more difficult and try to rebalance everything which will likely just lead to more problems and require leaderboard resets, etc? Just change the Flame value back where they had it and be done with it.

It seems doubtful that many people would actually bother exploiting Band/Flame (to the extent that anyone actually was, which was pretty much nothing) when it's no longer going to even beat a halfway decent Pinball/Sync run. With that being the case, there's absolutely no reason not to leave Flames exactly where they were.

[Bront20]

Given the fact that actually fixing the underlying problem requires doing something they're unable or unwilling to do (patch the game)

The dev time required for that likely just isn't available. People aren't not buying Blitz over this either.

solution is to simply put Flames back to where they were.

A few changes:

1) That (Flame Notes are 100% useless now)
2) Double or triple Runaway Notes points - Runaway Notes are useless now, they'd be somewhat interesting at 30,000 points
3) Boost Shockwave just a bit (again, not useful for most styles of play, a slight bump could actually make it viable in a Pinball build over Bandmate)
4) Maybe boost the instrument powerups slightly (Synch is too good too often right now, slight instrument boost would help most non-pinball scores).

It wouldn't be perfect, but it'd offer all kinds of options for GSing songs, and a few options for leaderboard chasing, and most of the tweaks I'm suggesting wouldn't change the average player scores that much.

I mean, of the untouched powerups, Road Rage is fine and has it's place, Bandmate is fine as well (it complements the top tier playstyles, but it's not the cause of any issues by far), Blast is fine, Point Doubler is safe, and Jackpot is generally well balanced risk/reward style of play.

Edit: If they were to patch, dropping the timing window slightly and/or prevening the hitting of 2 adjacent note, and increasing the value of notes themselves and Blitz Mode would probably fix things even better. They'd probably also be best in refiguring the star formula a bit at that point if they want to keep the star chase about where it is.

[Iceman71421]

They said in the DLC end thread that goals and tournaments are ending as well, so hopefully the problems with Blitz get sorted before its over. It would leave a sour taste in my mouth if they just dropped it completely without addressing this.