Coin Economy Tweaks

[thatmarkguy]

The situation also actively discourages powerup experimentation. It's pretty hard for people low on coins to justify risking 550 of them just to take a stab in the dark at an unconventional loadout.

They're risking 50 coins (maybe 150 if they have a disastrously bad run) as long as they stick with the song to the end.

This is honestly such a no-brainer that I suspect the reason this hasn't been adjusted is possibly due to something about the way the core game handles the restart mechanism, meaning that perhaps the restart function is "hard-coded" inside the software to simply ping back out to the server and charge the full amount for the powerups.

No; it's design intent. The game punishes restarters expressly because they intentionally designed it to punish restarters. They absolutely could have made the game only deduct powerup coins at song end rather than song start, and they chose not to.

one, perhaps the game could add an additional coin bonus situation other than just playing new songs.

It's called Rock Band World. It's called Score War. It's called weekly artist double-coin-rate promos.

Maybe you could get double (or even triple) coins for placing in a certain percentile of the board. That way the elite players who are earning top scores get rewarded for it instead of effectively punished for putting in such an effort to fulfill the game's stated core aim.

Either the elite players are restarting an effectively-infinite number of times until they nail their perfect run, in which case they'll continue to complain no matter what if restarts cost them no matter the reward for completion; or they play songs to completion and are not in need for coins anyway.

Alternatively, at the very least, it would be great if there were a coin gifting feature through Rock Band World. I would be more than happy to throw a few thousand coins to those who are running into this unfortunate limitation.

And if they did this people would be farming goals their main account already completed with alternate facebook accounts, and playing songs again with alt accounts for double-coin reward, just to transfer the funds to their main account.

[zage1337]

For a game that is entirely focused on getting top scores. The coin economy promotes the EXACT OPPOSITE. It rewards players who use nothing but Road Rage, Blast, Super on every single song and only plays every song once and not actually try to get the top rank on the leaderboards. It seems all the players I know who agree with me on this are on the top of the leaderboards. Also we like to chase each other's scores, and we have to pull off really risky runs in order to achieve these kinds of scores. Getting only 50 coin profit from a gold star run is just abysmal. There was no consideration at all to players who don't have massive amounts of DLC and don't want to use Facebook, since those are the only ways to get coins.

Sorry but 11 Gold Star performances on songs for 550 coins is unbalanced. Especially when a restart takes away that much. Set the ratio to 3 GS runs or 2 GS runs = enough for 1 restart. That would make it so I actually have coins to dispose on restarts, and I can easily make up for it.

If they actually rewarded you with a decent amount of coins for a good performance I wouldn't be upset with losing 550 coins on a restart. But the only way I can get enough coins is doing the 1 or 2 goals I can actually do because I normally lack a DLC song or two to do them. Or effectively waste my time grinding songs without powerups just to get enough coins to actually try to get..um high scores.

And Score Wars takes too long and most of the score wars I do...I BURN more coins then win because Im usually doing score wars with elite players and we restart constantly to get the #1 score on that song. Yes a single jackpot makes the difference between who wins and who loses. I'm restarting if I miss the 1st jackpot in a score war. And I don't like doing score wars with players that have 0 chance in beating me because it's just boring beating their score by 100-200k in 1 run, especially on a song I'm already 1st place on.

I just don't like doing the majority of goals because I find it a waste of time playing a bunch of songs I don't want to play and having to log on to facebook to start them, and I can't even check my progress in game. If the goal system was designed better I would choose to do them more often, and if more goals were focused on skill rather than how much DLC you have.(Sorry but most goals are play every song of X artist..that's time and money not skill), then it would be a lot better. I'd be happy for goals that actually challenge me skill wise.(There have only been a couple of powerup and gold star goals which I still get 1st try anyways).

tl;dr rant..the coin economy does the exact opposite of what the game was designed to be. A game was designed to be about achieving the best possible scores you can get, and the coins promotes the exact opposite.

I play this game for one reason. To get high scores. If I wanted to play "for the music" and buy DLC for my RB music library I have Rock Band 3 to satisfy that need.

[bigmf]

I have a few thoughts on this. I recently finished out my setlist, so no new song bonuses until I buy a new song. I decided I'd like to move all my songs into the gold stars category. Up until recently my number of coins was growing all the time. Moving songs from no stars to 5 or gold stars brings in a profit. After those were gone, I was only moving the coin total by 50 coins either way. Then I hit Captain Jack by Billy Joel. A few play throughs made it obvious that if the blast notes didn't land in a couple of certain spots in the first section of the song, there is no way I would even come close to getting the gold stars. There were a lot of restarts, because there's still six plus minutes left in the song after the first section. Chasing the gold stars on that song took my coins from 400k to 382k. It's a concerning trend, and initial indications on Foreplay/Longtime are that that song will cost me more.

It's probably a couple of weeks or more worth of coins from Rockband world to cover my Captain Jack losses, without buying new songs for the new song bonus and to get goals for which I don't own the songs. I know that the point of the coins is to push us into buying new songs, so my current trend of losing coins is probably what Harmonix is shooting for. I can't get overly concerned about the situation right now, because of the 380k coins I have. It is possible I could run into trouble in the future, however.

I guess when or if that happens, I'll try to buddy up with someone and do a series of score wars without power ups on short songs, trading off wins and losses. If you do score wars as an actuall three day back and forth between to people actually competing for the win, score wars are a drain on coins.


Long and rambling disjointed thoughts, up there^.

[Epsilon82]

They're risking 50 coins (maybe 150 if they have a disastrously bad run) as long as they stick with the song to the end.

First of all, the "as long as they stick with the song to the end" part is pretty much the kicker here. That's just an unconscionable waste of time to force people to engage in, and for what? A best-case scenario of earning a fraction of the cost of a single restart? That's simply not remotely reasonable for a game designed entirely around leaderboard chasing.

No; it's design intent. The game punishes restarters expressly because they intentionally designed it to punish restarters. They absolutely could have made the game only deduct powerup coins at song end rather than song start, and they chose not to.

You're imputing that purported design intent yourself, unless perhaps Harmonix has made some official remark about this specific matter that I'm not aware of. You could have just as easily claimed that the original coin economy was their specific design intent, but the fact that they so quickly and drastically changed it indicates that more likely they hadn't fully anticipated the consequences of the previous system in actual use cases. I see little reason to believe that this issue is any different. And if they truly do intend to punish restarters to the extent you claim, that by no means makes it some sacrosanct system that's beyond reproach. The merits of a design decision are subjective, and there's nothing wrong with people constructively criticizing them. This entire line of thinking is essentially an appeal to authority, which has no logical force in my book.

It's called Rock Band World. It's called Score War. It's called weekly artist double-coin-rate promos.

It's also called woefully insufficient at preventing the necessity for mindless grinding for those without hundreds and hundreds of songs. I fail to see a compelling reason not to add an additional "high score" bonus, unless you're suggesting that the point of Rock Band Blitz is somehow something other than...well, achieving high scores.

Either the elite players are restarting an effectively-infinite number of times until they nail their perfect run, in which case they'll continue to complain no matter what if restarts cost them no matter the reward for completion; or they play songs to completion and are not in need for coins anyway.

People who restart a near infinite number of times to get their "perfect run" still have to actually exhibit the skill in getting that perfect run. They're investing a great deal of time to pursue the game's chief objective; what is the upside in forcing said people to engage in hours of ADDITIONAL grinding in order to "finance" their efforts? You could have made the same argument about Rock Band 3 and it would be equally hollow. Sure, anyone could sit there and restart a single song ad nauseum until they finally nailed their FC. What exactly is the problem with that, particularly in a game that has literally no other multiplayer component other than chasing high scores?

And if they did this people would be farming goals their main account already completed with alternate facebook accounts, and playing songs again with alt accounts for double-coin reward, just to transfer the funds to their main account.

This is a classic case of the remedy being worse than the disease. If someone is willing to go through that kind of trouble just to get enough coins to do something as outrageous as try to get high scores in a game whose sole objective is to get high scores, what exactly is the problem here?

[zage1337]

Thank you bigmf for being able to think long term about this situation. When the game was first out it was easy to get coins because all your songs are unplayed.

I myself forced my self to gold star EVERY SINGLE SONG that I have and played. That includes The Cascade Effect, The Thief in the Night Part 1, Child in Time, Tuesday's Gone, The Complexity of Light, Madness, One Vision, By Your Command..aka every single song that's posted in "Hardest GS Thread", that's available on the ps3 store. I went out and challenged myself to achieve all those GSs which I now did. From all that grinding and setting my own goals I've become highly skilled at the game, and I am still improving. Now I can pretty much get 1st place on any song on the ps3 without much difficulty.(except on songs that a few individuals I know already have 1st on) I would have never gotten that good if all I did was SR songs with the exact same loadout and didn't try to learn the mechanics of the game. I would have been rich on coin though.

Of course by doing that and playing for challenge I've become constantly broke on the game, only because I only played for high scores and not for buying DLC for goals.

[iamchris4life]

I just read through the past 3 or 4 pages of this thread, and I'm going to have to agree with everything zage1337, Epsilon88, VampInc, etc. said; and disagree with everything thatmarkguy, jibjqrkl, etc. said. There is too fine of a line between elite players who are bankrupt and casual players who are drowning in coins. I think everyone on one side of the argument has gotten their point across to the other side one way or another. At this point, I think it would be time to hear what the developers have to say on this issue, especially since the phrase "design intent" has been carelessly through around in this argument without citation. On that note, I think the developers should really consider some of the coin economy solutions that were presented by some users in this thread:

So this is how it should happen.

Restarts are Free or no more than 50 coins except, when you restart you must use the exact same powerups. If you change powerups you have to pay for that powerup again. If you go to Quit Song, or go to a different song you have to pay again. Or at least make restarts with the same loadout something like 50 coins.

Or another suggestion is to make Restarts cost 1/2 of the coins it normally costs on a song, and make it so you get more than 50 coins for GSing a song. 150-200+ profit for GSing a song is alot more reasonable. You barely get any coins if you are not sightreading as it is right now. Sorry but not everyone has an endless supply of unplayed DLC songs to sightread and get 2x coin bonus. People are taking the 2x bonus for granted because you won't be getting many additional coins once you play all your songs at least once.

The people who never restart or have a truckload of coins won't be affected by this at all, however for the rest of us who don't have many songs to SR, and can't do song specific goals because not having the said DLC song or want to use facebook can restart songs without being completely bankrupt all the time.

A couple suggestions: one, perhaps the game could add an additional coin bonus situation other than just playing new songs. Maybe you could get double (or even triple) coins for placing in a certain percentile of the board. That way the elite players who are earning top scores get rewarded for it instead of effectively punished for putting in such an effort to fulfill the game's stated core aim. Alternatively, at the very least, it would be great if there were a coin gifting feature through Rock Band World. I would be more than happy to throw a few thousand coins to those who are running into this unfortunate limitation. It could even be integrated into a more interactive wager based system for Score Wars or something like that. I think the coin economy would be far more interesting if the transactions more included player-to-player rather than just player-to-server.

[SheSaidSheSaid]

Developer intent is clear from....y'know, how the game was developed.

And you can't expect them to change such a fundamental feature because of a bunch of complainers.

[fcmlefty]

Take one evening and knock out a ton of Rock Band World Goals playing Rock Band 3 instead of Blitz. You'll have more coins than you know what to do with. If you are as serious as you claim to be about chasing the leader boards on Blitz, it seems like a very small sacrifice to have to play Rock band 3 for a night to set yourself up for future Blitz endeavors.

[Epsilon82]

Developer intent is clear from....y'know, how the game was developed.

And you can't expect them to change such a fundamental feature because of a bunch of complainers.

Except for the fact that they already have drastically changed such a fundamental feature because of a bunch of "complainers" once already, which is precisely why this forum topic exists. The kind of changes people are suggesting here are far less dramatic in scope than what they've already done. And it's to Harmonix's great credit that they did that. Adjusting and revising an existing system once it's subjected to the rigors of large numbers of actual use cases is hardly an admission of stupidity or defeat, unless you think software developers are in an adversarial relationship with the people paying for their product.

[Epsilon82]

Take one evening and knock out a ton of Rock Band World Goals playing Rock Band 3 instead of Blitz. You'll have more coins than you know what to do with. If you are as serious as you claim to be about chasing the leader boards on Blitz, it seems like a very small sacrifice to have to play Rock band 3 for a night to set yourself up for future Blitz endeavors.

No offense intended here, but can you imagine how ridiculous this would sound in any other context? The point is that you shouldn't have to make "sacrifices" or jump through pointless hoops to simply play a game the way its design clearly encourages. Could you imagine, to choose a popular example, if people were required to earn tokens to compete in Call of Duty online multiplayer matches by, say, playing the single player campaign over and over again? As ridiculous as that sounds, it's really not a whole lot different than the kind of grinding or hoop jumping that people are expected to do here, all for the privilege of (again) doing exactly what the game compels you to do, which is to compete to get the highest scores possible.