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

[JCirri]

It's fine if the decision was not to cater to the vocal minority here. The problem is that this nerf is more likely to remove flame notes as a choice from the casual audience than it is the hardcore audience. Flames were (arguably) overpowered only in the hands of those that could string together massive chains without missing, or who could play 2 simultaneous lanes in a 4-part song. For the vast majority of players struggling to 5-star or gold star most songs, flames are now completely out of the question.

When I started playing I consistently achieved higher star ratings with blast notes and thus rarely attempted flames my first month, even being nearly 5 times higher in value than they are now. There's just no chance that I'd consider them today under those same circumstances. I'd quickly write them off as useless much as I did runaway notes.

At the same time on the expert/hardcore side, pinball scores can compete with original flame note scores which will still lead to outliers at the top of the ranks. In rare cases of very slow tempo songs with less than 5 parts which aren't that dense (such as Charlene in this week's tournament), it may be possible for a miraculous jackpot/flame run with an incredible amount of timing window abuse combined with luck to stand a fighting chance. Though that's far from a fair reference point for balance decisions to be based.

I attempted Charlene a few times today and could only manage to come within one-third of the top score, but think it might be possible with a single jackpot and single flame chain encompassing the entire song. If anyone pulls that off (or has already done so) I'd be curious to know how it fares.

I guess I'm a bit confused about the intended goal of tournament participation, and more specifically what factors this had hoped to achieve to motivate further participation.

Was it reducing score gaps such that even if scores are out of reach, psychologically they don't appear too out of reach? Leveling the playing field such that lesser skilled players realistically do have a higher chance, in hopes to spread prizes to more people? Encouraging power-up diversity such that everyone feels more included? Appeasing balance complaints in hopes to increase customer confidence? Or some combination thereof.

I think we're seeing already that outliers and large gaps will still occur at the top, and that only a handful of expert-skill players (most who've posted here) are likely to land there. As mentioned earlier, flame notes are likely to be almost entirely removed as a choice for casual users hoping to better their scores or beat friends at their skill level. This leaves blast notes as the only reliable option, decreasing power-up diversity across the board.

I could be wrong but I don't believe the lack of this nerf would have been a breaking point for any player otherwise wishing to participate for fun, nor do I think its existence will attract new participants. It's easy to say "flames were overpowered / something had to be done" when looking face value at top scores on certain leaderboards. But it quickly becomes a lot more complex with a full understanding of the actual mechanics and factors at play, and I wouldn't be surprised if popular opinion is reconsidered after seeing this in effect. Either way I think those people would be participants regardless.

To put it in perspective, for all combinations except jackpot previously you had to hit about 6-7 flames per chain to compare favorably with blast notes. With this nerf you need to average 28-29 flames per chain. That's far beyond my ability even with bandmate for 4 and 5 lane songs, much less that of more casual players. That's also totally independent of song length and multipliers (my previous post breaks down this logic further).

This all completely ignores the side effect of being left with leaderboards and personal scores which are very difficult or impossible to top for players of all types that have been lucky with flames in the past. In my opinion that would have been the deciding factor to lean in the direction of buffs, or even keeping how things were.

Simply sticking to using a majority of 5-lane songs for the tournaments would have in my estimation promoted well-rounded competition just as well, except without having to stir the pot with such a major balance adjustment and potentially revert back afterwards.

While I don't fully understand the reasoning behind the decision, I'm always thankful for the resources devoted to the community. It's great to see important issues continually discussed amongst new goals and content added on a regular basis.

Until I hear otherwise I'll hold out hope that eventually I'll be able to finish playing the rest of my library the challenging way I've learned to enjoy the most. Relying on pinball isn't fun for me, but I'll still attempt tournaments in the meantime because it's the one place leaderboards are accurate.

[AJayN85]

I just had to stop and say you are one very self righteous and arrogant person.

I believe you missed the post where I recanted and joined the opinion of Epsilon and the 1%.

Also, I may have phrased it in a very forward way... but read HMXHenry and HMXPope's posts about the 60 unique posters in this thread not being the majority, and nerfing Flame notes to allow maximum participation for tournaments. Essentially, I was right.

Welcome to the thread!

[RyRobo]

Going to add myself to the 60 unique posters in this thread and parrot a lot that's already been said really.

I don't mind balance changes, but nerfing anything in a leaderboard based title is a very negative and serious move. You ruin the integrity and reliability of the scoreboard as-of-now... I do agree that flame notes had too much scoring potential and this shipped solution might be the easiest to solve the problem you have to also agree it's definitely not the cleanest. If it's a choice between nerfing flame notes and resetting the leaderboards or keeping flame notes as before and keeping the leaderboards as they are I'd go for the latter. The population of the leaderboards will have grown the most during Blitz's launch weeks, and I doubt they'd fill up nearly as readily if they were reset now, nearly 6 months after. In addition, a good chunk of the score proud people (Which may make up a solid handful of what remains in the playerbase) would be demoralised and probably leave. Keeping the leaderboards as before is just unfair though and ruins the spirit of competition, which is a bigger crime IMO.

If flame notes were genuinely overpowered and unbeatable then many scores would be now unreachable, you say that you're impressed with many of the resulting scores of the tournament that reinforce the hope that new 'best' strategies will be discovered, well, if you believe there are strategies that are viable enough to beat current flame note highscores doesn't that mean that flame notes weren't the strongest combination anyway? I think they were, and even though Blitz's random nature means those high scores could probably be beaten it's, again, not exactly fair competition when before flame notes were an easy ticket to a top 100 rank on most songs.

I can understand if the change remains this way through the tournament, but if you want to 'fix' Blitz's current scoring position (Which I would like to see, as I don't really like flame notes too much myself, but as they hold so much potential I use them in nearly every case) I'd suggest pushing smaller buffs to the other powerups slowly. Buffing other power-ups does risk making gold stars too easy, but most of the player base is far from achieving gold stars consistently anyway, as you said, and if anything, doesn't this level the playing field? If that was the goal of these changes, it's more empowering to the fanbase to give the bottom players a push up rather than cutting the top players down. For lower percentile players they feel more motivated because the lower difficulty curve power-ups have more potential, the 1% on the other hand have more competition, and nothing makes the best want to try harder than more challengers.

I also understand you saying though that there is little development potential to test such large changes, especially changes that target a small subsection of the community. If this is the case, it may be best to leave Blitz alone. If you feel you're ignoring a potential problem when pushing a 'fix' then your fanbase will, likely, come out unhappy because they will notice the problem.

A thought on this note, is there no 'beta environment' you could push to these fans to test changes like these? Based on responses you have received in threads like this (And the coin case) it shows a huge playerbase desire to improve, and that Harmonix is capable of pushing changes per-fan-desire. Most of the replies here have definitely fallen into the realm of constructive criticism, so there's potential here I think.

Just a few of my thoughts, hope I wasn't parroting too much.

[S1ckH4nds]

Really disappointed in the response, even though I had a feeling it was going to end up being "well it's live for tournaments now and we're not going to change anything until they're done". As others have said (and I've said before), I just don't have any interest in playing Arkanoid to get a top score on a song. If values are reverted after the conclusion of the tournament, I might come back... but chances are, over two months from now, I'll have found something else to occupy my limited free time.

Regardless, thanks for the hundreds of hours of fun with Blitz. It's been real.

[nunchuck charlie]

I've not said anything about the topic to this point, I was kind of waiting for an official response. My take is that this was done for tournament play. It was done to allow others of lesser skill to have a sporting chance, or so I've read here. Why not just make tournaments so a player can only win a prize once? Then these super-skilled guys can get one prize, then new winner every time. Changing flame notes only made it so the same players with very good skills are now not using power-ups that require a lot of skill. Instead using Pinball and Sync, both of which don't encourage actually hitting the notes but rather makes that skill far less important. Were it people were using the Pinball/Sync combo, I could see a nerf in favor of making people actually hit note to get high scores, but this actually does the opposite. I love this game, I've never been a score hunter. My goal is strictly gold stars. I think tournaments are a cool idea. If the idea is to make it better for the average player, I believe that the only way to do that is to restrict tournaments to a certain power-up combination for every one and limit each person to one prize. Making power-up combo mandatory for each tournament would also achieve the want for players to use all power-ups to their best and not focus on only certain ones. The best players are the best, they will always take the top scores, no matter if you made it no power-ups. By making the best players use power-ups that can get you high scores even if you aren't that good, only means they will be better at that too. I still like the tournament idea, even if the same 5 to 10 people win every one of them. I suppose, in the end we will see if less skilled or casual players play more trying to win tournaments. I'm concerned that the tournaments will actually discourage less skilled or casual players, out of the frustration that they will never get even close to the scores of top players. Nobody likes to suck! That is why the best are who the tournaments really benefit. I hope people do play a lot, buy songs to be able to play and overall applaud what you give back to your customers and fans. I will enjoy Blitz regardless. I for one, thank you for the effort you put into trying to give us what we want.

[Epsilon82]

I could be wrong but I don't believe the lack of this nerf would have been a breaking point for any player otherwise wishing to participate for fun, nor do I think its existence will attract new participants. It's easy to say "flames were overpowered / something had to be done" when looking face value at top scores on certain leaderboards. But it quickly becomes a lot more complex with a full understanding of the actual mechanics and factors at play, and I wouldn't be surprised if popular opinion is reconsidered after seeing this in effect. Either way I think those people would be participants regardless.

JCirri, you are right on the money as usual with regard to all of the mechanical and mathematical underpinnings here, but unfortunately it seems that no amount of logic or explanation of how this affects the game is really going to make any difference, so I want to focus on the part quoted above.

Basically, every time the hardcore players and enthusiastic forum posters overwhelmingly support or oppose a particular element of a game, we are reminded that we are such a tiny portion of the fanbase. I can accept that, to a degree. But I believe it's incumbent on Harmonix to give some kind of plausible explanation for how exactly they feel this drastic change to the game benefits the masses of players who never post or evidently give their opinion on these kinds of things.

The notion that all of these players out there who are so disengaged that they can't bother to post on a forum were clamoring for some kind of massive change to the game that would result in Pinball being the last man standing strikes me as completely unbelievable. I'm also curious that if these overwhelming numbers of players don't post on forums and have trouble getting Gold Stars and thus never remotely challenged for the leaderboards anyway, how does Harmonix even know what they're thinking? How can a company cry poverty with respect to making any changes other than reducing the value of a single integer on a server but somehow have some massive polling operation that can accurately assess the feelings of a huge swath of casual players? I suspect that they don't, and this idea that Tournament participation would have been so much lower without nerfing Flames that it justified ruining the game for most of the more highly engaged players is pure speculation on their part.

The justification provided here is so implausible that I honestly can't believe it's on the level. The people at Harmonix are incredibly talented and intelligent designers and developers, and it's just completely baffling that they could say with a straight face that destroying Flames in exchange for the utter dominance of Pinball would make more casual players participate in Tournaments. Or that the difference between this and leaving the game alone would be enough to justify sticking their fingers in the eyes of their most dedicated customers. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm starting to believe that MaximusDM might be right: that this whole Tournament participation justification is just a smokescreen for the fact that Harmonix just got pissed at seeing the Bandmate/Flame exploit and hastily decided to kill off Flames without fully considering the consequences. And that the whole reason the game is still in this broken state is that reverting it would be admitting making a big mistake, which is something American corporations seem to be loath to do under any circumstances.

Is Harmonix willing to re-evaluate their stance after the results are in? When they see that Pinball is almost exclusively dominating the tournaments, will they realize that nerfing Flames accomplished nothing and put things back the way they were? You couldn't find a bigger fan of Harmonix than I am if you scoured the globe, but my confidence is badly shaken from this fiasco and the incredibly flimsy rationale justifying it.

[Lowlander2]

So apparently the casuals very rarely get to the point where they can reliably 5 star songs, making them very ill equipped to handle the tournaments, if they even vist RB World enough to be informed about it. And yet you'll cater to this group anyway.

This is what's referred to as a paradox.

[bmdbmd15]

So apparently the casuals very rarely get to the point where they can reliably 5 star songs, making them very ill equipped to handle the tournaments, if they even vist RB World enough to be informed about it. And yet you'll cater to this group anyway.

This is what's referred to as a paradox.

They just need to hand out virtual medals for everyone, that way we can all feel special.

Today's tournament - Everybody Wins.

* It's like P.E. teachers who have kids Jumping Rope, without the rope, so they can feel good about themselves and never actually deal with the scary things in life, such as failure/coming in last/etc.

[Supplenuts]

Two cents from an ex-game designer: nerf pinball, reset the scoreboards, or return Flame's value to what it was. Nothing else will reconcile the situation you've put the players into, honestly, besides a full re-evaluation of powerups.

Also, if you're trying to re-inforce "leveling the playing field", why aren't each top score's loadouts revealed in the game's UI? I've always wondered this since the first week or so of playing. It's not like it's any secret without a tiny bit of digging, yet it would be a huge plus for the casuals imo. You claim to be recording the data, so aside from the coding cost, I don't see a huge reason why it couldn't happen.

If I were a casual and actually looked at the scoreboard once or twice, I'd be flabbergasted about the scores (tournament or regular play). If were to know which powerups they were using, I'd be more enticed to be competitive, and probably buy more songs to compete.

[AJayN85]

This high-scoring Pinball thing sucks. Especially if that's how the top scores are being earned right now.

If the end goal was to have a game without One-Powerup-to-rule-them-all, the loadout should change according to the unique composition of each song -- see Bottle Rockets vs. Road Rage. Pinball breaks the system because it doesn't matter what the song looks like -- as long as you can keep returning the ball, the score ceiling is dictated by the length of the song.

To summarize what's been said here and in other posts: Pinball exists outside of the core mechanics of the game and shouldn't be as lucrative as it is.