Coin Economy Tweaks

[zage1337]

Okay whether you either agree with me or the others who are flooded with coins we can ALL agree on something..

The coin system the way it is right now does not benefit ANYONE. Either you are completely flooded with them and they are just a background number like blitz cred and completely useless, or if you like to use restarts on songs, they are a hindrance. The coins should be used COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY.

Don't make coins for the power ups. Period. Instead try to make rewards or something for people to spend coins on. People who are flooded with coins will then have something to actually do with them, and people who are bankrupt will no longer have to rely on grinding songs without powerups or jump through pointless hoops just to go for their scores. Everyone I talked to agrees that coins should either not be in the game, or not used for powerups.

Making the coin system for rewards or for purchasing different cosmetic stuff or emblems or anything makes everyone better off. Or how about if we can use coins to purchase new instruments, clothes, and such for our Rock Band 3 characters? It should have never been used for powerups which is an essential game play feature. It's like locking the 5th note on the guitar tracks and in order to hold a combo and get a high score you have to pay for it. It's stupid.

Everyone here is either complaining that they have too many coins and have nothing to do with them, or we are complaining that the coin economy is ruining the gameplay flow. So why don't we just ditch the coins entirely for power up usage. They should have never been implanted for powerups in the 1st place. Using coins to punish and not reward is just bad game design.

Set up a coin store and reward players who have a ton of coins. Make coins REWARDING and not PUNISHING. Use coins to GIVE to players and not TAKE away from players. Only issue now is in order to implant something like this, you'd need a major patch and a lot of rewriting. I hope they can do something about improving the coin system so it's not used on powerups.

Or how about improve Rock Band World and add features to spend the coins on. I like that we can spend coins for peeking on our opponents in score wars, but you can add a ton more.

But at the same time, ditch them for powerups. It would be cool if we can have something similar to Platinum Artist and such from RB2 in RBB, but you have to use coins to pay for an icon like(50,000-500,000 coins for stuff like these). It's these little things that can improve the game a lot more. Or use coins for events and such using RBW. Coins have a lot of potential, but the way they are handled right now IMO is just bad design.

Powerups are not a reward, they are a SPECIFIC GAMEPLAY MECHANICS REQUIRED FOR THE GAME. You are not meant to play this game without powerups.

[Bront20]

I forsee coins possibly being useful in the next itteration of RB if they have it.

Folks complained that clothing and options were hidden behind goals, well, now they can hide them behind coins, offer goals that earn you coins, eventually you can buy the pants (or lack there of) you're looking for using coins.

Heck, they could have an economic system in RB4 where it costs you money to book a gig but you can earn them back (100 coins to book per song, earning at the same rate as you do in Blitz).

Powerups are not a reward, they are a SPECIFIC GAMEPLAY MECHANICS REQUIRED FOR THE GAME. You are not meant to play this game without powerups.

Why not? I know a few people who find that fun. It's also a great way to scout a song out for a good path and what upgrades may work best.

[Epsilon82]

I forsee coins possibly being useful in the next itteration of RB if they have it.

Folks complained that clothing and options were hidden behind goals, well, now they can hide them behind coins, offer goals that earn you coins, eventually you can buy the pants (or lack there of) you're looking for using coins.

Heck, they could have an economic system in RB4 where it costs you money to book a gig but you can earn them back (100 coins to book per song, earning at the same rate as you do in Blitz).



Why not? I know a few people who find that fun. It's also a great way to scout a song out for a good path and what upgrades may work best.

Not to be trite here, but you don't have to play a song without powerups to discover that Jackpot and Flame Notes are the ideal choice. ;-) And even if you know you're not skilled enough to use that combo on a given song, you're not really going to know how well powerup combos are going to work until you can actually test them out by using them, which the coin system actively discourages for players who don't have massive numbers of songs to farm for sightreads.

Blitz without powerups is basically a really dumbed-down Rock Band Unplugged with multiplier progression. I really don't understand how anyone who has played the game with powerups for any length of time could find themselves anywhere close to engaged at the same level without them.

Now, it might be different if they handled powerup-free runs differently within the game. For instance, what if they had separate leaderboards for "Naked" runs? And even better, adjust the star formula to have appropriate star cutoffs for Naked runs as well. At least that way you wouldn't feel like you were a failure even if you played a virtually perfect run, and you would be earning coins at a much more decent clip, making the grinding much less of an issue. It would also effectively double the number of potential leaderboard spots for people to chase, AND have the added benefit of being a mode that is completely dictated by skill rather than what can be at times significant elements of luck.

[Bront20]

Not to be trite here, but you don't have to play a song without powerups to discover that Jackpot and Flame Notes are the ideal choice.

There are plenty of songs that are more condusive to other combos, particularly for folks who enjoy experimenting. Pinball is now useful if you can play it well, blast notes can sometimes help Jackpot better depending on how the gates break down, some songs have some purely evil endings which can nullify Jackpot for many folks.

Sure, it's generally a useful combo for the super-skilled, but most of us aren't.

[Epsilon82]

There are plenty of songs that are more condusive to other combos, particularly for folks who enjoy experimenting. Pinball is now useful if you can play it well, blast notes can sometimes help Jackpot better depending on how the gates break down, some songs have some purely evil endings which can nullify Jackpot for many folks.

Sure, it's generally a useful combo for the super-skilled, but most of us aren't.

I wouldn't really consider myself "super-skilled," but I was just able to easily nab the top score on a bunch of songs on Pearl Jam's Backspacer album even on some occasions with a little bad luck and even a couple terrible dropped Jackpots. The fact that I can easily get the top score on songs even on a bad run speaks volumes about how overpowered Jackpot and Flame is. If an actually good player like iamchris4life or MaximusDM or Zage played that song on PS3, they would have wasted my score.

Of course, Pinball could be useful, but that's not a skill related much to the game itself. And it certainly doesn't jive with your suggestion about playing songs without powerups to discover a "path."

[zage1337]

So I had a session of playing 7 songs or so and had 2k coins to start with. Now I have like 630 coins after only restarting a few times during the whole session. That's it. I am done with this game.

[iamchris4life]

So I had a session of playing 7 songs or so and had 2k coins to start with. Now I have like 630 coins after only restarting a few times during the whole session. That's it. I am done with this game.

This

[Epsilon82]

So I had a session of playing 7 songs or so and had 2k coins to start with. Now I have like 630 coins after only restarting a few times during the whole session. That's it. I am done with this game.

I really hope you stick around, Zage, because it's a blast (or is it flame?) trying to chase your scores, but I completely understand the frustration here. It's just not right for me to be currently sitting on a pile of 1.2 million coins just because I have a ton of songs while top-notch players are fleeing the game because they have virtually none. Especially when the most lucrative general-purpose power-up combination in the game is one that involves the necessity of never making a single mistake for long stretches of time, and even within that there is a significant amount of luck involved in the degree of difficulty of the flame spreading or even when they appear at all. Telling people not to restart in cases like that, all so they can earn a small fraction of what it costs for a single full loadout, is just not right.

If this severe imbalance is intentional as an incentive to get people to buy more songs, then it's the kind of ruthless, craven profiteering I would never expect from a quality company like Harmonix. I'm still holding out hope that this will be addressed in some way.

[zage1337]

You can also take a look at the goals. 95% of them all require you to have a specific selection of random songs and unless you have a ton of DLC or are willing to purchase that specific song intentionally for the goal, you are going to be short of a song or two. Nearly every major goal every week has 1 or 2 songs that I don't own even if I own the other. Not all goals are like that, but the majority are. The clear intention of goals is not to give you coins..it's to get you to go and buy more DLC for this game.

Grouping with people would defeat the purpose of doing the goals in the first place as how I will get such a small fraction of coins unless they only specifically play the one song I don't have which I know they won't because they would want the coins for themselves and nothing is stopping them from doing so, unless I intentionally play every song I own and ask them to complete the song I don't...It's kinda a lot just to work around a system all in order to have coins so I can play this game.

So I can't do most of the goals. Except the general Easy level goals with a 300-500 coin payout which is kinda worthless anyways. One sync run of Charlene would give me 500 in under 2 minutes. Which I do a lot for my grinds.

I have sightread most of my songs(I have some AC/DC,RB2 and left over albums songs that I don't really like that are unplayed), but that is temporary. The majority of my blitz session I am always playing songs I have already played at least once so I gaining 50 coins a song. I usually lose all of that once I restart.

My only possible options of getting a reasonable amount of coins are:

Intentionally playing a song without powerups..aka grinding for coins(like a Role Playing game yayy)

Doing Score Wars(but there is another problem with that).

Unless I intentionally farm out coins on weaker skilled players who have no chance at all in beating my score in score wars, I am going to be burning more coins then I would gain. If I am in a score war with an elite player, I will often have to use risky methods that will require restarting due to the element of luck in the gameplay just to get the score I want. My opponent does the same and uses restarts. These are usually players in the Top 2 of the specific song(Painkiller, Best of You, Waking the Demon, Black on PS3). Not great for my coin solution but it's the only true score wars I get.

And the obvious solution is to not restart the song, but intentionally limiting yourself just to avoid a flaw in the design is lucrative.

If I was a player that had 1000+ DLC, didn't try to go for the top score on most songs(purpose of the game) and never needed to restart I wouldn't have any of these issues. I would have enough DLC to do the majority of goals and I wouldn't care to restart because I know I wouldn't be capable of being the top of the leaderboards anyways. I would be flooded with coins and probably have 800k coins by now and have nothing to do with them right now.

[Bront20]

Unless I intentionally farm out coins on weaker skilled players who have no chance at all in beating my score in score wars, I am going to be burning more coins then I would gain. If I am in a score war with an elite player, I will often have to use risky methods that will require restarting due to the element of luck in the gameplay just to get the score I want. My opponent does the same and uses restarts. These are usually players in the Top 2 of the specific song(Painkiller, Best of You, Waking the Demon, Black on PS3). Not great for my coin solution but it's the only true score wars I get.

You realize you still get some pretty reasonable coin gains from losing a score war, right? You don't need to grind them.