New goals 10/2/12

[doomed26]

I really like the power up specific challenges. Its very fun trying to find the best set-up with the given power up. I would like to see more goals like that.

[BStu78]

Therein lies my ever-present existential quandary. Because RB World doesn't have a HARD and an EXPERT level, we sort of have to lump both of those groups into Hard. What I've been trying to do is create a mix of Hard goals that more aimed at those more advanced players and some that the "middle end" players can also achieve.

For example, I don't believe it's too hard to get 5 stars on most any song in RB Blitz. If you've got a full power-up loadout, you should be able to land on 5 stars without too much headache. Gold stars, though, are another level up, especially on crazy metal songs, so that's a benchmark I try to use for those harder Hard goals.

I think it will continue to be a balancing act, but your point of me (or somebody) giving a heads up as to whether a goal is REALLY hard, or just normal hard is something I'll think about. I may start doing these power-up specific goals in tandem at HARD and MEDIUM levels, to give people a choice.

I think the power-ups had a pretty good balance of challenge vs. accessibility. I nailed them all on my first pass, but only by a bit and only by giving very careful consideration to the strategy I would employ. And that's as a good, but far from elite player. I felt like it rewarded my effort and strategy and the accessibility really encouraged me to go after the goals. They could have probably been a bit harder and still felt achievable for me, but if it required elite level skill, I'd just give up after a couple play throughs.

Having a couple HARD goals be for elite players makes sense to me, but I'd hate to see the hard goals be only for elite players. The elite folks, after all, have a built-in motivation by jockeying for position of the leaderboards. For the casual but good player, accessible goals can be a good motivation. And they can be a challenge. Last week, I tried to do the Iron Maiden medium goal even though I'd have needed all gold stars to get it. Essentially, it was an elite goal for me, but I gave it a shot and got close. At the same time, I also recognized when I hit the limit of my skill and stopped going after the goal. That's fine every once in a while, but if the goals are often ending in failure, it'll feel discouraging.

I've really found Blitz a welcome surprise. I didn't think I'd get into as more than a track pack because my only elite instrument is vocals. While I have fun with guitar, I can't progress much past Medium level play in Rock Band. I thought Blitz wouldn't have much to offer me, but the gameplay and achievement system proved really accessible and fun. Its given a ton of added value to all of the DLC I've impulsively bought over the years. I think a big part of that is striking the right balance in giving a lot of positive reinforcement to casual players and having the trust that the elite players will create their own incentives to play.

[Bront20]

Hey gang! Popping in here to ask a genuine question.

Is it more preferable for a goal to be achievable on the first one or two tries, or for it to actually give you a challenge? My personal feeling is a goal with a HARD badge should actually be hard. With these new goals I'm more able to gauge a hard success condition than I have been with previous ones that just set star thresholds or whatever. I think this process I see you all doing of figuring out different playstyles is actually great! That was part of the intent of these goals, and of rebalancing some of the power-ups. RB Blitz has more depth to it the more we can find different ways to use its power-ups.

Also, if you're wondering how I came up with these win values, it was just a matter of Aaron, Nick Chester, and myself each playing each song with said power-up, and figuring out a fair point value based on a sort of middle ground of how we did.

I'm all for goals that are a bit of both.

Easy goals should be 1 try or just a few songs for almost everyone (3 star a song, 10 star a genre, ect)

Medium goals should be 1-2 tries for most players, but not everyone (30 stars on an artist with more than 6 songs in the game, or a genre, 4 or 5 star most songs, score a reasonable amount of points with a powerup (say, 30,000-35,000 with bottle rocket on message in a bottle to use a current example)

Hard goals should be rough but achievable, such as the Bandmate on the Run or Pinball Wizard goals (many here got them easily, but it took some thought and this is far from a good sample of average players), GSing a few songs etc... (The shockwave and Message in a Bottle goals seem close, though maybe just a bit out of reach since both needed luck with very specific upgrades)

Maybe make a tier of impossible goals that are in the super tough category for ones like Shockwave and Bottlerocket, or GSing Child in Time or Welcome Home or stuff like that? Stuff that you don't expect even 25% of the players to be able to complete?

On a side note, I'd love some odd goals like "Score X points on Super Bass in song X"

[Bront20]

Crazy metal songs are probably the easiest to Gold, just because of sheer note density.

Songs with lots of solos can be harder due to possibly losing 10K poitns with a single note miss though, so it's not always an easy-peasy thing with some metal songs.

[Epsilon82]

Songs with lots of solos can be harder due to possibly losing 10K poitns with a single note miss though, so it's not always an easy-peasy thing with some metal songs.

Yeah, that's one of the odd side effects of how Blitz (by necessity) has to automate the chart generation and star cutoff formulas. Unlike conventional Rock Band, the difficulty of attaining stars on particular songs has much less to do with the mechanics of keeping streaks in tricky technical note patterns and more to do with completely arcane aspects like early checkpoint caps, sparse note stretches, and (most significantly) the frequency and length of solos and the number of notes that are necessarily skipped because of them.

You can constantly break Blitz mode and still easily get Gold Stars on some of the technically harder songs, and on others you can potentially never miss and play well and still not get Gold Stars. But generally it's rare. In 1,022 songs, there are only 2 I've played that I haven't been able to get Gold Stars on after 2 or 3 attempts at most (Homecoming and Child in Time.)

[Bront20]

See, I'm not that good. I can 5 star songs easily, GSing is about a 35% rate though. and some of the really ugly solos I just can't do (ugly in blitz, not nessessarily ugly in RB3). But hey, that still makes me a top tier player.

[zage1337]

The Complexity of Light also had this problem with a forced +1 at the first gate, followed by a long drum solo, followed by another checkpoint that you can only get +2 max because the lack of vocal notes to warrant a +3. It also doesn't help that the majority of the notes were in the 1st half of the song where your multipliers really suffered from the beginning and it's extremely difficult to make up for it. That and Five Magics were the last songs I needed to GS in my entire collection. Since then I haven't found a song I couldn't GS on sightread or within 2 tries.

[Bront20]

The Complexity of Light also had this problem with a forced +1 at the first gate, followed by a long drum solo, followed by another checkpoint that you can only get +2 max because the lack of vocal notes to warrant a +3. It also doesn't help that the majority of the notes were in the 1st half of the song where your multipliers really suffered from the beginning and it's extremely difficult to make up for it. That and Five Magics were the last songs I needed to GS in my entire collection. Since then I haven't found a song I couldn't GS on sightread or within 2 tries.

RBN songs suffer with strange gates due to the general lack of sections.

[metalkorn]

Therein lies my ever-present existential quandary. Because RB World doesn't have a HARD and an EXPERT level

I'd ask the question, how difficult would it be to add an Expert RB World level of goal? I think Hard is fine as it is but I think there should be an Expert level on top of that.

[thatmarkguy]

I'd ask the question, how difficult would it be to add an Expert RB World level of goal? I think Hard is fine as it is but I think there should be an Expert level on top of that.

Or, like, Gold-Silver-Bronze tiers of goals/rewards? For these powerup-driven goals I could surely see something like:

Message In A Bottle Rocket (tiered)
Bronze tier: 25,000 Bottle Rocket points, worth 1,000 coins
Silver tier: 35,000 Bottle Rocket points, worth 2,000 coins
Gold Tier: 45,000 Bottle Rocket points, worth 4,000 coins

Once you complete a goal, you could re-sign up for it, but you would only be eligible to complete a higher tier than the one you already got, and would only be rewarded the coin difference between that tier reward and the ones you already got.