Pinballing has ruined this game!!!

[MaximusDM]

Every single Tournament win used Pinball. Every single one.

Everyone who competed in the tournament knows this.
I've just been waiting for Harmonix to admit it the entire time. Its sad that they need to walk around it.

This isn't a matter of clamming up national security secrets, its a matter of being honest with people who want to enjoy your product with genuine concerns and real PR repercussions. You are toying with people's time and money. Just be honest is all I am saying. Its all I could ask for.

Just tell us XMB is never going to be fixed and the real reason why. When number values or behavior change on a power up how about telling people exactly what changed. Exact specifics, instead of making it an easter hunt for your player base to scramble to learn the new rules.

We were looking at a string of leaderboard driven competitions with real world prizing with a significant cash value. It was essential to us that these tournaments were as balanced as possible for those participating. Leaderboard bragging rights are one thing, but with consistent prizing on the line as well, we wanted to ensure a more level playing field.

[Drokthir]

I don't think it was pinball that ruined this game.

I believe the tournaments are mostly to blame, as the current farce concerning viable power ups is just a symptom of HMX doing something that, while was intended to give a boost to the Blitz community, has as far as I am concerned back fired and alienated people from playing, rather than introducing more people.

[zage1337]

We were looking at a string of leaderboard driven competitions with real world prizing with a significant cash value. It was essential to us that these tournaments were as balanced as possible for those participating. Leaderboard bragging rights are one thing, but with consistent prizing on the line as well, we wanted to ensure a more level playing field.

If you honestly cared about the tournaments being balanced you would shut down RB Central right now and change that value back to 1,500 for flame notes then boot it back up. Seeing how these tournaments have been going on for 2 months now and every win used the same powerup and playstyle for every song, it's clear that you guys really don't care about the tournaments being balanced. Otherwise you would have realized the mistake you've guys made and attempt to correct that mistake.

Pinball would crush flame notes on many songs and vice versa. There so flame players and pinball players would each have their shot at winning their song. What you did was give flame players the giant finger.

Right now the process for winning a tournament song is this..
1. Use Bandmate/Pinball/Sync
2. Focus on keeping pinball in play and deploying bandmate to save it on a selected lane of your choice
3. Keep bouncing it and then let luck enter the equation. If you get a really lucky pinball then keep playing and you will likely win the song.
4. If not restart or re attempt the song until you get the lucky run with pinball.

Source: I've won 9 songs using this process. Substitute Bandmate with bottle or road rage for the earlier rounds.

Just admit that you don't care about this game anymore and you have given up. If you still care about RB and RB Blitz then show us that you care.

[malkieriking]

I think Pinball's utility is largely only limited by the length of the song. A song would have to be pretty short, I think, for Pinball to not be able to beat Flames, even at the original value. The longer a song goes, the more a particularly skilled Pinball player will be able to score.

I think you have the exact opposite effect here: Longer songs are more apt for flames, as multipliers get higher and flames get more valuable. The value of a pinball deteriorates as the song goes on, as the ball isn't affected by multipliers.

[grace_pressure]

Yeah, with pinball stuff, this happens:

http://i980.photobucket.com/albums/a...ps28aca683.jpg

I did this just a couple hours ago, got a ~40 bounce pinball, and went from there. I don't see anyone beating this without hours of grinding, and that's part of the problem. It's winning the tournament by almost 140K, and all of us top players have been doing runs. A similar thing happened last week with my Sweet Emotion score, and this week with the Jungle Boogie score put up by the current (and probably final) leader.

Had the same ridiculous experience with a 600K+ pinball on Glory of Love this morning... gfl beating that with another loadout, pretty much.

[Epsilon82]

I think you have the exact opposite effect here: Longer songs are more apt for flames, as multipliers get higher and flames get more valuable. The value of a pinball deteriorates as the song goes on, as the ball isn't affected by multipliers.

I know what you're saying here, but I was speaking more in terms of the theoretical. Meaning that the longer a song is, the more time you literally have to keep pinball alive. Practically speaking, nobody would actually be good enough to keep pinballs going the entire time, but in the theoretical sense, you can score with pinball indefinitely until the song ends.

[malkieriking]

Oh yeah, of course, sorry. I don't think we'll see any Piano Sonata type scores any time soon though. Maybe if you could TAS the game, but that wouldn't even be fun to watch IMO.

[cowboys282]

Everyone who competed in the tournament knows this.
I've just been waiting for Harmonix to admit it the entire time. Its sad that they need to walk around it.

This isn't a matter of clamming up national security secrets, its a matter of being honest with people who want to enjoy your product with genuine concerns and real PR repercussions. You are toying with people's time and money. Just be honest is all I am saying. Its all I could ask for.

Just tell us XMB is never going to be fixed and the real reason why. When number values or behavior change on a power up how about telling people exactly what changed. Exact specifics, instead of making it an easter hunt for your player base to scramble to learn the new rules.

No one should be surprised about any of this. Go back to when this happened. December 26th the day after Christmas. No warning. They just did. Treated us all who paid good money like fools.

The whole point of Rockband blitz was one last money grab. Companies like this plan way in advance. They knew that they were going to stop releasing DLC but waited to release Blitz and get as much out of the DLC as they could.

Why they nerfed Flames I will never know. But they don't care. I can't point to one example that shows they care. They got their money and are moving on.

How many people paid good money on songs to play in the tournament and had no chance of winning? You think Harmonix cares? Remember they changed the game the day after Christmas without telling anyone. people should have realized then.

[Epsilon82]

No one should be surprised about any of this. Go back to when this happened. December 26th the day after Christmas. No warning. They just did. Treated us all who paid good money like fools.

The whole point of Rockband blitz was one last money grab. Companies like this plan way in advance. They knew that they were going to stop releasing DLC but waited to release Blitz and get as much out of the DLC as they could.

Why they nerfed Flames I will never know. But they don't care. I can't point to one example that shows they care. They got their money and are moving on.

How many people paid good money on songs to play in the tournament and had no chance of winning? You think Harmonix cares? Remember they changed the game the day after Christmas without telling anyone. people should have realized then.

I don't think it's fair to say that they don't care. If they didn't care they wouldn't have changed Flames in the first place; perversely, if they didn't care, the game would actually be in overall better shape. There's a difference between apathy and just making a flawed decision. Their reasoning in making the Flame Note change was simply poor from the beginning, and clearly the effects didn't bear out as they'd expected.

They made a mistake, and hopefully they'll fix it at some point. But I don't think it's fair to say they don't care. The people who interact with us directly here almost certainly don't have the ability to just make these kinds of decisions of their own accord; for all we know they could be fighting tooth and nail for the reversion we're asking for.

[grace_pressure]

No one should be surprised about any of this. Go back to when this happened. December 26th the day after Christmas. No warning. They just did. Treated us all who paid good money like fools.

The whole point of Rockband blitz was one last money grab. Companies like this plan way in advance. They knew that they were going to stop releasing DLC but waited to release Blitz and get as much out of the DLC as they could.

Why they nerfed Flames I will never know. But they don't care. I can't point to one example that shows they care. They got their money and are moving on.

How many people paid good money on songs to play in the tournament and had no chance of winning? You think Harmonix cares? Remember they changed the game the day after Christmas without telling anyone. people should have realized then.

This is a bit fallacious. First, regardless of whether or not they could have told us, hmxhenry said on December 27th that they intended to tell us:

Hey all, thanks for your patience. As you may have seen, yes, we are planning to launch a series of tournaments for Blitz via RB World. The intent was to announce both the tournaments and the flame note re balance in the same announcement, but due to a scoring bug in the tournament system that's been further delayed. But, rather than make those affected in this thread wait any longer, I wanted to post some additional clarification here. Below is an excerpt from the announcement that will go out when tournaments are officially launched:

...

Second, who the hell cares if they wanted to promote DLC through Blitz? They made a fun game, and they are a business. Also, their incomprehension of balancing and subsequent PR has nothing to do money. There's no need to poison the well with these arguments that make us look bad.