Freezing issue in RB Blitz (tied to # of songs played?)

[Epsilon82]

Totally understood that it's not the ideal way to play. Just wanted to offer the possibility to make sure that everyone was informed as to all the available options.

There is something to be said for treating the offline mode as a practice mode; even if you can't actually use powerups, just seeing the charts and recognizing certain track layouts and density paths can be useful in planning for runs. Particularly with respect to keeping an eye out for potentially huge Jackpot activation points. Plus, Blitz mode can be surprisingly lucrative if you get good enough at the mechanics of planning ahead for switches and dealing with the back-end timing window, and you could make the argument that without the distractions of powerups, you can actually still improve your overall play quite a bit just by "hitting moar notes."

Nobody of course is suggesting that this is a viable way to play the game in a general sense, but if you're unfortunately hit by this bug, it's not completely worthless to play offline anyway. I say this because right after release I actually intentionally played without powerups for WAY longer than I needed to in order to bank coins. When they changed the system and made that kind of grinding pointless, I was amazed at how quickly I was gold-starring just about everything I played. I really believe that the practice I got at focusing solely on staying in Blitz mode and efficiently clearing multipliers without the benefit of powerups paid real dividends when I finally got started using them.

But hopefully this will all be resolved soon and it will become a moot issue; until then, though, I think some people may be surprised how much some offline practice could actually help improve your game.

[Pankrazzo]

The lack of being able to play competitive with my friends completely kills the offline mode for me. It's just not worth my time.

[Epsilon82]

Oh yeah, there was one other kind of obscure aspect to this that I meant to ask about or at least mention. For anyone who is affected, do you know if your data is still being uploaded to Rock Band World or not despite the crashing? Because when I first exchanged messages with the #2 guy on the leaderboard, he mentioned that he had gotten two crashes but that the songs still showed as played on Facebook (I think he might have been going for a goal.) I found that kind of bizarre, but I also noticed that his career score had ticked up by about a million or so in the time since he started getting the bug, which may mean that he has tried playing a few times to see if the crash still happens.

If it's true that the songs still are recorded on the server, then I wonder if there's any significance to that. It also seems to imply that at least if you can stomach restarting you could theoretically still play (and get credit for) as many songs as you want provided you restart your system for each one. Obviously that would still suck really badly, but you could still make some progress on a much more limited basis.

[VampInc]

Yes anytime I played the scores were updated and songs counted towards goals.
I'm sorry though restarting ANY computer based device over and over and over again is not healthy. But yes you are correct, if someone wanted to play that badly they could restart and reload after each song. Kind of takes the fun out of it in my opinion.
What I am wondering is that if this does not get fixed soon, does HMX plan to offer the people with the crash with something? I paid for a game that works....... Anywhere else in the world you buy a game you have a certain time frame to take it back per say. It's in the 3rd week now coming close to a month. I could of used that money on a game that works, or on songs for my RB3. Which since I was trying everything I could to troubleshoot this my system ended up corrupt and I lost everything. Yes I know, you should of backed it up..... I have never had one issue with my PS3 since the start. But yes I know it was bound to happen one day. Anyway I lost all my RB3 stuff and honestly I don't even want to put the disk in anymore. All my stats gone, songs I had played gone.. It's depressing...

[CausingTugBoat8]

Yep having same problem. Played 1,021 songs. Gutted about this.

[Epsilon82]

Yep having same problem. Played 1,021 songs. Gutted about this.

I'm...such...an...idiot...

I guess I couldn't help myself and I basically had to see for myself, so I ended up pretty much consciously playing into the bug last night. I was sitting on 1,016 songs played yesterday. The goals came out and so I played everything I could without playing new songs, but there were three I went ahead and played new for the scavenger hunt goal. That put me at 1,019. Then last night I played the powerup goals, and the bottle rocket one was a song I hadn't played, so that put me at 1,020. Knowing that that was the point at which a lot of people got bit, I started to just play Pop-Rock songs for the Community goal.

At this point I had played probably a dozen or 15 songs I had already played before. But of course, as I was going down the list and playing ones that my initial placement wasn't that high, I came across "Every Breath You Take" and thought, "Well, I'm only six stars from the Police goal" and I guess I couldn't help myself. Played that song and immediately got the crash on my 1,021st song.

I find it impossible to believe at this point that the 1,021 mark isn't some kind of "magic number," since if it were related to overall activity, it would have to be one hell of a coincidence that it didn't happen sometime in the last week where I've been replaying a ton of songs. But the fact that some people have gotten further (aSockMonster got to 1,146, I believe) makes me wonder if there's some other specific condition that triggers the issue in conjunction with it. In other words, having 1,020 total songs played seems to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for the bug. Along these lines, I wonder if maybe the fact that the new song counted for a goal has something to do with it. Maybe the people who had gotten further past 1,020 were doing so at a time when they weren't playing for goals and only got bit once they activated and played a song for a goal. I kind of wish I had tried to play some random non-goal song as my 1,021st now, just to rule that out, but obviously I can't un-ring this bell.

I also confirmed myself what Vamp reported yesterday, that on the server side it appears that nothing is going wrong. I promptly received credit for Every Breath You Take (ironically, it also turned out to be my new Best Performance) as well as the Police goal, even though the system crashed. I then played Tutto e Possibile (which I'd already played) and got the crash, but improved my score and it was reflected when I booted back up. Finally, I played another new song (I Shot The Sheriff) and got credit for that as well. My career score has updated exactly as you would expect.

So I guess all I can do now is wait and pray that the fix in the works pans out. Hmxhenry, should I even bother opening a support ticket or is this post effectively good enough?

[CausingTugBoat8]

Sorry if this has already been mentioned (I have only had time to skim read through the thread) but could this bug be linked to the Facebook app? Does anyone have this problem who are NOT on FB?

[Epsilon82]

Sorry if this has already been mentioned (I have only had time to skim read through the thread) but could this bug be linked to the Facebook app? Does anyone have this problem who are NOT on FB?

I don't think it's been mentioned, and I obviously don't know the details, but I'm inclined to highly doubt that Facebook itself is the culprit. I strongly suspect that both the game itself and the Facebook app interface only with the Rock Central servers. Meaning that Blitz uploads your data to Rock Central, and then Facebook pulls it from Rock Central. I would be very surprised if the Blitz application does anything directly with Facebook. I suppose you could test it to some degree by unlinking from Facebook and seeing if that makes any difference, but I'm pretty sure that what's happening is that the program is interfacing with Rock Central, and something in that process is giving the program an unforeseen unhandled exception. Especially since the Facebook app seems completely unaffected; even when the program crashes, your score is still posted, your career score modified, and any goal progress is attributed.

What I'm starting to fear is that fixing this may require a software patch, which would be much more difficult and expensive to fix than a server-side tweak. Hopefully they can figure out what specifically is being sent back from the server in this scenario that's causing the freeze and somehow modify it to avoid triggering it in the future, and that in theory could be done on the server side.

[CausingTugBoat8]

Yes I think you're correct. I am desperately clutching at straws. I just hope it isn't a major problem that they don't bother to try and fix on the basis that most blitz players are more casual and probably won't play over 1000 songs and it's us hardcore fans that will suffer. Grrr!

[Pankrazzo]

This bug will hit a few hundred players eventually, they're definitely going to have to fix it.