Welcome Home Gold Stars

[Bront20]

I've played close to 200 unique songs and have gold-starred something like 150-170 of them. On Welcome Home, I have about 490,000 points and I'm ranked 21 on XBL according to RBW on Facebook. And I STILL DON'T HAVE GOLD STARS on Welcome Home. I've been trying Road Rage/Blast/Super guitar. I'm wondering if Super Drums might be better with road rage since the drums are much more active in the final checkpoints after the guitar solo. If that doesn't work, than I'm convinced jackpot/super guitar is the way to go.

Sustains are worth more, so the sustains at the end are worth a ton of points. I'd play those and ignore any other tracks outside of blasts/RR and possibly OD.

[Epsilon82]

OBV, Its the solo and checkpoint modifiers that are stopping you from GSing. The chart for Welcome Home was designed 5 + years ago. They didnt know at that point that the song would be put into another game along with every other song from the subsequent 5 years. Blitz is pretty much a (hodge podge) , (we'll see how it sorts out) type of game if you had not noticed.

Sure, but I'd venture to say that probably at least more than 90 percent of the charts in the game were designed before Blitz was even in the concept phase, and some songs seem to have this weirdness more than most others. When you say "solo modifiers," I'm curious to what you're referring to. Because one of the reasons that there are certain songs much harder to GS in RB3 is that they included a 100% solo bonus in the base score, which on many songs is so many points that one mistake could cost you any chance at GS. But in Blitz, they appear to just give 10,000 points for 95% and 20,000 points for 100% no matter how long or busy the solo is.

Having run into a few more of these songs that are tough to Gold Star, it seems that specifically what seems to happen is that on longer songs, if you run into the occasional low multiplier potential early on, the cascading effect of lower scoring is that much more pronounced because of the song's length. Sometimes it can be counteracted with good use of Jackpot and sustains toward the end, but sometimes not.

I'm really impressed that they found a formula that seems to work so reasonably well for most average -length songs. I wonder how much tinkering it took to do that.

[siee]

Jackpot/Blast Notes/Super Guitar.

Just tested it and got 559k - Rank 3 on leaderboard.

[Epsilon82]

I finally got around to playing this song yesterday, and the reason this is so tough was immediately obvious on the first checkpoint. There simply appears to be no way to get higher than +1 cap on the first checkpoint, and the effect of that exponentially increases throughout the song. I was using Road Rage/Blast Notes/Super Guitar, and ended up a shade over 500K. It was hard to tell but it appeared I was extremely close to Gold Stars anyway based on where Duke's arrow was.

But siee's got the right idea. Jackpot/Blast Notes/Super Guitar is pretty much the golden combo for most songs in general, but Jackpot in particular seems to be absolutely critical for these longer songs that have low cap raises early on. I'm pretty confident that I could easily have had well more than the 5-10K I probably came up short if I used Jackpot well late in the song. Road Rage just doesn't seem to pay off as well in longer songs because of the randomness. Getting 3X in a Super Lane when the multipliers are really high is just an enormous amount of points in most cases.

[zage1337]

I am actually starting to wonder if the 100% solo bonus scores are actually affecting the Rock Band Blitz cut-offs despite only getting 20k no matter what the solo is. I made a thread about Child in Time and it's the only song so far that looks impossible to GS thanks to how the solos are calculated in the game.

[Epsilon82]

I am actually starting to wonder if the 100% solo bonus scores are actually affecting the Rock Band Blitz cut-offs despite only getting 20k no matter what the solo is. I made a thread about Child in Time and it's the only song so far that looks impossible to GS thanks to how the solos are calculated in the game.

I don't think that's the case, mostly because there are plenty of songs with long and busy solos that are still easy to gold star. I haven't played Child in Time yet (honestly I can't even remember if I own it) but do you know if there are early checkpoints that only have a +1 or even a +2 cap? That's what seems to be causing the issue in Welcome Home, and last night I ran into the same thing in Teen Age Riot. There are only five Bass notes in the first checkpoint, and that caps your multipliers at +1. If that happens early, it completely screws you because you're actually getting 2 fewer multipliers at every point in the song. I even played the song again (changing to Super Drums because the parts get crazy) and got fairly close to Gold Stars, but even with the #2 score on the PS3 leaderboard I couldn't quite get them. I'd imagine I'd have to try to use Jackpot on those crazy busy drum parts near the end to pull it off, but that would be pretty risky.

I'm pretty confident that the problem is related to the game not recognizing or accounting for the disproportionate cascading impact of early low multipliers. But I'd have to take a closer look at Child in Time to see if that fits into this category.

If it's not just that, maybe there's another aspect of solos that could be affecting it. Obviously, since the charts are generated from the existing RB note charts, there are a potentially a ton of notes that Blitz could be ignoring? What if there's some issue with the game's thinking you can switch lanes to hit more notes when you actually can't? What makes me wonder about this is the fact that GGAHT doesn't have solos at all (I think they may have set a time limit for solos and then just didn't include them if they exceed that length.) Maybe it's not the 20,000 bonus exactly that causes it, but the fact that there are a lot of other notes that you can't hit during the solo and somehow the game isn't accounting for that?

I'll check and see if I have Child in Time when I get home for lunch and give it a try if I do.