Compilation of questions answered by HMX (indexed)

[Sayburr]

Question: What the hell? Only 12 Bon Jovi songs and three of them repeats?

HMXhenry said: Sorry to hear you're bummed out by the number of songs, but we tried to make it pretty clear that we were getting 12 songs and not the entire album. Here's the discussion thread that's been up for the last month or so that announced the news. As for the songs that we already have, there's been a huge number of requests for rereleasing back catalog tracks with Pro charting. I certainly don't hope this is the last we've seen of the Jovi, so if there are additional songs you'd like to see hit up the song request feature in the Support tab.

[Sayburr]

Question: Is there a limit on the number of characters that can be created?
HMXhenry said: FWIW, you can have ten custom characters for each profile so if you're interested in creating more in game avatars you can use multiple profiles to beef up your roster pretty quickly. Hopefully that helps those of you in love with the character creator!

[Sayburr]

Question: Why is the game telling me I need to get a negative score to increase my rank?

HMXThrasher said: hey guys - we've seen this a few times and are looking into a fix for it.
hooray for math!

[Sayburr]

Question: Harmonix doesn’t know what they are doing with pro-charts. Why don’t they play like the tabs I have gotten off the internet?

HMXThrasher said: …Our team of professional musicians in the audio department utilize stems and input from the original artists when doing our charting. In rare instances small tweaks are made for the sake of gameplay but you'll find that we don't just "rewrite music theory" or "make up our own chords" - please don't disrespect our hard working (and well educated) authoring team by suggesting that.

DavyinaToga sent me a PM saying: A majority of the "Sousaphone Is A Necessary Evil" episode of the HMX podcast embellishes the answer a bit more thoroughly, covering the whole Pro authoring/Trainers process and the difference between the 17-fret Mustang and the full 22-fret Squier leading to differences in charts.

That podcast can be found here: http://www.rockband.com/blog/episode031

[Sayburr]

Question: Is the Dave Ghrol achievement bugged?

HMXThrasher said; This goal is tied to DLC and the [goals] menu will help you figure out which songs to use. [Exported songs will not work].

[Sayburr]

Question: Do RBN songs have pro-drums like HMX released songs do?

HMXThrasher said: Regarding RBN songs w/pro cymbals - So here's the deal with those tracks - Rock Band Network drums will work in Pro Drums on a song by song basis, based on whether or not the authors added extra MIDI information. To be clear, the authoring standards were updated with this info well after launch, so older RBN content is unlikely to have Pro Drums charted. More recent tracks are more likely to have this extra data. So the older songs you've tried to play are not authored wrong specifically, it’s just that there’s no Pro info in the song, and so cymbals show up as default (basically those older songs aren't meant to be played in Pro Mode.
Hope that clears things up - thanks so much for supporting the RBN content!

[Sayburr]

Question: Everyone having the same avatar is driving me nuts, can HMX do something about it?

HMXhenry said I'll talk to Web Team about the forced avatars. We've been talking about a plan to make avatars, signatures and custom titles "unlockables" that you can earn. Part of the intent of making avatars unlockable is being able to easily identify spammers, one time posters and people that register just to cause trouble as well as rewarding people who are awesome posters and want to stick around to get more involved in the community.

We'd obviously make things like avatars very easily accessible for new users, since it definitely helps us identify posters as well. There are roughly 450,000 posters registered to the forums, so having a more visual cue tied to someone's username is incredibly helpful. That's part of the reason why I've never changed my avatar, because I want to make sure that people know me when they see me. So by all means, avatar it up! You wouldn't go outside without wearing any clothes, so don't show up to the forums naked either.

[Sayburr]

What was the reasoning behind removing both online and local competitive modes from RB3?

HMXHenry said One of the challenges we face with every release is finding a way to appeal to both hardcore and casual fans without just repeating whatever we did last time. We want to make sure that features appeal to as many people as possible, and hopefully new features like Pro Mode, expert level goals, friend to friend leaderboards and setlist battles will scratch that itch for the hardcore score focused fans.

[Sayburr]

Will additional disc exports be supported by Rock Band 3 on the Wii in the future?

HMXHenry said Rock Band 2 and GD:RB were definitely the immediate priorities at launch. We’re thrilled that RB3 is able to support export on the Wii and we’ll continue to work with Nintendo to try to get Wii folks access to as much music as possible.

[Sayburr]

Many legacy RBN songs have incorrect Pro Drums charting, unlike the official DLC. Is there any chance these could be fixed by the author, if they so choose, and re-downloaded?

HMXHenry said Unfortunately not. The tracks aren’t necessarily charted incorrectly, they just display cymbals by default if the author chose not to add in the extra MIDI information. The authoring standards changed well after RBN’s launch, so newer songs are more likely to have this extra data. The only way to add the Pro Drum charting would be to release a new track offer that people would have to buy, since RBN would recognize it as an entirely different song.