The dreaded "Connection to Rock Central has been lost. Sorry about that!" message

[Epsilon82]

Sorry in advance for the long post, but I've been stewing about this for a while and need to get it out there.

Let me preface this by saying that I think Rock Band Blitz, minor issues aside, is a work of utter genius. As someone who didn't start playing rhythm games until a few months after the first Rock Band came out, and subsequently became hopelessly addicted, I am simply amazed that they've managed to make a game that combines the musical interactivity of traditional Rock Band style gameplay with the addictive puzzle game aspects of something like Tetris, all with an automated system that works with all pre-existing DLC. I thought I would enjoy the game for a bit and then go back to playing RB3, but I'm in this for the long haul.

That's why it's so incredibly frustrating that the game handles the Rock Central connection requirement so poorly, particularly in the case when it happens during or immediately at the end of a song. Now, it's not a huge deal if it happens when browsing the list or even right before a song starts, because you just have to click a couple buttons to reconnect and the game even defaults to what song you had selected when the server crapped out.

But when you play a song all the way through, are thrilled with your score and can't wait to see how high on the leaderboard you placed, it's unbelievably deflating to see it hang for a few seconds and know that what you just did will vanish into the ether.

I understand why Harmonix decided to go with a purely online server model for this game, even if I desperately hope they do something to provide the ability to sync with a fully-featured offline mode down the road sometime. But with that being the case, they either need to make sure their servers are virtually ironclad (which is probably not practical) or there needs to be a better way to handle this infuriating situation.

Without knowing the technical details, it seems as though what happens is that at the end of the song, the game tries to hit the server to push the score, coins, and cred up to it. I think that's true because of the fact that every time I've had this happen, the "Loading" screen that usually comes up very briefly before the song report stays up there for several seconds. So if the game tries to hit the server and fails for whatever reason in a certain amount of time, it just kicks you back to the main menu.

My question is this: why can't the game, instead of simply quitting at that point, allow you the option to retry connection? In almost every case, I've been able to immediately reconnect to the Rock Central server, so it was obviously just a temporary situation. Wouldn't it make sense to at least allow the player to keep their score in memory and attempt to reconnect as many times as they want before just flushing their performance down the drain? That way, if someone had the run of their life on a song they've been working on for hours, they could at least have the option to fix whatever's wrong or just wait the Rock Central server out until it's clear.

It just seems that this simple measure alone could potentially eliminate the most egregious pitfall of this system.

[MaximusDM]

I agree. It tries to establish a connection for like up to 10 seconds and then gives up to determine your run was worthless.

I am willing to wait up to the entire length of the song I just played for it to register because otherwise I'm going to be running it again anyway. So what's worse? Having the player wait a few more seconds or have the player lose his coins, lose his score both local/online, and then have the player re-do the song in hopes that it doesn't happen again and hopefully comes close to the score he hit last time.

I'd rather wait a few more seconds for it to register.

[SirDavidTLynch]

Am I the only one who's never had any connection problems?

[SheSaidSheSaid]

Probably. I haven't had much in the way of connection issues, but I did have one score get wiped off the table (and it was a gold star run, too )

[BachiG]

Hopefully this happens on both the PS3 and Xbox versions... You know, so that it gets "looked into"

I kid, I kid! No hard feelings from this PS3er, HMX!

[Epsilon82]

Well, I think the problem likely affects PS3 users more, simply because the PSN is not as stable as XBL. It's extremely rare for me to get dropped from XBL at random times (though it has happened to me once or twice in several years), but the PSN is just flaky sometimes. It's not at all uncommon for people to just lose their connection to the network at random times, sometimes fairly often, no matter how good their Internet connection generally is. The difference is that with other games, dropping from PSN doesn't necessarily stop you from playing an online game (as counterintuitive as that sounds.) This game does, even if you pause and reconnect (as I did just this morning when the PSN booted me in the middle of a song.) Apparently RB Blitz sees a dropped connection at any point and just says, "Screw it. No soup for you" instead of handling it elegantly by allowing for a re-connection.

Last night I played for about 3 hours without any issues, which was probably the longest streak I've had so far. But mostly it's not the PSN that drops me, it's just that the Rock Central server has some sort of issue and can't upload the score at that particular point. It just baffles me that they would treat this situation (especially one as simple as something that is posting a few integers to an online database) as some kind of fatal critical error that requires a complete kick to the main menu.

[Epsilon82]

Hopefully this happens on both the PS3 and Xbox versions... You know, so that it gets "looked into"

I kid, I kid! No hard feelings from this PS3er, HMX!

The irony is that the PS3 RB3 crash bug, which is ostensibly far more egregious than this issue, is actually not nearly as big of a deal for a solo player, because at least in RB3 you could play offline and save your own scores locally. Also, I never once got a crash late in a song, it was almost always within the first 20 seconds or so. So in RB3 you could pretty much never completely lose a finished run. But in RB Blitz, even though it doesn't completely crash, every run you make is potentially at the mercy of the stability of external servers.

[Epsilon82]

Just got this issue again on my lunch break, only this time I noticed something interesting. When I selected my powerups and hit play, the game took an unusually long time to load before finally coming up to the "X to continue" screen. So I was a bit wary, but I thought it just might have taken a bit longer to load because the song (Seven from RB1) seems to have pretty dense note tracks throughout.

So I played through the song, and did well enough to get the top spot of the PS3 leaderboard. But this time, at the end, it didn't even flash the typical "Loading" screen before it shows the results, not even for an instant. It's as though the connection failed at the outset and the game didn't even bother to try checking again at the end.

Fortunately, I was able to do even a little bit better when I reconnected and played it again, but it would have been really frustrating if I hadn't gotten good luck with Blast Notes or something like that and I came up short of what I'd already done, aside from the obvious annoyance of having to immediately replay the song to get credit for it.

[Epsilon82]

So pretty much the nightmare scenario happened last night: I got this error after having posted a Gold Star run on Green Grass and High Tides. So frustrating....but it kind of makes sense, because if this is something that just happens sporadically and randomly, your chances of getting it during a longer song are statistically higher than on a shorter one.

[T-Hybrid]

Am I the only one who's never had any connection problems?

I've had it happen a handful of times. It's frustrating when it happens as I lose the score, cred, and coins...but I'm glad that it doesn't affect achievements.

I understand why they have to hit Rock Central after every song, but it would be nice if the only thing lost after a bad connection was the coins/cred. I could live with that if the score still made it across as SOME point. Even if I had to manually select a "Send scores to server" button to resubmit my work.