HMX: Please unpatch Pro Guitar DLC compatibility.

[karaokefreak]

We will, however, continue to track your feedback and pass it along internally to ensure that we’re able to improve online matchmaking moving forward. I hope that answers some of your questions.

Overthinking this decision will be highly appreciated.
I don't think it is a great concept to shut pro players out of online play. We pro players payed a lot for our instruments after waiting long for them , and we pay 150% for DLC with less functionality.

No one can expect people to buy pro updates when they don't have pro guitars. Since approximately 98% all of Rock Band players don't have a pro guitar, it leaves 2% of matches online, with a very low possibility of finding them online at the same time (since I am in Europe) PLUS having the unlikely luck of finding pro players who bought the same DLC as I did ....

Saying that you never planned online compatibility in the first place means that you never wanted to have pro players online. I just can't imagine that you didn't know how unlikely it would be to find a band with everyone having pro updates.

Pro Guitar is a great progress for this genre, but if this was really intentional, then rock band 3s online concept is a complete failure. Sorry to say so, but from all possible solutions, this is the most unlogical. Actually it is the most simple solution imaginable.

ANd there is one point that undermines my opinion on this: If I have only Drums, then I can still play with everyone else, since the guitar / bass / vocal / keyboard charts are included in the song file.

Why should this be any different with Pro Guitar? Charting it might justify addionional costs for those who play Pro Guitar / Bass, but it doesn't justify additional costs for everyone else. Specially with the Squier Strat in mind which only allows pro-gameplay, this is a bad decision. Imagine all those people that wait for the Squier. They will never ever play online, since they cannot find anyone to play with. I actiually never met anyone else with a pro guitar online. I am always the only guy with one.

[mikeyts]

Right. That's why I said it is not an issue for a lot of people. While I agree the poll does necessarily indicate accurate results for everyone who plays, I don't think it is fair to come to your own conclusions determining how many people abstained from voting.

I am just giving my feedback. I am not belittling anyone else's opinion here....just how it affects me and how I play the game. I don't expect HMX to cater to ME, but I do think they value EVERYONE's evaluations, and these forums are an excellent conduit for them to receive all forms of feedback.

You've obviously come to a conclusion that the number of people who read the top post and voted represents some significant cross-section of RB players and that some meaningful conclusion can be drawn from the results. I disagree and I stated why. People who disagree with you aren't "belittling" your opinion. In this case, neither of us will ever know which of us is right.

I've posted at least half a dozen polls in this forum in the few months that I've participated in it and I've learned that creating them is very tricky. The wording of your question and the choice of possible responses (and they way they're worded) is really difficult to get right. I always get some posts by people who say, "Why didn't you include such-and-so response???" and "None of the responses describes me or my opinion so I didn't vote". I think that most of the people who read the title of this thread said, "Meh--pro guitar, who cares" and never opened it and that most of the people who did open it read the top post and said, "Meh--online, who cares". That's my opinion and you're free to disagree with it--I won't take offense .

[charliesmile]

I actiually never met anyone else with a pro guitar online. I am always the only guy with one.

re-read what you just typed.

[Edify1]

LOL. When I was a kid, there were no video games.

I just happen to like online play, and reducing the number of available people to play with doesn't seem to promote that very well.

I can see this is not an issue at all for those of you that already play alone or don't play online, but for those of us that do, it's a big part of the game, and the poll results seem to indicate a lot of people like that part of it.

Well, when I was a kid there was no internet. lol And when internet finally came around, video game systems with on-lin functionality were still a long ways off. I can remember going to a friend's house to play Street Fighter tournaments, and play games like Contra. The problem with on-line games now is that it discourages actually having friends in person and encourages playing with complete strangers.

[raynebc]

Pardon me if I missed this, but is there a filter or something that allows somebody to only connect to random people online if they have one or more pro guitar upgrades for DLC? People that buy pro for one song probably do for others as well, and this "pro guitar lobby" would at least provide one reliable way for people to play pro online without having to clog up their friend list with people they don't know. This lobby could automatically apply a filter so that any songs that are selected must have the pro guitar/bass part available.

[MattyT]

My point about the parallel between this and the legacy vs. RB3 version DLC is this (Only a hypothesis, of course):

Pre-RB3 DLC format:
G, B, D, V.

Post RB3 DLC format (basic):
G, B, D, V, K, pD, Vh, pK.

*I know that the reasoning for the incompatibility is audio stems for Keys, especially, necessitating a different format.

The addition of Pro Guitar/Bass to the Basic Post-RB3 format makes it so that there are now 3 different file types:

Aforementioned Pre-RB3 and Post-RB3 basic, but also now:
Post-RB3 Pro:
G, B, D, V, K, pG, pB, pD, Vh, pK.

This is why you couldn't see the Pro charts (or have them scored) online unless everyone owned them, hypothetically - it was looking for the pG & pB charts on everyone's systems. Like Henry said, it wasn't even supposed to be cross-compatible (between Pro and Non-pro chart owners) online. People got a beneficial glitch for 3-months, as far as I see it.

[Santa Claustrophobia]

Overthinking this decision will be highly appreciated.
I don't think it is a great concept to shut pro players out of online play. We pro players payed a lot for our instruments after waiting long for them , and we pay one third more for DLC with less functionality.

No one can expect people to buy pro updates when they don't have pro guitars. Since approximately 98% all of Rock Band players don't have a pro guitar, it leaves 2% of matches online, with a very low possibility of finding them online at the same time (since I am in Europe) PLUS having the unlikely luck of finding pro players who bought the same DLC as I did ....

Saying that you never planned online compatibility in the first place means that you never wanted to have pro players online. I just can't imagine that you didn't know how unlikely it would be to find a band with everyone having pro updates.

Pro Guitar is a great progress for this genre, but if this was really intentional, then rock band 3s online concept is a complete failure. Sorry to say so, but from all possible solutions, this is the most unlogical. Actually it is the most simple solution imaginable.

ANd there is one point that undermines my opinion on this: If I have only Drums, then I can still play with everyone else, since the guitar / bass / vocal / keyboard charts are included in the song file.

Why should this be any different with Pro Guitar? Charting it might justify addionional costs for those who play Pro Guitar / Bass, but it doesn't justify additional costs for everyone else. Specially with the Squier Strat in mind which only allows pro-gameplay, this is a bad decision. Imagine all those people that wait for the Squier. They will never ever play online, since they cannot find anyone to play with. I actiually never met anyone else with a pro guitar online. I am always the only guy with one.

Is this satire?

[karaokefreak]

re-read what you just typed.

Whats wrong with it. I never met a second player in one band that had a pro guitar (or at least used it in the same band). It is very very hard to find other pro players. So far, I have always been the only pro guitar / pro bass player in a band online.

Is this satire?

Which part is the one you didn't understand?

[FujiSkunk]

To pro guitar/bass players who want to play online and think the current system hampers you from doing so, I certainly encourage you to continue voicing your opinions to Harmonix. This last patch, particularly the return of stage kit support, shows they do care, they will listen, and they don't settle merely for low-hanging fruit that will appease the largest numbers of people.

However, keep some perspective when making your feelings known. In particular:

• Online players are a small subsection of total RB players. Pro guitar/bass players are a small subsection of total RB players. The intersection of those two groups is a very small subsection of total RB players (case in point, I like playing pro, but I've never been very enthusiastic about online play, not even during the RB2 era). As much as they might want to, Harmonix may not be able to justify devoting resources to adding features for such a small group, especially if the features require wholesale revisions of code that was not designed with those features in mind.
• Speaking of design, Henry noted RB3 was designed to require players to have the same files in order to play together. That includes the pro upgrade files. Whether or not this was the right design choice, RB3 is the product of that choice. Fundamental design choices are not something that can be easily fixed with a patch. Trying to do so runs the risk of further breaking the game's code, or rendering it even more difficult to work with and patch in the future. Like it or not, we should accept this is as what RB3 is. If you think there is room for improvement, make suggestions for how this can be changed beyond RB3.
• Offering pro game play at all was a major undertaking for Harmonix, risky and expensive. They need it to be profitable. Does anyone here really think they would intentionally do something to discourage people from going pro? Perhaps the decisions they made were not ideal (it's already been established there is a lot about RB3's release that wasn't ideal), but you can bet the last thing Harmonix wants to do is alienate any potential customers. To accuse them of otherwise is unproductive and downright silly. Assume they want the situation to improve, and phrase your requests accordingly.

I'm sure I've repeated a lot that has already been said, but sometimes a point needs to be hammered before people get it.

[mikeyts]

Pardon me if I missed this, but is there a filter or something that allows somebody to only connect to random people online if they have one or more pro guitar upgrades for DLC? People that buy pro for one song probably do for others as well, and this "pro guitar lobby" would at least provide one reliable way for people to play pro online without having to clog up their friend list with people they don't know. This lobby could automatically apply a filter so that any songs that are selected must have the pro guitar/bass part available.

No, there's no filter (something like that was suggested earlier, but not the DLC checking).

A new one just occurred to me: besides the "Find online players" option, there should be a "Find online players (no pro guitar/bass)". It's a bit Jim Crow, but what're you gonna do ?