Caltrops - Rock Band - Re: Rock Band complaints

Forum Overview :: Rock Band

by Lizard_King 12/21/2007, 8:33am PST

Fussbett wrote:

Now I'm ready to talk about what sucks with Rock Band past the Strat strummer.

1) The structure of the Band World Tour.

I've played it a lot and yet still most of the structure of the BWT remains a mystery to me. I'm never very clear on where we should play next, or often even what songs to play next. Perhaps this is to mimic the difficulty of breaking into the music industry, but I don't appreciate explaining to my fake bandmates why we have to again play some song we've already passed twice. Then the game suddenly says that we have to move up in difficulty to get more fans. More difficult songs? No, probably the difficulty level we choose for each instrument. We change those up depending on the song. What did we do that song on? Easy/Expert/Medium/Medium, I think. So do we all have to go up a notch? Or just the easy guy? After some internet research, it looks like you can't have anyone on easy to go past 49,000 fans. Ok, so do we bump him to medium and then do more songs and that's solved, or do we have to go back to redo some of the older songs? It's all researchable of course, but so dumb that I'm researching at all. Worse though is how we didn't know this going in, or we might've forced the medium minimum right away, since now we'll have to drop down in tiers to help out the dude who just advanced to medium.

I don't know which of these things is obvious to you, but I'll say them anyway because the manual is possibly the most useless piece of shit ever.

When we run into the difficulty wall (like it tells us no more stars), the lowest one just upgrades. The guideline we used all of the way to the Hall of Fame (100pt achievement! :( ) was "whatever the band manager said to play, eg, hitting the yellow button in the world tour screen. Your difficulty rating appears based entirely on the lowest level player, but it's very easy for a good higher level player to really carry the team. My wife has gotten us to five stars even with me failing out once or twice in a game, for instance.

There appear to be 3 different numbers you need to keep track of: stars, fans, money.
stars: This is the key one. Rock band itself will limit a venue to the minimum difficulty (occasionally locking out medium for me as a mediocre hard player), but beyond that it doesn't really matter. Stars unlock venues, stars unlock challenges (earning a jet, hall of fame, etc), and the only guideline you might want to follow is the aforementioned band manager. I feel free to downgrade difficulty to the bare minimum (I switch to medium, wife switches to hard) for the ridiculously long or mystery challenges, because I'll be goddamned if I'm going to get through five songs and then get crushed by Flogging Molly. Don't redo songs, as the star rating is there whether you got it on hard or easy. I think it's much more advantageous to keep moving on and finishing out venues if you can.

fans: that is based apparently on difficulty level, difficulty of song, and also frequency with which you play that song (more often = less valuable). I wouldn't worry too much about fans, or let your fake band worry too much about them, as it impairs you from taking risks and playing on the difficulty level you should be on versus your comfort zone. We're capped at around 600,000 right now for Hard, and we'll probably be there for the near future as we work up to the Endless Setlist which sounds like a goddamned nightmare but oh well.

money: well, you know. We make ridiculous sums of cash in hard, although that may be heavily affected by that expert bandmember. So there is a point past which 200$ haircuts will be meaningless. If that helps at all...

2) Band member roles in the Band World Tour.

Yes, that is terrible. That, and no mode where bassist and guitarist can switch back and forth in a long set. That sort of "realism" just pisses me off.

5) Cluttering up the song list with those horrible indie songs.

You did this better in Guitar Hero: segregation. Plus the indie songs were way better in GH. Rock Band has a bunch of MySpace yahoos who maybe won a contest? Plus perennial bridesmaid Freezepop.

In general, the game needs a better way of weighting songs in the tour. If they are getting bent out of shape with realism, well, fuck you. My band doesn't want to play that fucking song, and I don't know how on earth this remotely realistic, so let me cut out some of those awful songs. The indie ones haven't been a problem yet, but if I never play the Ramones or Suffragette City again it will be too soon...so the best way would be to allow people to customize their pool of songs and make some rarer or nonexistent.

This goes double for DLC: Just because I like to play Blackened on my own doesn't mean I want to subject my band to it every time I hit "Mystery setlist", and I don't think I should have to delete the song to keep it from being a problem.

Rock Band complaints by Fussbett 12/21/2007, 5:06am PST NEW

Re: Rock Band complaints by Lizard_King 12/21/2007, 8:33am PST NEW

Whoa, I forgot about the manager. by Fussbett 12/21/2007, 5:23pm PST NEW

Your idea: good. by Lizard_King 12/22/2007, 2:22pm PST NEW