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

[Epsilon82]

The dev time required for that likely just isn't available. People aren't not buying Blitz over this either.A few changes:

1) That (Flame Notes are 100% useless now)
2) Double or triple Runaway Notes points - Runaway Notes are useless now, they'd be somewhat interesting at 30,000 points
3) Boost Shockwave just a bit (again, not useful for most styles of play, a slight bump could actually make it viable in a Pinball build over Bandmate)
4) Maybe boost the instrument powerups slightly (Synch is too good too often right now, slight instrument boost would help most non-pinball scores).

It wouldn't be perfect, but it'd offer all kinds of options for GSing songs, and a few options for leaderboard chasing, and most of the tweaks I'm suggesting wouldn't change the average player scores that much.

I mean, of the untouched powerups, Road Rage is fine and has it's place, Bandmate is fine as well (it complements the top tier playstyles, but it's not the cause of any issues by far), Blast is fine, Point Doubler is safe, and Jackpot is generally well balanced risk/reward style of play.

Edit: If they were to patch, dropping the timing window slightly and/or prevening the hitting of 2 adjacent note, and increasing the value of notes themselves and Blitz Mode would probably fix things even better. They'd probably also be best in refiguring the star formula a bit at that point if they want to keep the star chase about where it is.

It's not that I disagree with your suggestions...I'd be inclined to agree with all of this if I were in charge of the game. I just think that given the fact that they're largely moving on from the game here, it seems like the easiest thing they could do is just send it back to the way it was.

[Bront20]

It's not that I disagree with your suggestions...I'd be inclined to agree with all of this if I were in charge of the game. I just think that given the fact that they're largely moving on from the game here, it seems like the easiest thing they could do is just send it back to the way it was.

Oh, I don't expect all of that, but I can hope, and putting it out there means they can at least read it and think about it.

[ricecake]

I just saw this in the other thread:

I'm sure some people would love to see us add Score Duel back into RB3 so we can give the game a proper send off, or adjust Flame Notes in Blitz, or patch in RB2 era character animations, or have one track from every decade and every genre released, or release "just this one band!!!" to ensure that everyone gets what they want. But that's not going to happen. Not everyone is going to get what they want before weekly DLC ends.

Emphasis added. I guess Flame Notes are going to be stuck where they are.

[grace_pressure]

Good eye... Didn't they say that all they had to do was just change integers? Also, their fixing of Blitz might not be precluded by the end of DLC, but no response by the time tournaments are over would be telling.

Disappoint.

[Epsilon82]

I just saw this in the other thread:

Emphasis added. I guess Flame Notes are going to be stuck where they are.

I think when he said "that's not going to happen," he was referring to the part he just mentioned, meaning the more general "ensuring that everyone gets what they want." That little list he gave includes several things, most of which would require significant expense and development (adding Score Duel and RB2 character animations to RB3, releasing particular DLC content.) The one exception to that is adjusting Flame Notes, which pretty much involves changing an integer on a server.

In other words, one of those is significantly different from the others. Returning Flame Notes to their prior value or something considerably higher than they are now is trivial, and that's the case because they intentionally designed the game to have that flexibility (which is why the Offline mode is utterly useless.)

So I don't think he was intending to specifically rule out the possibility of readjusting Flame Notes in particular, at least until he comes into this thread and says it himself. There were too many words between the mention of Flame Notes and the "not going to happen" for that to be ironclad. Not that I would be surprised if they just let this die on the vine, either.

[Hairlooksgreat]

I think when he said "that's not going to happen," .....

The use of a period instead of a comma before "But that's not gonna happen" leads me to believe none of it's gonna happen. I've been wrong before though. And with Drakes comments during last weeks livestream about seeing the sales numbers of Blitz, pretty sure they just want to wash their hands of this game ASAP and call it a failed experiment to boost DLC sales. No more tourneys, no more goals and no more new DLC after only 7 1/2 months is telling.

[zage1337]

HMX has given up on this game, and I was foolish to think that this nerf was only temporary for a reason such as tournaments. This is completely asinine. Fixing flame notes does not require that much effort. If they truly want to call the game a day, then can't they spend like 2 hours if even that just changing that line of code of the flame note value back to 1,500? This isn't something that takes extensive patching or a ton of resources. This is a single change that can end all of this nonsense and this was something that they started in the first place. Had they never touched flame notes, then this PR disaster would not have happened.

I can't believe they want this game to stay as Pinball Blitz with focusing on pinball being the only way to score a #1 score or have scores that are completely impossible and have the fun combos useless.

I like pinball and almost use it exclusively now but I love actually hitting notes and playing the track. The problem is that I can't get anywhere near a decent score on most songs now most of those scores are impossible to beat without pinball. There are only a handful of tracks where I can have jack/blast fun with and that's quite saddening. Pinball is the same strategy on every song and the only thing that's different is note density and song length. Hell if it wasn't for the sync powerup and trying to squeeze each lane I would have been completely bored with playing pinball.

Does HMX still care about this game? This game had balance problems and such before the nerf but it was much more involving and fun before they did this. I don't see why they can't adjust flame notes after they showed off how easy it is to make server side changes to this game on how it was designed. Use the advantages of Blitz being a server side game responsibly. I can understand not spending significant amount of time and resources trying to further edit this game, but the only thing we are really asking is to change a single integer (350 to 1500). That's really it.

[Epsilon82]

The use of a period instead of a comma before "But that's not gonna happen" leads me to believe none of it's gonna happen. I've been wrong before though. And with Drakes comments during last weeks livestream about seeing the sales numbers of Blitz, pretty sure they just want to wash their hands of this game ASAP and call it a failed experiment to boost DLC sales. No more tourneys, no more goals and no more new DLC after only 7 1/2 months is telling.

It's entirely possible, perhaps probable, that they're just not going to lift a finger from here on out. I just don't think that kind of precision of language parsing can be particularly compelling evidence in a highly informal forum setting. It sounds like he was just kind of rattling off a list of a bunch of stuff people requested, all of which were completely pie-in-the-sky ridiculous EXCEPT for the Flame Note adjustment, in the service of just making the point that they're not going to make everyone happy.

Maybe he really was intending to say that none of that will happen, but I think it's worth pointing out again that one of those is WAY different than the others in terms of time, energy, and expense, so I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility just on the basis of that vague post. But it's also possible that they just can't be bothered at this point.

[LuigiHann]

I honestly cringed when I saw this fix among a list of pipe-dream wishlist items, as if reverting this back to the way it was before would be just as difficult as patching the game with the RB2 animations or releasing everyone's favorite song as DLC. I realize that Henry is just a community guy, so his dismissal of the issue doesn't necessarily mean that the issue has been dismissed by the dev team, but based on the nature of the announcement it's entirely possible that by this point, there is no Blitz dev team, so there's nobody even around to flip this switch if they've all moved on to other projects.

I'm basically a prime example of a user who's completely unaffected by this issue, since flame notes are too hard for me and I've never had any delusion that I might even leave a mark on the leaderboards, but it continues to baffle me that they must have seen this change have the exact opposite of the intended effect, and just shrugged their shoulders at it.

[agentnnc]

HMX has given up on this game, and I was foolish to think that this nerf was only temporary for a reason such as tournaments. This is completely asinine. Fixing flame notes does not require that much effort. If they truly want to call the game a day, then can't they spend like 2 hours if even that just changing that line of code of the flame note value back to 1,500? This isn't something that takes extensive patching or a ton of resources. This is a single change that can end all of this nonsense and this was something that they started in the first place. Had they never touched flame notes, then this PR disaster would not have happened.

Two hours? I'd be shocked if it took more than 20 minutes to change the value and reboot the servers (if that's even needed) to implement it. Heck I'll do if they give me access.