Coin Economy Tweaks

[zage1337]

I can understand that paying for coins discourages over grinding songs and I accept that. I just think that either restarts need to be tweaked or you should at least be able to build up some coin when you are just playing songs normally without having to be involved with RBW goals. Unless you are sightreading or intentionally getting horrible scores by not using powerups, the highest # of coin you can get is +50 by getting Gold Stars, and if you only 5* or 4* it, you lose coins anyways. A simple restart should not take away the amount I get for playing 11 gold star runs of songs that I already played.(which can be up to like 1 1/2 hours of game time)

[jibjqrkl]

lots of songs out there you can get gold on with 2 powerups.
hell, get 1 of the short 1 instrument songs and only use pinball.

you can even go and do something else after you hit that first purple note because you dont even need to hit any notes after that. just let the pinball do its work

[zage1337]

lots of songs out there you can get gold on with 2 powerups.
hell, get 1 of the short 1 instrument songs and only use pinball.

you can even go and do something else after you hit that first purple note because you dont even need to hit any notes after that. just let the pinball do its work

But you are butchering your scoring potential by not using all your powerups. And yeah pinball is really overpowered and unbalanced. Some players I know just SR'd 1000 songs 1st try and did some goals, and they now have a huge bank of coins to use restarts at their disposal. Another played all of his songs with 2 powerups but now his scores are really subpar because of it, which he is now cleaning up.

I myself challenged myself to grinding hard songs and trying to GS everything I can before I got any good skill at the game, which I think I got from getting those accomplishments. I guessed I developed that playing style from Rock Band 2/3, where I set my own goals that tested my skill. However the coin system punished me for it and now I'm left with hardly any coins and all my songs already played and most of the goals I can't do because I'm usually missing a song or two.

I don't usually restart every song, but most of the songs I play are songs I already played before and I only get 50 coins for it. So even when I play normally and not restart I'm still gaining coins at a snail pace so when I finally do decide to play a hard song or beat a score and restart I lose everything.

I would be very happy if they just reward you with more coins when you gold star a played song and at least give you a positive balance when you five star a song you already played. That way even if I still have to deal with the 550 loss from a restart, I can at least recoup that loss by only playing a few GS runs instead of 11 and still go for a high score while I am at it. And it would make a lot more sense that a player wouldn't still lose coins if they 5* a song.

Most Blitz players will only be playing songs they already played as the game get's older and we all have SR'd every song in our library. Unless you are one of those people who buy every DLC song every week, then I guess you will always be SRing. The coins you get isn't really a problem early on when most of your songs are unplayed, since you will get a fair amount of coins. However opportunities to sightread a song are limited.

[jibjqrkl]

so just play song of the century (for example) a few times with only pinball, only 1 powerup and the song isnt even 1 minute

[VampInc]

I agree with Zage on this issue... I remember when Blitz came out and the system was really screwed up. I played for a week to a week and a half with only using 1 or 2 power-ups.... I had first place on the PS3 and I was the first person to hit the 1,020 crash..... But when another top guy hit the 1,020 limit his career score was a lot higher than mine due to him using a full load out. Now I am trying to clean up the mess.... Which it is a mess because I can not see my stars in game.. I have had to make a spreadsheet of the songs I did not Gold Star so i know what to play.....
Most of the songs in Blitz you can use Road Rage, Blast Notes, and Super X and Gold Star it without any problem. There are some though you will come across that requires other combos. Now If I play a song on SR and I notice that there is a lack of notes, lots of sustains for example and I have RR / BN / SX as my load I don't want to finish the song.. So I quit the song and yea I don't mind repaying for the new load out. But if I'm using Jack Pot and I miss a 127k JP I'm going to want to restart and try that again using the same load out. I do think it's unfair to have to repay for the same song and same load out..... I do have tons of coins because of what I did in the beginning, but I'm paying for that now...
For the typical player maybe that is okay, but Zage, IamChris4Life, and myself are not. For all the players out there who play to get the best score you can get or you want to beat your friends and family at a song then I'm sure you will all agree.
Not everyone has all the time in the world to play.. Kids or adults all have other things to do besides sit behind a tv playing one song 5 times at 10 minutes each for an hour...when we only had possibly an hour to play in all... But if we could restart and not lose coins for it that hour of play could only take maybe 20 minutes leaving us with 40 minutes to play other songs....
Use Blitz Creds to unlock the restart option... They are NOT used for anything at all.... they serve NO purpose in the game once you unlock all the power-ups..

[SirDavidTLynch]

Most people don't play the same 10-minute song over and over. For one thing, "Shout" is the longest song on the Blitz soundtrack at 6 minutes, and maybe a dozen or two out of ~4,000 songs are anywhere near 10 minutes. For me a typical run is gold stars on a 3-4 minute song. For the overwhelming majority of players, the current coin system is fine. Most people who have been playing since release are well into the hundreds of thousands of coins.

[VampInc]

Most people don't play the same 10-minute song over and over. For one thing, "Shout" is the longest song on the Blitz soundtrack at 6 minutes, and maybe a dozen or two out of ~4,000 songs are anywhere near 10 minutes. For me a typical run is gold stars on a 3-4 minute song. For the overwhelming majority of players, the current coin system is fine. Most people who have been playing since release are well into the hundreds of thousands of coins.

Anyone who cares about the leader board does play the same song over and over and over again TRUST ME... Ask ANYONE in the top 25 if they don't play the songs over and over again. I'm sure it's more than just the top 25, but you get my point.
Goals???? Anyone who cares about completing goals does care, Like I said some people have jobs, kids, school, girlfriends, boyfriends etc... They don't have all day or hours a day even to spend trying to grind a goal or a song to beat there friends, family, or whoever.

Ok 3 - 4 minutes.... 4 x 5 = 20 minutes at least on one song just so you don't get ripped off by the coin system. There is NOTHING wrong with restarting a song and if you use the same power-ups the game NOT charging you anymore.

Like Zage said what if RB3 had the same system, there is A LOT of Blitz players who play(ed) RB3, how many of you ALL have restarted a song because you KNEW you were not gonna get gold stars?
My point exactly... this is the same thing here... if you know your not going to achieve whatever it is your trying for on a song because you messed up for whatever reason then what is the point of playing it all the way to the end??? There is no point this should be fixed.....

I am one of those player who has hundreds of thousands of coins btw... last I checked I was over 821,000... But I still don't think the coin system is fair on a restart.

[thatmarkguy]

some people have jobs, kids, school, girlfriends, boyfriends etc... They don't have all day or hours a day even to spend trying to grind a goal or a song to beat there friends, family, or whoever.

Some people do. But it sure doesn't sound like you do.

I was the first person to hit the 1,020 crash.....

[VampInc]

Some people do. But it sure doesn't sound like you do.

Not that it is any of your business and very rude of you "thatmarkguy" to say....

I'm just very good at time management... I do have a life, I work in IT, My wife and I have 4 kids from the ages 5 to 10. I'm just lucky that I get paid like I do for only having to work 3 days a week.

Not to mention my oldest daughter and I are currently playing Borderlands 2 atm...

So whats your excuses???

[Epsilon82]

I'm with zage, iamchris4life, and vamp on this one. I'm not actually one of those people who tends to restart much; this is the first game where I can regularly get high enough on the leaderboards for it to really be worth it. But it seems like the current system is excessively penalizing those who don't have a huge number of songs at their disposal. I have a huge number of songs and have mostly just been playing each one once and moving on so far, and I've thus managed to amass over a million coins, but it's very easy to see how someone with fewer could find themselves in a real bind once their double coin bonuses are no longer available.

As has been said time and time again, Blitz is a game primarily based on score chasing. But ironically, the coin economy is structured to reward precisely the opposite. People like me who are just playing songs once and moving on to the next one are being lavished with mountains of coins, while those who are actually attempting to focus down and truly maximize their scoring potential are faced with the prospect of having to mindlessly grind for hours on end just to give themselves an opportunity to improve their already impressive scores. 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.

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. If something like that is happening, and the server doesn't receive any information from the software indicating the distinguishing case of a restart versus a fresh attempt, it would require a software patch instead of mere server-side tweaking, and maybe that's why nothing has been done yet.

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.