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

[Ketchupyoshi57]

Thank you Harmonix for listening to us and restoring the integrity of the game and its leaderboards.

I will probably continue to take a break from Blitz due to being completely burned out by excessive pinballing, but I at least know that the game I come back to will have legitimate competition again. I could not take the game seriously knowing that some of my scores and the scores of my competition were literally unbeatable. It also didn't help that the only effective strategy in a music-based game involved ignoring the music. With the return of flame notes, those who actually play the song may have a fighting chance once again.

The only things that could reasonably be done to further improve the balance of Blitz are buffing Runaway Notes and Shockwave. Those two powerups remain useless for high scores, but it won't necessarily be the end of the world if they don't get buffed. They just won't ever be used by top players in any competitive situation outside of locked powerup competitions.

If I do come back to Blitz, I'll probably just play it for fun and get whatever high scores I can. I don't think I'll do much more pinballing though, because that just killed my enjoyment of the game entirely.

[grumblevolcano]

Rock Band will always be Harmonix's main title. I've always had fun with Rock Band ever since I've heard about it, but even the great must fall at some point. (It's just too early though!!!!) And if this all turns out to be some April Fools joke at the last day of rock band DLC, I'M NOT GOING TO BE LAUGHING!

The April Fools joke theory was probably the most popular reason for the doom and gloom of the announcement. I feel though that the situation with Dance Central pretty much confirms that it isn't.

[MaximusDM]

Whether pinball won every tournament or whether flame note one every tournament is irrelevant. No one won the tournament by taking advantage of a scoring exploit. So yes, this benefited the people that were playing the game within the boundaries of how it was meant to be played.

You can't honestly believe that playing pinball in Blitz in the way it was meant to be played.
I'd imagine the vision was to have all these power-ups be useful in different situations giving each an edge depending on the layout of the instrument note charts, song, and note density, but most importantly be leaderboard viable.
The structure of the song should define the loadout and it was up to the player to diagnose it and execute. But hey, what do I know. I wasn't the one who pitched the idea of the power-ups or their balance.

And if we didn't make any change for tournaments I'd have someone else in my ear about how their trust was broken by allowing someone to compete and win by taking advantage of a scoring exploit. Damned if we do, damned if we don't.

Obviously you're correct that it would of been a big controversy, perhaps bigger than the nerf topic, if people felt tournament winners were exploiting the game.

But can you be honest in saying that you underestimated that the player-base would achieve that level of play with pinball? Because everyone knew the potential of pinball.

I know either you or Pope were quoted as saying that the intent of the nerf was balance. But how balanced was it really? Yes, you avoided a possible "exploited" scoring tournament winners but I think the tournament winning loadouts speak for themselves as far as balance.

Because there is no "right". "Right" is a myth. Your "right" is not the same as another player's "right" and the "right" for the players in this thread isn't the same "right" as the other 99% of the people playing Blitz. We balance through rounds of playtest and get it as close to "right" as we can. Sometimes when games ship, you find out in the live environment that "right" is something different. We've been able to patch other games and with Blitz we've been able to live balance. But it will never, ever be "right" for everyone. RB3 has been patched 5 times and we could release another 5 patches and we'd still be getting requests for specific features, specific fixes, additions, subtractions, etc.

You as the developer make the decision of what is right in terms of balance. Perhaps you saw the flame note exploit and thought:
"Well, that didn't come up in playtesting, the balance of the game can not be saved in terms of leaderboard viable loadouts."

If you honestly felt flame notes were balanced after the nerf, then say it. If they weren't, then cop up to it.
If you honestly think runaway notes are viable in a loadout now knowing the environment of these flame note exploiters that you reverted the point value back to and pinball wizards, then say it.
Can the game be balanced in the environment it is in now? Or is it a lost cause hypothetically if you had the power to do so?

Many titles don't receive any support, let alone the support you mentioned, 6 months after release. That doesn't mean it's a waste of time, money, and effort, it just means we can't provide indefinite support for every game, certainly not launch levels of support.

And I loved the support! But I thought the entire point of this server based power-up changes was the ease of it and the avoidance of the requirement for patch files and all the baggage that comes along with it.

Respect for even responding to my big essay of a post. I was honestly surprised.

[agentnnc]

The April Fools joke theory was probably the most popular reason for the doom and gloom of the announcement. I feel though that the situation with Dance Central pretty much confirms that it isn't.

I'm pretty sure the sheer amount of times that Harmonix staff said it isn't an April Fool's joke confirms it isn't. If it were an April Fool's joke, they would have announced it...I don't know....maybe a little closer to April first instead of February?

[Epsilon82]

So I got around to playing a few songs. I'm rather rusty. I know they've been reverted because if you play a song like Weird Science where there are very few keys parts, guess what? Those flame notes are gone once you drop them once because the next note will be on that one keyboard note at the end of the song. :P

Anyway has their frequency been diminished from the original? I don't remember but it seems like they drop a little less frequently.

I've played quite a bit of Jack/Flame and aside from some bad drops due to my own rustiness I haven't noticed any difference in the spreading. Flames have always been volatile, so to speak, in the regard of spreading, but generally speaking, the more you hit, the more they spread, and this makes it really important to hit as many as you can early, even at the risk of breaking streak, because it seems to have a cumulative effect on how frequently they spread later in the song.

It's also critical to stay vigilant and make sure you spot and hit the first flame note in a chain, because if you miss that, it could be quite a while until another spawns. It's just the nature of the beast; on busier songs with 5 lanes, and depending on how the highway is curving at a particular point, you could miss a starting flame that you never even saw and it seems like they never spawn.

That issue with the next flame note spawning WAY later in the song by putting it in a sparsely populated lane is unfortunate, but I don't think it behaves any differently than it did before the initial nerf. That's just something you have to take into account when choosing powerups; songs that have long gaps between parts on particular instruments can really hurt you in flame spreading if you're unlucky. And it doesn't matter if you "drop them once" in that regard; you can hit multiple flame notes, all of the ones that are available even, but if the spread pattern hasn't gotten to the point where it spawns more than one per hit, it can still put the next one way down the track and there's nothing you can do about it.

[hmxhenry]

I wasn't going to post again seeing as what I wanted has been done. But the only thing "Silly" is what you have said. Yes ALL arcade games will lose traffic after 6 months.

But to act like the Flame note nerf had no effect on the games population is "Silly."

Riles is actually correct, we didn't see a substantial decrease in play statistics after the Flame notes were changed, not any more so than the expected decline in activity 3-6 months after launch. It affected a very small portion of the community and while there were a number of people in this thread who were unhappy, just as many people in this thread continued to play or participate in tournaments.

It is really sad to see this "Rock Band was a bad experience let's move one, LETS MOVE ON" attitude from people at HMX

I'm not sure where you're getting that at all. That's certainly not the tone here at Harmonix. While we are excited to start work on new things (and who wouldn't be after almost 7 years of development?) we hold RB near and dear to our hearts. That's why we've supported it for as long as we have, and why we'll still continue to support the servers, store, community efforts, web content, giveaways, etc.

If you honestly felt flame notes were balanced after the nerf, then say it. If they weren't, then cop up to it.

It doesn't matter what I think, it matters what the community thinks. I have no horse in this race. There was a significant amount of noise about a scoring exploit and we addressed it as best we could given the time and resources available. There was a significant amount of noise about restoring Flame notes so we restored them as best we could given the time and resources available.

And I loved the support! But I thought the entire point of this server based power-up changes was the ease of it and the avoidance of the requirement for patch files and all the baggage that comes along with it.

Respect for even responding to my big essay of a post. I was honestly surprised.

Server side changes are easier than patches, that's for sure, but that doesn't mean that we're able to do it whenever we want to. Any time a change needs to be made in a game we have to consider 1) user demand 2) the size of the addressable audience 3) the size of the active audience 4) dev bandwidth 5) priority over other titles in development.

I know you don't think power ups are balanced, either before tournaments or after tournaments. That's fine. As I've said before, it's never going to be "right" for everyone. You don't think using pinball is the "the way the game was meant to be played". That's fine, you can play however you'd like. Some people want Flame notes buffed, some people want them nerfed. Some people want Blitz mode buffed, some people want Pinball nerfed. We can't do it all, we can only balance as best we can for the majority.

[Epsilon82]

Because there is no "right". "Right" is a myth. Your "right" is not the same as another player's "right" and the "right" for the players in this thread isn't the same "right" as the other 99% of the people playing Blitz. We balance through rounds of playtest and get it as close to "right" as we can. Sometimes when games ship, you find out in the live environment that "right" is something different. We've been able to patch other games and with Blitz we've been able to live balance. But it will never, ever be "right" for everyone. RB3 has been patched 5 times and we could release another 5 patches and we'd still be getting requests for specific features, specific fixes, additions, subtractions, etc.

There may not be a 100% "right," but there's definitely a sliding scale, and leaving a rhythm game in a state where a powerup involving skill completely unrelated to the music itself utterly dominates all other possible powerups that involve actually hitting notes in the song is way further from "right" than the game was in before (and fortunately is now.)

Once again, I take issue with the implication that somehow 99% of the players were fine with this change. You can certainly draw the inference that because you didn't get complaints outside this thread, that means that 99% of players were fine with the change, but I think that's more of a classic example of the dog not barking more than anything else. 99% of players don't understand or care about the game's mechanics to really even have an informed opinion regarding the implication, and it's a bit tiresome to hear the most dedicated and enthusiastic players be characterized as somehow out of touch with the game. The hardcore players are the only ones who are going to understand the game well enough to know how damaging this change was. I guess my issue here is that when you imply that "everyone except those in this thread seemed to be fine with it," you're assuming that the casuals know or even care enough to know better in the first place. Take a fighting game, for instance. If they make some drastic change to the characters that results in one particular character dominating high-level competitive play, it's not like the majority of people playing the game on weekends locally with their friends are going to rise up in arms about it. That doesn't mean that their silence can somehow be logically construed as support for that change. It just means that it doesn't affect them enough to care, nor do they possibly even understand what the change even was. I think a similar principle applies here; a minority of people complained because only a minority of people played the game at a high enough level to be affected by it. Even those who switched to Pinball and won tournaments were saying that this change was terrible, and I think that's very telling. I can't think of a single high-level player who supported this change, even those who ostensibly benefited the most from it.

Casual players, by their very definition, are not going to have any chance to compete at the highest levels in the first place, so nuking the game's balance in the service of increasing their participation makes about as much sense as slashing prices on cheeseburgers at a vegetarian convention. Higher participation than expected can most logically be attributed to the fact that you were giving out prizes to randomly selected winners. It seems a huge logical stretch to believe that anyone was thinking, "now that Flames are dead and Pinball is the only worthwhile note powerup, I'll play in the Tournaments because now I have a chance to win!"

[Epsilon82]

It doesn't matter what I think, it matters what the community thinks. I have no horse in this race. There was a significant amount of noise about a scoring exploit and we addressed it as best we could given the time and resources available. There was a significant amount of noise about restoring Flame notes so we restored them as best we could given the time and resources available.

I think the obvious difference between those two situations is that the flame nerf happened pretty much immediately after the scoring exploit was discussed, and the flame restoration took 3 months, even though it was immediately obvious to everyone that the result of this would be the utter domination of Pinball with nothing else even having a chance in hell to complete. I think it's a little frustrating for some people who may have been interested in competing in Tournaments for Harmonix to have held firm on that decision through the duration. We'll never know if Pinball still would have dominated tournaments (I suspect it would have in most cases), but at least there would have been something interesting going on if the mistake had been corrected sooner. As it was, every Tournament was "which of the four players who can stomach playing Arkanoid instead of a music game will have the best or luckiest out of 50-100 attempts."

Waiting until after all tournaments were done to make the change makes it sound like you still don't believe that having Pinball dominate was a problem, which may be the source of some of MaximusDM's concern here. It makes it seem like you just fixed it because people complained and not because you actually think it was the right thing to do.

Obviously, I'm very happy the change was made, and it's better to fix it late than not at all, and credit is warranted for fixing it rather than just letting it die on the vine like many other companies might have. I strongly suspect that you will be leaving well enough alone from now on, if nothing else because it will be the path of least resistance. But I think there's at least some value in discussing the root causes of this change and the decision to fix, even if they're mostly of an academic nature at this point.

[CJHobbes]

The April Fools joke theory was probably the most popular reason for the doom and gloom of the announcement. I feel though that the situation with Dance Central pretty much confirms that it isn't.

Rock Band will always be Harmonix's main title. I've always had fun with Rock Band ever since I've heard about it, but even the great must fall at some point. (It's just too early though!!!!) And if this all turns out to be some April Fools joke at the last day of rock band DLC, I'M NOT GOING TO BE LAUGHING!

Hate to derail this thread for a post, and maybe I'm missing the sarcasm/joke, but:
It's already been officially stated, time and time again, that this is not an April Fool's joke.

/derail

[hmxhenry]

There may not be a 100% "right," but there's definitely a sliding scale, and leaving a rhythm game in a state where a powerup involving skill completely unrelated to the music itself utterly dominates all other possible powerups that involve actually hitting notes in the song is way further from "right" than the game was in before (and fortunately is now.)

RB's character creator is a great example of a feature that is completely unrelated to the music itself that a portion of our fanbase is FIERCELY passionate about. Just because it's not related to the music doesn't mean it can't be fun. It was likely the most popular power up throughout all of playtest and remains one of the most used power ups by novice and expert players alike. Just because it's not 100% focused on hitting the gems doesn't mean there isn't a place for it in the game or with a substantial part of the player base.

Once again, I take issue with the implication that somehow 99% of the players were fine with this change.

The hardcore players are the only ones who are going to understand the game well enough to know how damaging this change was. I guess my issue here is that when you imply that "everyone except those in this thread seemed to be fine with it," you're assuming that the casuals know or even care enough to know better in the first place.

That doesn't mean that their silence can somehow be logically construed as support for that change. It just means that it doesn't affect them enough to care, nor do they possibly even understand what the change even was.

At the end of the day, that's still 99% of the player base that, in your words, isn't affected. Whether they were fine with it, wholeheartedly in support of it, or didn't even realize it happened, it was a change that affected 1% of the player base. And that 1% wasn't happy with the change and we changed it back. To support that 1%. We do a ton of hardcore support with RB, always have, and Blitz is no exception. We listened to the feedback of a few high end super users, made a request for dev time to correct it, and pushed it through for you.

I'm not sure what else you're hoping for. An admission of guilt? 10 weeks of Blitz time back that you didn't enjoy during Tournaments? We've rebalanced Flame notes specifically in reaction to the feedback in this thread. We won't be able to do that all the time, but in this instance we were able to and we're glad that the majority of people are pleased with the change.