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f4phantom2500
Joined: 15 Mar 2007
Posts: 2885
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 Posted: Mon Jul 05, 2010 9:53 am Post subject: |
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| TheZenRoom wrote: | | I think it's a bit ridiculous to say that anyone who'd never played RB before but put on a skit would have done just as well as any of the 4 finalist bands in this year's tournament. After all, the qualifying round that determined who even GOT to go to Atlantic City was entirely based on in-game score and nothing else. For example, you can't reasonably say that bands who scored over 2.5 million on "Get Up" have NO skill at playing RB2. I will however be the first to admit that "Get Up" was the easiest song on the qualifying list to get a very high score on. But hey, we (ROFL Mao) didn't make that list, we just looked at it and decided to do the song we thought would best get us to Atlantic City...and I know we weren't the only ones who came to the same conclusion. |
I don't think it's ridiculous. The judges didn't seem to care if people did poorly anyway, so if you were able to get in it didn't matter how good you were at the game in regards to getting into the top four. There were at least 1 or 2 qualifying locations where nobody showed up and thus literally any group of 3 or 4 people who could go up there and pass any of the qualifying songs on medium would have gotten in. Apparently, as long as this hypothetical band could 3* Smells Like Teen Spirit in the first round in AC, they would have enough technical skill to get into the final round. Getting over 2.5 mil on Get Up is all about pathing and involves very little skill; since everyone within the competition has met a standard of game skill in order to get there in the first place, albeit a low standard, there is much room for comparison of technical skill between said bands. Of course so many bands picked Get Up, for the obvious reason that you stated. I'm not saying it's a bad strategy, but I don't think a song that easy and worth that many points should have been on the list to begin with. With Get Up, there's literally no reason for any band to play either of the point-heavier songs, even if they could do as well on them.
| TheZenRoom wrote: |
Also, I should mention that Kyle from Harmonix spoke to the finalist bands at sound check on Day 2 and informed us that the audio technicians used the fader on their sound board to cut the game audio out between songs. According to him, that destroyed the audio calibration they had set the system to at the start of Day 1, so only the very first band got the benefit of the correct intended calibration. Every band that followed them had to deal with horrible audio lag, which made playing by ear near-impossible, and often forced bands to choose between putting on their intended performance, or gluing their eyes to the screens to ensure they could get a decent score. |
Conversely, there was a much larger crowd as the day wore on. Everyone had their own hurdles, some being worse than others. I'd argue that it's better to have a big crowd and bad calibration than good calibration and no crowd, especially since a large part of the judging was based on crows interaction and response. After all, it's pretty clear that they were ultimately looking for a band to entertain people. Further, I really don't think calibration would have made *that* much of a difference; it's easy enough to play by site, especially considering the caliber of songs that most bands picked, and that they couldn't fail, and those TVs were calibrated well enough to my eyes.
| Quote: | | Since Day 1 was the performance round where it was clearly explained that the in-game score didn't matter, |
Read youhas's post.
| Quote: | | I'm not surprised that most of the bands decided to concentrate on the showmanship aspects of what they had planned, and say screw it to scoring high so that they wouldn't be called out for having "Rock Band Face". Sure, that meant a lot of missed notes and nosedives into the red on occasion, but it's not like there was anything anyone could do to fix that, short of forgoing performance entirely, which I believe would have been an even worse choice. |
You're right, foregoing performance entirely would be a much worse choice, especially since no fail was on and the judges didn't seem to care about technical skill or score regardless. If the lag situation was so bad that people's only reasonable choice was to bomb the songs and focus entirely on performance, as you say, then I feel for you guys having to deal with it. But technical skill and score weren't considered anyway, as you've already pointed out, and since no fail ended up being on, said nosedives into the red meant no in-game consequences. It wouldn't have made a difference one way or another if they had focused on doing well regardless.
| Quote: | | For Day 2, Kyle made sure that the techs used the kill switch to mute the game audio instead of the fader, thus eliminating this particular issue. Keep in mind that I'm only reporting what Kyle told us on Day 2 about the cause of the audio mis-calibration, these are not conclusions I'm making on my own in any way, shape or form. |
So are you saying that the calibration was fixed the second day, or are you saying that the cause of the lag was something different entirely?
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Kawigi
Joined: 27 Feb 2008
Posts: 2879
Location: Redmond, WA
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| Posted: Mon Jul 05, 2010 10:44 am Post subject: |
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Being able to understand where both of you are coming from here, and having followed both the compliments and complaints about the contest (some of them firsthand :-) ), I'd like to share a potential insight about RB and this competition.
If you go to Harmonix's website and read about the company, you'll see some version of the line "Harmonix was founded with a simple mission: To make the thrills of music-making accessible to non-musicians." Well, change "music-making" to "a live musical performance" and "Harmonix" to "The Total Rock, Total Rewards Contest", and I think you'd get a statement that is almost as true. Giving a great musical performance is a related but completely different kind of skill than playing great music.
And it's hardly surprising that the metaphorical Gene Simmons of the competition and the metaphorical John Petrucci of the competition would have differing views on how things should have been done :-)
I enjoyed Rofl Mao's final performance live, but I didn't get to see their first-round performance (we were on-deck at the practice stage at the time). I did hear it went pretty badly from a gameplay perspective, though. I didn't get to see Here Comes a New Challenger perform live on account of not getting off my butt early enough in the day, but I did watch the video of it, and I enjoyed the whole thing, even though I saw some flaws in it. Maybe it's true that HCaNC would have scored better with a similar performance later in the day, and yes, that sucks, but it probably still wouldn't have gotten you to the next round without putting more effort into your appearance.
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f4phantom2500
Joined: 15 Mar 2007
Posts: 2885
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| Posted: Mon Jul 05, 2010 11:09 am Post subject: |
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| Kawigi wrote: | | Maybe it's true that HCaNC would have scored better with a similar performance later in the day, and yes, that sucks, but it probably still wouldn't have gotten you to the next round without putting more effort into your appearance. |
I don't know, apparently if we'd all wore black shirts and red ties instead of different colored shirts and black ties we would have gotten 3~4 points higher for costume. Or maybe it was because that band played later in the day. That look was the look that we were going for; unassuming inconspicuous dress, then flat out destroy with skill and rocking out. Unfortunately for us, the entire theme of the costume relative to our performance and relative to our entire display didn't seem to be relevant, since the tasteful understated look was unoriginal enough to more than cancel out our technical advantage, even though it was the same look we went with for the Spike TV RB2 premier. We figured that everyone would be doing crazy over the top costumes and just going all out with that, hashing together different ideas for different rounds instead of trying to make a cohesive overall image, and that our simple, more elegant and connected image would, at the very least, not completely negate our higher technical merit. In any case, there is no way that any discrepancy in our costume was at all close to the discrepancy in technical skill displayed by us relative to the other bands. But, again, technical skill wasn't a determining factor anyway so our whole concept just falls apart here. At least we know what to do next year: go as over the top with costumes and stage antics as possible while not focusing on doing technically well at all.
_________________
Here''''''''s a playlist of my FC videos of the 7 hardest songs to FC in GH1...also Cheat on the Church:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=4A83D02058247AC5
***subscribe plz*** (hint: playing along to vids can help you in GH1 ;) PM me if you need song/section-specific advice).
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Hitoshura
Joined: 17 Mar 2007
Posts: 611
Location: Oakland, CA
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| Posted: Mon Jul 05, 2010 3:15 pm Post subject: |
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| TheZenRoom wrote: | | I should mention that Kyle from Harmonix spoke to the finalist bands at sound check on Day 2 and informed us that the audio technicians used the fader on their sound board to cut the game audio out between songs. According to him, that destroyed the audio calibration they had set the system to at the start of Day 1, so only the very first band got the benefit of the correct intended calibration. Every band that followed them had to deal with horrible audio lag, which made playing by ear near-impossible, and often forced bands to choose between putting on their intended performance, or gluing their eyes to the screens to ensure they could get a decent score. |
I find this very interesting, as it explains several things for me. First, our band went to great lengths to avoid the "rock band face" by practicing our parts not looking at the screen/in performance mode. As the drummer, I couldn't look at the bottom of the screen to play by visual cues anyway because the yellow cymbal was completely blocking my view of most of my screen. I figured it was no big deal, as I'd practiced playing the song by ear anyway, but given the quoted information, it's no wonder I missed so many easy unison bonuses, attempting to hit them my audio cues only. Based on TheZenRoom's information from Kyle, this may account for a large part of the degradation of our score (four stars on stage, versus gold stars EVERY TIME in practice), and likely other bands' scores as well.
Granted, I think it's fair to expect to do worse live than in your living room, but it's not only us that had problems. The vocalist in nearly every band I saw would at times start singing phrases early, so something was definitely going on. Maybe they were looking at the screen at those times, and so were dead on according to the game, but they were way off the game audio coming through the speakers.
What I'm getting at is that I don't think the scores for the performances on stage are an accurate reflection of the skill levels of the bands that were performing, and the judges may have known this. I wonder if it was just a simple offset after the first band, or if it changed completely every time a new band went on? Perhaps the judges became aware of this problem with the audio lag sometime during the first half of the day 1 performances, realized there was nothing they could do about it in the short-term, and so decided not to penalize bands for something they had no control over and wasn't their fault. Instead, they went with giving them the benefit of the doubt in the game score category. Can you imagine how much worse things would have been if they had criticized some bands for their poor game scores, and it was found later that it was likely due to a technical issue independent of the band's skill? Maybe, given the circumstances, the judges had no choice but to exclude game skill from consideration during day 1.
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CowShark
Joined: 30 Nov 2007
Posts: 325
Location: DFW - Texas
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| Posted: Mon Jul 05, 2010 3:35 pm Post subject: |
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I just wanted to hit a note of "lounge act gone metal," which we sorta got at, but wasn't received as totally rad. Bummer. The way the audio thing sounds, it seems like it'd be a volume problem that'd only really slam the vocalist, so I'd bet the ones who were barely passing or riding out the no-fail were the ones with real problems, and everyone else had a similar setup to the (our) first band.
Anyway, the rules may or may not be the same if there's another one of these, so who knows what we'd wan't to focus on at that time. I do understand that our getups (getonups) were not on the level with the bands that moved forward, and it seems like good costumes/catchy song choices carried over favorably to other categories of judging. So I think we kind of stepped on our own feet a couple times out of the gate. You live, you learn.
Had a fucking blast though. Congratulations to the winners, and I'd come back for another one of these in a heartbeat, even if I knew that we had no chance of winning, just to hang out with all the awesome dudes and ladies that I hung out with this time, especially (alphabetically) Draktyr, Icemage, Mephistojak, Paradise, Shift, Sophie, and Youhas.
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count220
Joined: 13 Feb 2008
Posts: 176
Location: New York City
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| Posted: Mon Jul 05, 2010 6:04 pm Post subject: |
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Hey folks... Smeeguel from Science!!! here.
Just thought I'd give my $0.02 regarding the judging of this competition.
I wish I could say that I'm 100% shocked with our high technical score despite barely 3-starring it on stage. To be honest, we took a calculated risk and assumed that the "game mastery" category was BS, and the event organizers wanted the four best performers in the finals. It's a risk that could have backfired in a big way, but we thought about it like this... the qualifiers were designed to weed out bands who weren't that good score-wise. Generally speaking, if you won a qualifier, it's safe to assume that you know your way around a plastic instrument.
We can gold-star SLTS on command, just like I'm sure most bands in attendance could gold-star their song of choice in their living rooms. We bet on the fact that MTV knew this and they would instead place priority on looks and performance in AC.
I can't speak for all of Science!!!, but I'll be the first to admit I'm not in the same league as most of you score-wise. I hardly ever compete in score-only competitions because #1 I'm not that good and #2 I have way much more fun acting like an idiot onstage.
Still, I can 99% SLTS consistently on X guitar, and I went as far as memorizing the part so I could focus on performance. In AC, I played roughly 80% of the song without looking at the screen... and I still got a score in the 90s (95% I think?... the adrenaline got the best of me and honestly I can't remember).
There's a note-heavy spot right before the solo where the choreography called for me to switch hands and tap the solo left-handed. I knew I'd dip into the red while switching hands, but again it was a calculated risk and part of the performance... Other than that, I should have been hitting most of my notes unless there was serious lag... again, I was barely looking at the screen so I can't say whether I "failed out" in other places.
I wish we had a video of the performance to see where we went wrong on a technical level. SLTS is a hard song to 5-star when you're not pathing at all. OD auto-deployed every time I jumped, and it's hard to keep a streak going when you're crowd surfing. Lucky for us, our risk paid off and the judges awarded higher "technical" scores to the bigger performances.
Having competed in TRTR twice, making the final four both times and winning once, my advice to anyone playing next year is this: If you made it to AC, we all know you're good at Rock Band. Probably REALLY good. Don't treat the AC round as a video game competition. Focus on stage presence and putting on a show that non-RB people want to see. Be larger than life. Show the judges costumes and moves they've never seen before.
Sour grapes aside, the entire weekend was a blast, and we would have had just as much fun (if not more) had we been eliminated on Thursday. I'm already looking forward to next year. If any of your find yourselves in the NYC area, make sure you swing by our RB night at the Pourhouse, where members of Science!!!, ROFL Mao and a few other competitors hang out regularly.
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f4phantom2500
Joined: 15 Mar 2007
Posts: 2885
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| Posted: Mon Jul 05, 2010 7:17 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | What I'm getting at is that I don't think the scores for the performances on stage are an accurate reflection of the skill levels of the bands that were performing, and the judges may have known this. I wonder if it was just a simple offset after the first band, or if it changed completely every time a new band went on? Perhaps the judges became aware of this problem with the audio lag sometime during the first half of the day 1 performances, realized there was nothing they could do about it in the short-term, and so decided not to penalize bands for something they had no control over and wasn't their fault. Instead, they went with giving them the benefit of the doubt in the game score category. Can you imagine how much worse things would have been if they had criticized some bands for their poor game scores, and it was found later that it was likely due to a technical issue independent of the band's skill? Maybe, given the circumstances, the judges had no choice but to exclude game skill from consideration during day 1. |
I definitely see your point, but even if it did all work right for everyone, we played a far more difficult song than anyone else, so even if people were doing very well at their songs the technical skill displayed would have still been lower than what we put up. It sounds like pretty much every other band did get shafted with the lag, I mean as easy as Get Up is, it does show that those that qualified have a basic command of the game that was largely unseen in AC. But I digress.
The important thing is it looks like we all had a good time up in AC, despite any competition shenanigans. All anyone can do is cross their fingers and hope that next year things go more smoothly in that regard. But I think everyone pretty much knows that next year is gonna be even more badass in terms of just hanging out and having a badass time. Cheers to those who won, clearly you guys knew what the judges wanted; 3 of the 4 finalists were there last year, after all, so kudos to you guys for blowing everyone away with your costumes and stage performances.
An aside for a moment. I know there's some tension between us and some of the other bands, let's not pretend there isn't. I know some people think we were sore losers (which I think is wild; we rocked for FA/KE and DeLorean Racers in the finals. I was even the guy yelling Rock Like an Egyptian). I just really wish those people would step back and think of this from our perspective. We thought skill level would be taken more into consideration, but having not been there before, not knowing what the judges were looking for, and being the first band up, we were totally walking around in the dark. We actually thought Screaming for Vengeance might not be technically difficult enough. Of course we were upset; I'm pretty sure that, on the whole, we were the most technically skilled band there. I could be wrong, but I find it unlikely; I FC'ed GH1 and 2 and we got someguy913 on drums. If anyone there was as technically good as us, I wish I's known because UI love meeting that kind of talent. We definitely displayed the most technical skill on stage, and we just assumed that, in a video game competition, technical skill at the game would be taken into consideration, especially with the 1/3 Game Skill category. Understandably, it sounds like the whole lag issue really screwed everyone else over, but in the end the judges see "Gold * Screaming for Vengeance" (btw our score was still total trash...1.5 mil? I was embarrassed.) vs "not gold * anything else, which is all easier". We went in there thinking that would count for something, but it didn't. So, even though the painstaking time and effort that many of the other bands put into costume and choreography were rewarded, the painstaking cumulative time that we've put into straight up getting technically good at the game was ignored. But that's just how it goes sometimes. So, again, please understand. We just needed some time to blow off steam etc, and I really don't think that anyone, especially who made it into the top 4, should take anything like that personally; you guys won! You guys clearly knew what you were doing in this tournament, and it paid off. Congratulations.
So, I think we've all spoken our peace and hopefully we can just let any drama go and just be cool, because I know nobody wants to deal with drama, and everyone just wants to have a good time. I think that, once we let this all go, we'll see that the involved bands are actually pretty cool groups of dudes and chicks  .
_________________
Here''''''''s a playlist of my FC videos of the 7 hardest songs to FC in GH1...also Cheat on the Church:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=4A83D02058247AC5
***subscribe plz*** (hint: playing along to vids can help you in GH1 ;) PM me if you need song/section-specific advice).
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wuLFe
Joined: 18 Aug 2006
Posts: 2679
Location: Richmond, IN
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| Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2010 11:46 am Post subject: |
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After skimming through this thread, I am once again eternally grateful that I didn't qualify for this - I fail to see the point in having this tournament involve Rock Band when the actual game seems entirely incidental - Why not just blast some "hip ol' Rock 'n Roll" in the background and have people play air guitar - seems to amount to the same thing.
Anyhow - congrats to the finalists and the winners, and I hope y'all had a blast in Atlantic City!!!! |
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Icemage
Joined: 11 May 2008
Posts: 3200
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| Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2010 2:16 pm Post subject: |
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| wuLFe wrote: | | After skimming through this thread, I am once again eternally grateful that I didn't qualify for this - I fail to see the point in having this tournament involve Rock Band when the actual game seems entirely incidental - Why not just blast some "hip ol' Rock 'n Roll" in the background and have people play air guitar - seems to amount to the same thing. |
I made some joking comments this past week about how the tournament was really a karaoke cosplay tournament, not a Rock Band tournament. And I know I'm not the only one.
Don't get me wrong, though, David - we had a very, very good time, and I wish you would have made it out to join us. The competition itself was rather ridiculous, but the good times were very much real.
I'm looking forward to doing this again next year!
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count220
Joined: 13 Feb 2008
Posts: 176
Location: New York City
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| Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2010 5:04 pm Post subject: |
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| Icemage wrote: | | I made some joking comments this past week about how the tournament was really a karaoke cosplay tournament, not a Rock Band tournament. And I know I'm not the only one. |
That sounds about right. The semis and finals are a stage show with plastic instruments. High score is a plus, not a requisite. I don't see that changing any time soon. A stage production looks way better on TV than a score competition... and MTV is running the contest for mainstream appeal. As long as there are judges giving out subjective scores, they're going to give the nod to whoever they think "looks the part," regardless of technical skill. As long as you go in with the right expectations, you should be able to compete and enjoy it.
Plus...
| Quote: | Don't get me wrong, though, David - we had a very, very good time, and I wish you would have made it out to join us. The competition itself was rather ridiculous, but the good times were very much real.
I'm looking forward to doing this again next year! |
This.
Win or lose, you still get to go to AC and hang out with dozens of other RB geeks. The camaraderie and debauchery was damn near epic. CAN'T WAIT 'til next year.
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CowShark
Joined: 30 Nov 2007
Posts: 325
Location: DFW - Texas
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| Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2010 7:55 pm Post subject: |
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| count220 wrote: | | Win or lose, you still get to go to AC and hang out with dozens of other RB geeks. The camaraderie and debauchery was damn near epic. CAN'T WAIT 'til next year. |
Damn near epic? Man, I cleaned blood off the walls of Icemage's hotel room. If that's not a party...
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niq24601
Joined: 07 Jul 2008
Posts: 323
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preppypoof
Joined: 25 Jan 2008
Posts: 163
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| Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2010 9:18 pm Post subject: |
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| niq24601 wrote: | | I'm bummed that we didn't make it out to AC, maybe next year if we can get out of Kawigi's shadow >_>. |
and SCHKATEN HEIM's!!! |
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toymachine 
Joined: 30 Oct 2006
Posts: 9629
Location: Toronto
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| Posted: Wed Jul 07, 2010 4:25 pm Post subject: |
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I sympathize with f4phantom and HCaNC for obvious reasons.
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Icemage
Joined: 11 May 2008
Posts: 3200
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| Posted: Wed Jul 07, 2010 5:32 pm Post subject: |
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| toymachine wrote: | | I sympathize with f4phantom and HCaNC for obvious reasons. |
To be completely fair, though, they were also the only band on day 1 who actually had a calibration setup that worked. After their performance the audio engineers did something with an external audio fader or something which added some disgusting audio lag which was never recalibrated, which is why they were the only band able to score gold stars.
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