What Happened to Flame Notes In Rockband Blitz?????

[metalkorn]

Well said AJay. I am from the development side myself so I know exactly what you are talking about regarding testing.

From experience QA is there to ensure there are no game breaking bugs essentially and that you will pass through First Party hopefully on the first attempt. You would be surprised how much development time is spent on trying to accommodate first party checklists and guidelines, as a developer you'd rather not spend time on those sorts of things but it is what stops you from shipping a game ultimately not the fact that a powerup is too powerful.

Game balancing is a challenge and you can't catch everything, not to mention changing one thing has an impact on something potentially unrelated elsewhere in the game. The final build of a game is more likely to only see 100 or maybe 200 hours of testing done to it prior to submission. At this point they are likely fixing one or 2 bugs so you generally test those fixes and then smoke test the game at that point to ensure it didn't break something. It all depends on your timelines and ship dates.

On an unrelated subject the issue they had to fix server side regarding being unable to obtain more scores after playing 1000 songs i think it was? That is evidence right there that you simply cannot test that stuff in a basic testing environment. They should have populated a testers leaderboard with dummy data for every song in the library to test this but that is hindsight and I'm sure HMX have learned from it, as they will learn from this.

[athl_latin]

Flame Notes were too powerful. Period.

Whether you use it with Jackpot or Bandmate, it created crazy outlier scores that could only be matched by using that specific loadout/method. Seriously, one flame note at 3,000 points = one well-placed Bottle Rocket at 3,000, except the Bottle Rocket cost you 1/3 of your overdrive! AND Super Instruments (Vocals, for the upcoming example) and Jackpot can boost EACH NOTE for 18,000 points? (Correct me if I'm wrong on that last figure, I honestly don't know for sure.) AND the Flames are UNLIMITED with perfect play?!?

...

HMX isn't finished re-balancing. Having a skeleton crew means they can't do a great job of fully testing all combinations of powerups. However, one powerup obviously needed to be nerfed. It is much easier to do that than buff 14 other powerups and hope that everything balanced properly and that nothing broke in the process. I would wait to pass judgment until they get everyone back in the office and finalize the scoring rules. However, they can now use the nerfed Flame Notes as a baseline for the average scores of the other powerups...

/HMXshill

So because it's the easy thing to do you just nerf the flame power-up and clear the leaderboards. So easy, right? and in the process you piss off the top 200 or so of your customers who worked hard to get the scores. I don't know the statistics but I'm sure if they are at the top of the leaderboards it's because they've purchased a lot of songs. If it's not more than the rest of the players combined, it's a good chunk of thier income. Pissed them off and they go away. Somehow I don't think it is the right thing to do.

A lot of people have explained how the nerf affected the leaderboards and how unfair will be to wipe the leaderboards. So if HMX finds out that their balancing still doesn't work because people find another way to get a high score, will you wipe the leaderboards again?!?! What's the point of having Leaderboards at all?

I also don't care for a perfectly balanced game where everybody gets #1 in the leaderboard. Part of the fun was to climb the scoreboard and figure out how those on the top did it and I was getting good at it. If the objetive of the game is making sure everybody gets the same score I'm not interested. It's the give-everyone-a-trophy philosophy. As other people have said, a bigger risk should give you a bigger reward. Now, was that too much of a reward with the flame notes? maybe and that's debatable. And if so, find a way to fix it (the right way, not the easy way) so you don't piss off your top customers. The people here have given them several good suggestions. If they claim they listen to us, they have plenty of options they can use.

[zage1337]

In this thread: the 1% complaining about changes that benefit the 99%. Since we're all geeks here, I'll quote Spock too: "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

According to this thread that is completely incorrect. How the hell does making 1 powerup nearly useless benefit 99% of the players. It doesn't and it's not like only the top players were using flame notes in the 1st place. The game and countless blogs recommend experimenting with powerups to get the top score, and even they recommended loadouts such as Band/Flame which are now completely useless. Also I had/have many 1st place scores on PSN and I probably used flame notes on only half of them. Yep I didn't use Flame Notes on every song, and with the exception of Runaway Notes which are completely useless, I've used every powerup in the game at some point to get a top maximizing score. I even used unpopular powerups such as Shockwave and Pinball and still got the top score even by a large margin on some songs. I still posted some 1st place scores since the nerf but I didn't use flame notes obviously seeing how they are completely worthless now. The game was already fairly balanced for what it was and it's extremely difficult to perfectly balance a game like this in the first place.

It's more like that 99% of the people in this thread are upset about this change. Making another powerup completely useless further removes the variety of the game as now you have 1 less powerup on the table. Balancing the other powerups made far more sense because then you can introduce new meta strategies and not mess up the leaderboards to oblivion. Yes it takes more time to do that but that's why you DON'T RUSH IT and don't leave the issue to the last minute.

You can't nerf a powerup in a leaderboard score based game. Period. Doing so will result in a wide portion of top scores completely unobtainable and thusly break the entire enjoyment for score climbing. What fun is it knowing that the top 20 scores on most songs are literally impossible?

Wiping the leaderboards is a horrible idea and will only piss off the hardcore players even more. We invested hundreds of hours into this game building the skill to be able to post such scores so why should they all be wiped due to a nerf that was clearly not thought up in a reasonable amount of time, and yes the hardcore players matter. We also invest a lot of money into HMX and are the most loyal customers. The 1% is very much needed and pissing off those people is bad for customer relations. It kind of reminds me of "selling out".

Face it this nerf was very rushed. HMX was working on a skeleton crew and it was there fault for waiting this long to deal with the flame note imbalance. They knew well in advance how people were getting the top scores and knew well in advance most likely about the tournament. You should never leave rushing a nerf to the holidays a few days before you want to add a big new feature into the game. This was horrible timing and a very poor way of handling the issues of this game.

[Epsilon82]

So Zage, you were right all along. They actually did break the game for some middling attempt at "leveling the playing field" for these Tournaments that only a handful of people will have any chance at being competitive in anyway.

I really can't believe this. Even after the longstanding XMB crash fiasco in RB3, the absolutely inane handling of Rock Central Server disconnects, the massive imbalances in the coin system, and all of the other weird design and technical problems over the years, I never in a million years would have thought they would be so crazy as to do something like this under such an unbelievably flimsy rationale.

This notion of Flame Notes being too powerful is just ludicrous to me. The problem was never that Flame Notes, individually, were worth too many points. It was that the mechanical underpinnings of the engine allowed them to be exploited under certain particular conditions without requiring great skill. I don't consider people who have the dexterity to play two lanes simultaneously within the timing window "cheaters" or "exploiters," because what they do requires a great deal of skill, and skill should be rewarded.

The problem the whole time was that the engine permits button mashers to achieve infinite flame spread while Bandmate is active on a third lane as long as they mash fast enough across two remaining adjacent lanes. The absolutely insane part about all of this is that Blitz already has a bonus scoring mechanic built into it that could directly and precisely fix this exact problem: Blitz mode. Instead of punishing mashers by making the reward for clean play more substantial, they punish everyone by making a perfectly legitimate powerup useless. In the process, they've taken a particular combo with an extremely high risk-reward ratio that requires a great deal of relative skill to use effectively (Jackpot/Flame), and made it significantly less powerful than a combo that requires practically no skill at all (Road Rage/Blast Notes.) If you want to talk about imbalance, THAT's an imbalance far more unacceptable than even the rare abuse of Bandmate/Flame was.

This is basically the equivalent of burning down your house because you had a termite infestation in the attic.

And where is this notion of leveling the playing field coming from? The whole point of scoring games is for players who exhibit superior skill to be rewarded with higher scores. Could you imagine if they had Rock Band 3 tournaments, and to level the playing field they got rid of the multiplier system because people who hit too many notes in a row had an unfair advantage over people who miss a lot?

[Epsilon82]

Let me put my primary complaint in greater focus here: can anyone give me any valid reason why Road Rage/Blast Notes should be a generally more prolific scoring combination than Jackpot/Flame? Risk/reward mechanics are pretty much the linchpin of any scored game in human history; it's like the golden rule/first principle of skill games (or hell, even luck games.) This nerf completely destroys that basic principle in this game.

To make an analogy to RB3: this is basically like Harmonix deciding that people who play on lower difficulty levels shouldn't be penalized with fewer points. So not only do they make the points-per-note less on Expert, but they actually make playing on Medium give you MORE points than if you'd played on Expert.

That may sound extreme, but make no mistake: as someone who has spent hundreds of hours developing the skills this game requires and has improved dramatically over these last few months, the notion of going back to using a noob combo like Road Rage/Blast Notes to score decently is exactly as unappealing as going back to playing Medium drums would be in Rock Band 3. It's just not nearly as interesting or fun to play when the skill the game demands is so much less. To say nothing of the fact that I will never be able to beat my own scores using the same powerups as before, no matter how much better I actually play on that song.

I have pretty much never in my gaming life been as disheartened as I am right now. I never would have thought I'd say this, but if the state of the game isn't reverted or at least heavily adjusted to bring back any semblance of skill-based risk/reward elements, I'm probably going to have to quit playing entirely.

[DaLynxEffect]

Let me put my primary complaint in greater focus here: can anyone give me any valid reason why Road Rage/Blast Notes should be a generally more prolific scoring combination than Jackpot/Flame? Risk/reward mechanics are pretty much the linchpin of any scored game in human history; it's like the golden rule/first principle of skill games (or hell, even luck games.) This nerf completely destroys that basic principle in this game.

To make an analogy to RB3: this is basically like Harmonix deciding that people who play on lower difficulty levels shouldn't be penalized with fewer points. So not only do they make the points-per-note less on Expert, but they actually make playing on Medium give you MORE points than if you'd played on Expert.

That may sound extreme, but make no mistake: as someone who has spent hundreds of hours developing the skills this game requires and has improved dramatically over these last few months, the notion of going back to using a noob combo like Road Rage/Blast Notes to score decently is exactly as unappealing as going back to playing Medium drums would be in Rock Band 3. It's just not nearly as interesting or fun to play when the skill the game demands is so much less. To say nothing of the fact that I will never be able to beat my own scores using the same powerups as before, no matter how much better I actually play on that song.

I have pretty much never in my gaming life been as disheartened as I am right now. I never would have thought I'd say this, but if the state of the game isn't reverted or at least heavily adjusted to bring back any semblance of skill-based risk/reward elements, I'm probably going to have to quit playing entirely.

I'm beginning to think they are just a bit aggrieved that flames are so dominant that no serious players are interested in all the other powerups they put so much effort into designing.

I was all for Leaderboard resets earlier even tho i'm 12th on career score but now I suspect that the game is completely broken and unfixable.

Put the flames back to what they were and upating other combos might work hopefully. But I doubt that will be considered now.

I think I'm done with buying songs and improving my scores. What's the point.

It was a fun couple of months . . . .

[pelemerengue]

I'm excited to compete in the tournaments, if only for the lure of a potential DLC win. But I don't really see the point of competing on the song/overall leaderboards anymore if the game is just going to be re-tweaked all the time. It means when higher scores are possible, you'd want to play as much of your library as possible. And when those high scores are unattainable, like they are now with flame notes nerfed, there isn't any point in trying to compete--your scores are just going to be really low and outdated if Harmonix ever makes a subsequent adjustment that makes higher scores possible later.

I would be pretty annoyed if my leaderboard scores got wiped (it took a ton of effort to get them), but at the same time, this adjustment makes trying to get any new high scores kind of pointless.

I really wish Blitz mode had been significantly buffed instead. That would at least discourage button mashing. I guess there's some validity in considering the bandmate+flame lane-juggling technique an exploit, but I still think it's a legitimate way to play. In fact, now it's the only way to gold star some songs with band+flame... and not by a very wide margin at all.

[athl_latin]

It just occurred to me.... to help with the balance of the game and prove our point, can we provide a list of songs that we think can't be GS'ed with this new configuration?
I have a couple but I'm not sure how good the info is coming from me since on average I'm ranked between 5 and 40 on the PS3 songs I've played. Maybe the really good players like Epsilon, Zage, Maximus and others can help with this.

Just a suggestion.

[blingdomepiece]

The problem with a solution that punishes the hardcores to benefit the casuals is that at this point in the rhythm game life cycle, the casuals have moved on to playing something else (or not playing video games at all) and your ratio of hardcores is a lot higher (they are maybe the reason you are still here in the first place).

[Mircosoft93]

first off: thanks HMXshill for your detailed statement, I'm the 1% thats happy about the nerf

...but band/flame jack/flame rewards the skill of a player...

why did this nerf happen? Because of an exploit. I can't believe ppl still arguing about some discussion that has ended weeks ago. If your good at juggling between two lanes it will still reward you with some more points instead of those crazy 1.3 mil-points-on-Bang Your Head-scores who stand in no relation to your skill

...but flame notes are worthless now...

why? because HMX had to ensure the exploit can't be abused in as few songs as possible

just get over it that flame notes were OP and had to be toned down especially since the exploit or stay offended for a few weeks until you realize how utterly addictive this game is and why you've played it for so long