Compilation of questions answered by HMX (indexed)

[Sayburr]

After how many years, still no wireless microphone with controls?

HMXHenry said, Honestly, there's not a ton of demand for alternate mic peripherals. Vocals are far and away the least used instrument in RB, so there's not a huge audience for something like this. Add in complications with proprietary 1st party wireless technology, potential lag, wireless connectivity issues and there's not a very compelling case for this. Cool for hardcore vocalists or party play people looking to free up their hands, but those people appear to be few and far between.

[Sayburr]

What are the best ways to keep up with Harmonix?

HMXPope says,
The Community and Web Teams have been working really hard over the last year on exploring new avenues for getting our content out through as many outlets and media as possible. To make things easier for you all, [the link in my name will keep you updated to] places where you can find Rock Band news.

ROCKBAND.COM
But, of course, you knew that or you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

NEWSLETTER
The signup for this is currently located at the bottom of the http://www.rockband.com homepage.

PODCAST
Itunes Subscribe - http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/M...t?id=335277400
RSS Subscribe - http://feeds.feedburner.com/Official...ockBandPodcast

OFFICIAL TWITTER FEEDS
Rock Band - http://twitter.com/RockBand
The Beatles: Rock Band - http://twitter.com/TheBeatlesRB/
Rock Band Network - http://twitter.com/RockBandNetwork

HARMONIX COMMUNITY/PR TEAM TWITTER FEEDS
HMXJohnD - http://twitter.com/johntdrake
HMXHenry - http://twitter.com/hmxhenry
HMXPope - http://twitter.com/mrpope
HMXJessaBrez - http://twitter.com/jessabrez
HMXAmgo - http://twitter.com/amgo
HMXNick - http://twitter.com/nickchester

OFFICIAL FACEBOOK PAGES
Rock Band - http://www.facebook.com/RockBand
The Beatles: Rock Band - http://www.facebook.com/TheBeatlesRockBand


OFFICIAL HARMONIX FLICKR PAGE
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hmxcommunity/

THE 'ZINE
For those not in the know, this is where all our articles, videos, podcasts, and DLC Announcements live: http://www.rockband.com/zine

[jceddy]

This post is really old...do you have an update?

[GNFfhqwhgads]

This post is really old...do you have an update?

An update to what? It's called editing.

[Sayburr]

Why are Rock Band DLC songs so expensive?

HMXHenry said, Because they're not free to license or produce. $0.99 - $1.29 will get you an average song on iTunes, $2 gets you a song you can play on 4 difficulty levels on 5 different instruments in a variety of game modes.

LoopyChew, a fan of the game, added, This podcast details the DLC creation process. That should do a pretty good job of answering your question.

[Sayburr]

How can I request pro upgrades? Will you make a request tool for it like you did for regular songs for us selected players?

HMXHenry replied, [If the] "selected players" made up a bigger audience I'd agree with you. It's such a specialized request for such a hardcore segment of the community that it's unlikely we'd build a specific request tool for it, especially when you can write in Pro upgrade requests (or RB3 versions) in the existing song request tool. We also have the added benefit of sales numbers, so we can look at what a track sold, make a pretty educated guess as to the Pro adoption rate and then figure out if there's enough demand there to warrant an upgrade.

[Sayburr]

Hey, has anyone heard of Harmonix flat-out saying that Rock Band Blitz is the last Rock Band game?

HMXHenry said No, we've never said that RB Blitz will be the last RB game. [The person who said this] sounds like a Grade A chucklehead and you can tell him I said so.

[folkeye]

Hey, has anyone heard of Harmonix flat-out saying that Rock Band Blitz is the last Rock Band game?

HMXHenry said No, we've never said that RB Blitz will be the last RB game. [The person who said this] sounds like a Grade A chucklehead and you can tell him I said so.

Relay to HMXhenry we're all in need of a good chuckle... make it so.

[Blasteroids]

From the PAX Q&A posted at RockBandAide.com

There is an artificial DLC cap of 3,000 in RB3, even though we have about 3,700 total songs available. As people’s libraries continue to grow, is any sort of fix or workaround planned for this?
The DLC cap isn’t artificial. An excess of content results in severe memory leaks and load issues, neither of which are ideal unless you love interminable load screens or having all your game data erased. So while it’s obviously not ideal having a DLC cap with an ever expanding library, there’s also no readily apparent solution given that no one else has ever had to deal with an issue like this on consoles before. Deleting and redownloading content as you hit the limit isn’t the most elegant solution, but it’s the best one available at the moment. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the specific stats, but this is most definitely an edge case where only a fraction of 1% of the RB community is affected.

Whilst I do not personally have this issue, I find the answer to this a little surprising. It seems to indicate that RockBand 3 is a complete bugfest with no memory bounds checking.

I find it incredible that they would not have used custom memory allocators and stream data as and when required to get past this issue. But what surprises me more, is this got past PR. Amazing!

[FujiSkunk]

From the PAX Q&A posted at RockBandAide.com

Whilst I do not personally have this issue, I find the answer to this a little surprising. It seems to indicate that RockBand 3 is a complete bugfest with no memory bounds checking.

I find it incredible that they would not have used custom memory allocators and stream data as and when required to get past this issue. But what surprises me more, is this got past PR. Amazing!

Keep in mind Harmonix was under different control back then, and we're all pretty much in agreement that the game as originally launched did not exactly offer the most trouble-free experience. But also keep in mind any console game developer, especially nowadays, also has to rely on a lot of code that is beyond their control. It could be that some XBox code library provided by Microsoft is a culprit here, perhaps one the game uses to pull and sort DLC from the hard drive. Any such bug in the underlying library is not necessarily a problem for a game that has a few dozen pieces of DLC tops, which is 99.999% of the other games out there. Now we have this one game offering a few thousand pieces of DLC, and the cracks in the whole process are starting to show.