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

[MaximusDM]

It doesn't matter that you can get 30 million on a one lane song.
ANYONE could do it.
Easiest use of flame notes that any casual player could try would be any 2 lane song, (Redemption Song, Rodrigo y Gabriella songs, Landslide, ect.) You won't hit anywhere NEAR the top. Ever again.

And you can't change rules like shifting to play 2 lanes, or the way flame notes spawn without destroying the ability to hit the top scores already on leaderboards. You can't do it.

Only thing HMX should be allowed to do it BUFF numbers and behaviors of non high scoring powerups. Even STILL though, bandmate/flame SHOULD always be ruling out on top. Why? Because it takes the most amount of work/skill. You can't have a set of powerups that takes a ton of reflex skill and management and then have it equal out to a score that just blast notes highways with road rage. It makes no damn sense.

Harmonix is scared to separate the men from the boys and yet with power ups like jackpot/2x co-existing you see that was their original intent all along. So HMX clearly doesn't know what they want.

As for the tournament, hey that's cool. I'm sure you knew about this way ahead of time. I'm also sure you knew what was scoring high on leaderboards...WAY ahead of time as well. So why punish everyone because you procrastinated in balancing your own game?

Like others have said; so now that flame notes are literally worthless and fall into the category of runaway notes and even 2x. You have essentially taken one more power-up off the table of usefulness. All scores from now on are probably going to have used blast notes. Then are you going to nerf that next?

Clearly the people who tested this game were not at the level as many of the concerned players in this topic. Get us all in a room and we'll balance your game game out.

[athl_latin]

I agree that the decision taken was a very bad one because of the impact to the leaderboards and so far I have agreed with the people who want things changed back to the way things were for flames notes and possible buff other power ups, like the Runaway Notes and Blitz mode.

My suggestion would be that before making any drastic decisions let's wait until next week when the right players, the ones who can make decisions, come back from their Holiday break. They'll see the outporing of comments within this thread and make a decision based on our feedback. Then we'll decide whether we keep playing Blitz or go somewhere else.

Indeed, the timing of all of this was very poor and I hope they'll learn from it. Let's hope that they hear our points and act in a way that most of us can agree with.

[DaLynxEffect]

I've bought about 500 songs in the last few months, currently 12th on career leaderboard and was aiming to be No 1 (yes i have more time and money then sense!)

Unless this nerf is rolled back OR leaderboards are reset I will not be buying another song ever.

And to the paranoid Cowboy - you do know you can have more than 1 Facebook account right? Sheesh

[HeyRiles]

What I don't get is why they don't just do tournaments that are locked to a certain combination of power-ups instead of allowing a free-for-all when only one combination will yield a winner

[DaLynxEffect]

What I don't get is why they don't just do tournaments that are locked to a certain combination of power-ups instead of allowing a free-for-all when only one combination will yield a winner

Because they WANT people to be able to choose their load-out. Saying that tho, they may as well remove flame/2x/synchro/runaway/blitzpower from game altogether for all the use they are.

[Lowlander2]

Allow me to allay some worries right off the bat. We’re only tweaking these things in the positive. That is, your favorite power-up is not being maimed or gimped in any way. You just may start to see a little more competition for your top leaderboard spots from some folks, so keep a look out!

???

[cowboys282]

I've bought about 500 songs in the last few months, currently 12th on career leaderboard and was aiming to be No 1 (yes i have more time and money then sense!)

Unless this nerf is rolled back OR leaderboards are reset I will not be buying another song ever.

And to the paranoid Cowboy - you do know you can have more than 1 Facebook account right? Sheesh

Daly I know you can create another Facebook account. The problem is when they run tournements with real prizes you would need to have your real information. How else would they send you a prize?

There is nothing paranoid about it. When you download the App right off the bat you have to agree to allow Rockband access to all your basic information. Why do they need your basic information? Whoever thinks I am paranoid should ask someone from Harmonix sometime. Some people are too trusting.

[metalkorn]

I agree with jibs that perhaps the better solution for the tournaments would have been play X song with this combination of powerups, that would make for the level playing field and you could eliminate flame notes from them entirely if you wanted to.

Given the functionality on RBWorld for Score wars where you can pay 20 coins to see what combination your opponent used in a score war that it's clear this information is stored on the server so it makes sense that this gets used.

After reading through this thread it seems as if this nerf while not affecting me personally as I play for fun and not generally to dominate the leaderboards has led to alienation.

few possible solutions

Go back to what it was until they come up with a solution for the leaderboards
Wipe any leaderboard score that has flame note usage (this could be brutal though for those with those scores)
Somehow scale the scores on the leaderboard where flame notes were used, not sure if that is even possible.

I still think however that if a single combination of bandmate/flame or jackpot/flame is allowing people to dominate the leaderboards then it is completely negating the idea of mixing up powerups to get the best combo which was a selling point for the game.

Yes it takes skill to use those combos, but it is still something that those people can exploit and people shouldn't lose sight of that so I understand what HMX is trying to do... perhaps it shouldn't have been attempted during a Christmas break with a skeleton crew though.

[metalkorn]

Daly I know you can create another Facebook account. The problem is when they run tournements with real prizes you would need to have your real information. How else would they send you a prize?

Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo - god knows what else. Create a new "fake" email account to accompany it. HMX will contact you via email if you win. I know I certainly don't have a phone number or mailing address on my facebook account.

Using Twitter as an example if you win a code or something on there from HMX they send you a Direct Message. Also, you have to win something for this to be an issue too. Nothing wrong with just playing for the fun of it, heaven forbid

[AJayN85]

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." And if HMX is going to stage a tournament, they're going to aim for maximum participation: score and powerup parity. In this case, the powerup that got nerfed was the bud that needed to be nipped.

HMX has all the data to back up this decision. Every time you play a song, select a loadout, and post a score, that data gets sent to their servers. Just with that info, their data mine can tell them which powerups are overused, underused, score too much or score too little. And guess which ONE powerup gives players a ridiculous advantage over ALL OTHER powerups?

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?!?

Yes, you reading this thread, you earned them fair and square -- and very skillfully, I might add -- under the game conditions that HMX initially approved. No one is debating that. And I highly doubt that HMX hates you for that -- heck, they may want to hire you! However, clearly both testers and game designers didn't expect players to post ridiculously high scores using a limited set of powerups, let alone only ONE of the purple note powerups.

I'm sure the design docs intended there to be a few powerups that were better than others, but the optimal loadout would depend on the song type. What they DIDN'T intend was for everyone to eventually learn to play Band/Flame or Jack/Flame in order to reach the top of the leaderboards... and I'm sure they REALLY didn't intend for players to learn to flawlessly play two tracks at once.

Yes, I can hear you in the back: "the QA Testers/Designers should've caught this!" Having been a QA Tester on a handful of music game titles, and also being pretty decent at Blitz without completely learning Jack/Band/Flame, I can tell you that I would NOT have thought playing two lanes was possible until I saw the video. I can think of one or two fellow testers that might have eventually built up the skill to do it (if they cared to), but I would've ruled those two out as extreme outliers, they having played music games since 1999 and know all about how to exploit timing windows.

Take it for what it's worth, but in any game, there WILL be bugs that won't be caught until the game is released into the wild. Follow my math for a bit:

A QA team of five, each playing 40 hours a week = 200 hours of testing per week. I'll assume a 3 month test cycle, with the game evolving over the course of those three months -- those testers did not play the game as WE know it for 12 weeks; they did live re-balancing and testing on AT LEAST 12 different versions (builds) of the game. They may have played the version of the game as we know it for maybe a week or two before it was approved for release.

(For simplicity's sake, let's just assume they were always testing gameplay and not worried about DLC compatibility for all 4000+ songs in the library, platform/network standards for PSN/XBL, etc. But now that I've said that, imagine having to test every piece of DLC to make sure it didn't crash the game...)

(Also, if you've made it this far, thanks for sticking with me. )

5 testers x 40 hours x 12 weeks = 2,400 hours. (Not even counting overtime, and I'm sure there was overtime.) 2,400 hours is probably more than any one person on the planet has played Blitz. However...

30,000 gamers x 1 hour x 1 day = 30,000 hours.

30,000 > 2,400. Consumers > QA Testers.

Fine, is five testers too small of a team? Make it ten, which will double the output of the team... that's still just 4,800 hours. You can see where the slippery slope leads, but it still comes up short. The open market will always be the biggest test period for any game. Guaranteed, someone in the open market will find bugs that even the best testers would not have found on their own. This is why crowdsourcing works.

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...

... To those of you who went back and played a few songs on Band/Flame or Jack/Flame: you just gave them more data to help fine-tune the re-balancing. Yep, that's right, you helped them, just like you helped them to realize that Flame was waaay too broken. Congrats, you're technically a QA Tester! No, sorry, you don't get paid for it.

Finally: they haven't cleared the leaderboards, but they probably will. Just expect it, because it's the fair thing to do if you change the operating rules of the game. I think they could reset the boards without affecting star and cred counts, but I can't be completely sure.

So, to recap, aka TL;DR:
• Maximum participation is HMX's goal, especially with tournaments coming soon.
• Flame notes were fundamentally broken past the point of buffing everything else, so they were forced to nerf it.
• Designers probably intended players to use a variety of loadouts, not just Flame.
• A QA team of any reasonable size will miss some things that 30,000 gamers won't.
• HMX isn't finished re-balancing, so holster your pitchforks and torches until they say they're done.
• If you want to help them re-balance the game properly: keep playing! (I understand if you don't, though.)
• I'm speculating, but expect the leaderboards to be cleared, if possible.

P.S.: If being in a band at Ümloud a few weeks ago is a preview, the gig bags and the Blitz posters they're giving out for the tournaments are pretty sweet. You all will definitely want a gig bag. /HMXshill