Coins - Questioning Their Use...

[pksage]

A few more thoughts to add to my previous post that might shed more light on the opinion being discussed.

While I personally know that Harmonix isn't in this to gouge us on microtransactions, I can see why some people might jump to that conclusion (on their Jump to Conclusions Mat). "Why is my pool of limited resources going down faster than it is replenished as I play this song more than once? Clearly there's got to be some way to replenish it so I can keep playing. Oh no...microtransactions for coins would be too good a fit!" In this situation, the hypothetical score attack player might seem whiny and lazy. You might again ask: Why don't they just go play a new song? Well...

Rock Band 3 has a "number of times played" sort, and this is no mistake. Players have favorite songs, and they want to perform particularly well on those songs. This behavior is hard to keep up when you're spending 750 coins to get 300-450 back. Many people in this thread have defended "vanilla" (power-up-less) play, but that's kind of avoiding the issue. We don't want to play really well and be rewarded with 4*, which is established in Rock Band "canon" as being okay, but not great. We played excellently! We should have gotten 5* or GS! Playing without powerups make 5*/GS all but impossible, and kinda punishes players for not using them. As Vildiil said:

After spending a couple of hours with the game and getting a full understanding of how it works it became very clear the entire point of the game is appropriate Power Up selection per song in order to get 5 and gold stars.

This is the point of the game. There's so many things in place stressing Blitz's competitive nature. But how can we be competitive if only a certain percentage of our playthroughs have a chance at competitive scores? How are we supposed to keep interest in tinkering with powerup combinations on our favorite song if we have to switch to unrelated goals for coins?

Blitz is so much fun, and I want to play it to death. I want to play it until I have good scores on all of my favorite songs, and I want to defend those scores against my friends. But I feel like the coin system is crippling this very desire.

(A parting note on possible solutions: What if you spent coins as a one-off unlock to unlock a specific powerup slot for a specific song? There might not be a database in place to track that data for each song, but I would much rather unlock the competitive capabilities of a specific song, play that song a bunch to earn more coins, and then unlock another song, etc.

You could also just say that 5*ing a song earns you free powerups on it for life. Anything that encourages competitive play on a specific song without the crippling coin costs, really.)

[Hairy_Cabbage]

Pksage, u say the point i was trying to get across so much better than i even could lol.

[atalkingfish]

So to get a decent amount of coins i need to have a facebook app?

I never thought i would buy a game on xbox live arcade and be hamstrung because i dont have a facebook account.

not everyone has/wants a facebook account and to limit my coins because of that is kinda sucky.

I haven't used facebook at all and getting coins has not been a problem at all for me.

[Doc_SoCal]

Pro Tip:

You DONT need a full load out of power ups to get a high score.

I have GS'd several songs with just ONE power up and the payback in coins is.... wait for it...

Profit.

People are a trip...

[Lowlander2]

Honestly, at this point, it's kind of the opposite problem. Even when replaying songs, I'm sitting on so many coins, I don't know why that counter at the top right even exists any more, and I don't know why I should do the goals except that they're there.

But it's no skin off my back either, so yeah.

[hodayathink]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I've read in more than a few places that you don't even have to be playing Blitz to get goals (and hence more coins), the "Get X stars on X songs" Facebook goals can be achieved on Rock Band 3. While this doesn't necessarily remove the "grinding" portion of it, it makes it so you don't have to spend coins to get coins.

[MemoDLSG]

Let me just preface this saying that this is all IMO, for me, from my perspective. I do not claim to speak for everyone or anyone, though I'm sure there are at least some people who agree with me.

Coins (as with most any in game economies) are used to power unlocks or upgrades. You don't start Zelda with a full load out of weapons and when you run out of arrows you may need to buy more.

I'll stop you here. Flawed analogy, as it's a fundamentally different type of game. In Zelda, finding rupees (exploration) is part of the appeal of the game. Also, they come in such vast quantities that you mostly don't have to worry about you running out (also with arrows and bombs themselves which you also find laying around). For me, grinding for coins is not the appeal of the game (others might disagree, though it is pretty clear from all promo videos/previews etc. that the appeal of the game is playing the songs with powerups and not grinding for coins), and you do need to grind if you don't have new songs regularly and don't do Score Wars/Goals (which I guess is the point of the coins, which is understandable but inconvenient). That is, I have to work to get to play the game I want to play (the songs with the powerups).

In Blitz, coins will help fuel your power ups and the more coins you have the better your power up load out. If you do well, you should be able to recoup most of those coins, prevented you from having to "camp" or grind songs.

Well I'm guess I'm not doing well enough then... Right now I'm getting more coins than I spend but only because I'm playing new songs... Each song gives me about 300 to 400 coins (without the doubling) and each powerup costs 200-300 (and you use 3 of them at a time) meaning once I've played all my songs, I'll have to actually grind songs without powerups to get to play the songs with them.

Additionally, rewarding extra coins for playing new songs actively discourages grinding, as you'll get more coins for playing new songs than you will for replaying the same songs over and over again. On top of that, it encourages users to try Score Wars and RB World Goals, where you should have no shortage of coins to fuel your power ups.

Wouldn't grinding be discouraged by the inherent displeasure in it? And using Score Wars/Goals encouraged because they're good on their own? Either way, I think there could've been better ways to discourage grinding. For example, in addition to new songs, the 2x bonus could be given to songs not played in a while. Maybe even keep the premium to new songs and give 1.5x coins to songs not played in a while (a month or two). And to encourage using Score Wars/Goals, they could have given out Blitz cred, a number that gives bragging rights but is not needed to play the game. Also, the fact that coins are meant to encourage using Score Wars/Goals *does* imply that there is shortage of coins without them...

Though I think I'm more saddened by the side effect that coins (as they're dealt with now) introduced; or at least I hope that making the game unplayable as it was designed offline (as it was designed = with powerups) was a side effect and not a deliberate decision. To put it in context, I have one of the old 360 models, one without integrated wi-fi, and I do not plan to either buy an expensive adapter or a new Xbox. My Xbox swaps around between the TV room (next to the router and with an extra Ethernet cable to connect to it) and the living room (which also has a TV and is where we have our occasional Rock Band parties). In the living room I have no way to connect my Xbox to the internet, and so if the Xbox happens to be there then, I cannot play Blitz unless I go move my Xbox downstairs. Sure, a minor inconvinience, but an inconvinience nonetheless, and I guess this little anecdote just goes to say that even with this being a downloadable title, it doesn't guarantee that everyone playing it will have internet access all the time, and assuming so was a mistake that could break the game for some.

Maybe I'm exaggerating, but the thing is, you could go on and on about how the coin system (and the always-online it implies) is "not that bad", but it is not *good*, as it just creates a barrier between me and enjoying the game I want to play. Sure, that barrier could be broken by playing Score Wars, but what if I don't know any friends who play the game, and I don't want to add random people on Facebook just for that? It could be broken by playing new DLC, but really, I'll buy new DLC if I like the song, not if I need coins.

TL;DR - I don't like coins because obtaining them is not fun, and that gets in the way of playing the actual game. I also don't like how they're implemented because it means the game doesn't work offline.

No, that's gross. We have zero plans to do that.

Well, TBH I would expect nothing of the sort from Harmonix, and it's nice to know for sure.

EDIT: Wow, many posts as I was typing my wall of text. Seems pksage agrees with me with the "coins get in the way of the game" train of thought.

[HeyRiles]

I feel the experience would be much better off if coins were just removed entirely - I don't think they add anything to the game, and they're just a hindering middleman that all of us can really just do without. It would seem more intuitive to just have the powerups unlock as you receive more cred without having to pay to use them every time, and I don't really understand why both exist together because neither coexist with each other very well

I haven't had a problem with a lack of coins yet but my main issue was that there wasn't any noticeable indication that I was spending them constantly. There have been a couple songs where I restarted the song near the beginning because I didn't like the path I took, and I'm just now finding out that I spent an additional 700 or so coins every time I restarted. That's really lame and I don't understand the point of that at all, because the intent of most Rock Band games thus far had been grinding to get the best score possible. I don't like that the game punishes me for re-playing songs over and over again

Furthermore, I really don't like how people that don't have a Facebook are needlessly punished. I think about half of my coins have come from Facebook, and that's a half that people without Facebook won't get. It's counter-intuitive to prevent people from grinding songs by installing coins into the game, yet for people without Facebook, it seems as though they have to grind songs (without powerups) in order to have the coins necessary to play a new song with all three powerups available. Doc said you don't even need three powerups to play effectively, but from what I can tell that's only true for those who are already truly skilled at the game, and I find it near impossible to receive a gold star ranking on a song without all three powerups chosen - and that's a problem for those trying to get all achievements in the game, who will, ironically, have to grind old songs in order to have the coins necessary to attempt a gold star run on a song

The whole thing seems counter-intuitive and I don't believe anything of value would be lost if coins and coin-spending were simply dropped from the game

[Crid1968]

Sorry HMX, I think I'm going to sit this one out. I was genuinely interested in this game, but yesterday I read the forums with growing disappointment as it became apparent to me that the game you've created here simply isn't for me.

I've played the demo and it was kind of fun, but without decent offline support, it really isn't what I'm looking for.

Stripped-down offline mode?

I'm not interested in online leaderboards or how I'm doing against other peoples' scores. I'm really only interested in beating my OWN score. My wife only has an offline profile and has no interest in creating a Silver one, so she wouldn't be able to use powerups or earn coins.

Coins in general

One of the things I love about Rock Band is that I can play a handful of tracks and I might beat some of my old scores. Each track is a completely stand-alone thing. In Blitz, I have to save up coins from one track in order to try to get that elusive high score on another track? And if I fail, I'll have to save up again to have another go? That's not fun, that's MMO-style grind.

Plus the "double points when you first play a track" thing seems totally arbitrary. Once a player has played all tracks once, their progress effectively slows unless they buy more DLC. Again, a bit too MMO-like for my tastes.

"Social" gaming

None of my Facebook friends play Rock Band. I'm no fan of Facebook games anyway. I use Facebook, but I turned off apps some time ago because I got fed up with the constant onslaught of game invites. I'm not about to turn it back on.

Blitz as a track pack

I might get it for the tracks at some point, but I'm in no rush. I'm only familiar with about half a dozen of the tracks, and two of those I've already played in other Rock Band titles.

Sorry if this sounds overly negative. I'm not saying the game is bad - it's just not the game I was hoping for.

[HMXMister_Game]

We totally understand that some of you are dead-set against the coins, and others see them as a frustrating bottleneck.

That said, we'll be watching the coin economy closely and if we feel it's necessary we can adjust it. Please know that we're listening carefully to your feedback.