The Official Rock Band Discussion Thread - Page 160

So the only think I lose is the $$$ that my original character made, and any special things I unlocked like the golden guitar, etc...

The money you get from the other character doesn't transfer, but you can use the same band.
Edit: I think actually you do save your equipment you bought. So if you bought some fancy drums you can still use em on the new character.

I definitely agree that some of the guitar songs aren't very fun, but I think its still a great song selection. The percentage of songs I really love playing/singing is lower, but the amount of tunes is still about right, if not more than previous games. It just makes the grind a chore. But they definitely did better integrating DLC, and more make a setlist options are available and the random setlists include DLC (though it seems to love to pick the toughest songs on me). In any event its the extra online functionality, BotBs, challenge mode, etc that will keep me busy. Some of this stuff should have been in the original game, but oh well. I'm still really enjoying the game.

Also expert vocals are very much improved, I actually like singing on expert now and might actually spend a little more time doing just vocals, though my wife snickers at me for doing so. Plus she slammed the door on me and called me all kinds of hideous names when I sang Painkiller for the first time last night

There are three kinds of mystery setlists this time: simple mystery setlist, mystery setlist, and challenging mystery setlist. Simple only pulls from tiers 1 and 2, normal pulls from 3 through 5, and challenging pulls from 6 and 7. If you are only getting the hardest songs, then you must be playing challenging lists. Then again, you can get Snow on a normal setlist because it only takes the overall band difficulty into account.

I don't have "Snow", I preferred the pre-BSSM Peppers. I do get how the 3 "named" mystery setlists work though I don't get why I almost always get Blackened. The ones that are part of the "challenges" (van/bus/roadies etc) seem to be completely random though. In any event I guess I will just drop down to hard guitar for the challenging mystery setlists or do expert vocals. I broke the million fan mark yesterday so my failures are quite painful.

Well, unless they changed the fan caps, if you're at a million+ fans and you drop down to Hard on guitar, you won't get any fans.

Supposedly they did. I have friends on my friends list that don't play Expert and are well over 1 million fans.

Reaalllly...

That's interesting.

Anyone out there have the scoop on this?

Are you talking about Rock Band or Rock Band 2? On Rock Band 2, one can easily break a million fans playing at "Hard" difficulty. In fact, once one does this, new fans seem to come in by the droves; my wife and I were earning something like 179,000 fans per performance (regardless of what it was) for each event we did on "Hard" after breaking the first million barrier.

In contrast, on the original Rock Band, we were only earning like 7000 fans per performance and it was taking forever to get to a million, so we gave up on it altogether.

I don't think the difficulty determins very much in RB2. I play mostly in hard mode and I have 19 million fans, I gain fans every song.

double post.

I hit a million the other day on hard, and now I'm up to about 3 million.

They also changed the fan caps on RB1 with a patch as well. This was a while ago, too.

There are hard caps and soft caps. I know the "medium" hard cap is 550,000 and the "hard" hard cap is 1,025,000. After this, the soft cap comes into play, and you only get a certain number of fans per performance, whereas going up a difficulty level will net you even more fans.

The changes to the caps in Rock Band 1 were only to raise the roof on the hard caps. There were no soft caps in Rock Band 1 and you could hit a point where you'd never gain any more fans without an increase in difficulty.

You also get more fans by replaying gigs with more members, and you not even needing to beat your former star score.

I'm new to the actual band play mode. Is there much of a reason to have more fans? Since I'm over 1mil does it really change anything? When I fail songs and it tells me I lost 50k fans I don't even care.



....my drums have been delivered. Here's hoping no one steals them while they sit at front door!

What kit did you order?

Its really just one of those neat progress indicators, for people into leaderboards and such.

In RB1 the caps were hard and you couldn't gain fans past a certain point without going up in difficulty and people screamed and screamed even though they could still play the game.

The ION set of course

That's not true. I'm over 3 million fans right now on hard, and I gain about 179,000 with every 5* song I play.

Right, but you're past the hard cap, so now the soft cap of 179,000 per song applies. If you do a modifier that doubles your fans, it'll still be 179,000 because you're at the cap. Pretty sure the medium soft cap is 7,900 fans.

But that doesn't make any sense. Before I hit 1,000,000 fans I was only getting 10-20,000 per set. Now all of a sudden I'm getting 179,000. Seems to me that I haven't hit the hard cap yet, I've just hit the next level. The hard cap would come in when they start *limiting* the amount of fans I can get, not bumping it up 100x what it was.

No, I think NoThru22 is probably correct.

It just so happens that you saw TWO different mechanisms hit at the same time. The first was once you reach 1 million fans (which takes forever), the game essentially decides you are now a "superstar" band and starts awarding you ridiculous amounts of fans. For example, if you played on Expert, you might typically get 20,000-50,000 fans per set before hitting one million. But once you hit 1,000,000, you start getting 250,000 - 1,500,000 fans per set (depending upon things like venue size, # of stars, etc).

But if there is indeed a threshold for Hard players that is still around 1,000,000 fans, your expected "windfall" will still be a reduced number of fans than if you were playing on Expert since you are now past this threshold.

So you effectively hit "the 1M+ fans next level" AND the Hard difficulty fan cap threshold at the same time, making it hard to see that it is actually being limited.

I played last night with a friend on drums and me on guitar we had just over 1 million fans. We played a 4 songs make your set list and choose all tier 1 and 2 songs and played them on expert. We got 2.5+ millions fans and only got 18 stars. That is insane.....

I would agree only if it keeps increasing at 179,000 each time. But I have a feeling there's another level that Hard users will hit and fans will decrease. I'll have to check the RB forums to see what people are saying there.

It just seems very suspect that the fan cap threshold would be so ridiculously high.

Nope, a milly is the threshold. Now that the soft cap is in place, you can gain more fans by going to expert, but you're going to gain 179,000 per hard song now.

Yeah, it looks like RB2 also resolved a previous gripe of mine from RB1: a fixed fan limit for any set regardless of the number of songs.

With RB2, it looks like you now get a certain fan amount per SONG in the set, rather than per set, which is much more reasonable.

It was kind of ridiculous in RB1 when you would do a single 4-minute song on Expert and get up to 1.2M fans, and then do a 1-hour 18 song marathon or the 6-hour 58 song Endless Setlist on Expert and also get...1.2M fans.

I like the per-song multiplier much more...although there is definitely some SERIOUS fan inflation with RB2.

I was a bit confused by your terminology, also. A "hard cap" is an absolute limit. There's no going past it. A "soft cap" is one where once you hit the limit there is some sort of penalty imposed. So 1.025 million fans is the soft cap for hard difficulty, at which point you are apparently limited to 179k fans per performance. Is it known if there actually is a hard cap anymore? Did RB1 have a hard cap on fans on expert difficulty like it did on the lower difficulties?

Somebody hit a billion fans already, but the RB forums say they nailed exact. So one beeleeyon fans might be the hard limit.

I was amazed that there were bands with 565 Million fans less than one week after release.

Yeah, the terminology used was a bit confusing, which is why I decided to use the term "threshold" rather than "cap," but the overall mechanism he described seems accurate.

I agree that "soft cap" should refer to what you hit on any difficulty when your fan awards become reduced (but not completely shut off).

There was no known hard cap for fans in RB1 when you were on Expert. My wife and I had over 200 million, whereas the leading RB1 band had almost 700 million fans. In some ways, I think this is what HMX is trying to address for the non-Expert players with this change in RB2. Whereas Expert players could constantly earn more fans by playing new sets (or by matching or beating any previous star amounts on already-played sets), Hard and lower players had no incentive at all to keep playing the Tour once they hit the hard fan caps since they got 0 fans from that point on unless they moved up in difficulty.

What was really crazy was that one band already had about 285 million fans on Sep 13th, the day BEFORE the game was even released!

I've reserved my input on the entire until I could play around with it for a bit. Had it for a couple weeks now and have some observations about the game, especially as it compares with RB1:

(Background info - I enjoy drumming on Hard the most, although I will occasionally pick up a Hard guitar or mic. I am playing with the RB1 instruments with reinforced drum pedal.)

1. Song selection - Initially, I was not impressed, but for the most part I like most of the songs. I do notice that my wife tends to choose the RB1 songs when choosing the sets, though.

2. Song "charts" - The actual charts are kinda hit and miss. I've said in a previous post that the best songs seem to have the worst charts and vice versa. One of my favorite actual drum parts on hard is the Interpol song that everyone seems to hate.

3. Tour Mode - Big improvement from RB1. I like the improved ability to gain fans after 1000000. I'm pushing 3000000 and still haven't unlocked every venue. The only complaint I have about Tour is the "Hire Staff" option - it really doesn't seem to make much difference.

Now, my biggest gripe about the game is the lack of a simple single-player progression through all the songs. I realize that playing through the Challenge Mode accomplishes mostly the same thing, but the problem is that the Challenge mode has taken away the incentive to improve my score and/or gain stars on songs. Unlike RB1, theres no simple way to see my performance on a single song at a specific difficulty, so I never really feel compelled to improve, because I never know how my performance compares to any before it. In RB1, I was playing the game up to the day RB2 came out in order to improve my scores (I was trying to 5-star every song on Med and 4-star them all in hard) - I doubt I will be doing that with RB2. I will likely reach a point where I've completed all the challenges I can and opened all the stuff in World Tour and I'll feel like I'm done with the game.

The most frustrating thing about this is that HMX could have left the game EXACTLY as it is now and simply provided me with a simple list of all the RB2 songs along with the score and star ratings, and I would have been completely satisfied. Does this make it a bad game? No. It's still terrific, but it's held back by one simple oversight.