Saturday, November 29, 2008

Endless Setlist 2 Anyone?

There's a party going on at my house, and Rock Band 2 is the reason why...

Phoenix, Sylvie (the famous Maca Groupie) and myself (the Reject) are attempting to complete the Endless Setlist 2 on Expert Vocals. Phoenix is currently finishing American Woman, and Sylvie will now start Livin' on a Prayer, followed by One Way or Another. Once these are complete we'll have completed 35 of 84 total songs (and we started at 3pm).

Our goal is to complete all songs on expert without pausing or failing one song. So far so good, but the night is still young, and we hope my PS3 will be able to continue without crashing...

Once complete, my band, The Moustachu, will have Legendary Status, and my PS3 account will have several new trophies, including the Coveted Bladder of Steel Award!

I will keep you all posted with updates as the night continues. Chances are we're going to be here for a while...

Update (by Phoenix): We are now signing Raikan's favorite song: Alex Chilton for the halfway point. Go Macas go!

Update #2 (by Dman3021): It's now 8pm and we're finishing up G&R's Shackler's Revenge, which means we have 24 songs left before the Endless Setlist 2 is over! Go Reject Go!

Update #3 (by Phoenix): 9PM! We are ready to tackle the Impossible song group! This means we are 12 songs away from victory. Go Groupies Go!

Update #4 (By Dman3021): 10pm... Just finished Painkiller and... it's over! We did it! Wooo! Thanks to Phoenix and Sylvie for you help over these 7 hours (84 songs) of play. We got 387 stars and 25,641,000 fans! My throat is a little sore, but it was well worth it. Go Rock Band Go!

Now, we need to do this Endless Setlist 2 with 3MaaR...!

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Latest Scores

Woohoo, the leaderboards are finally up to date!

To commemorate this moment, I have made our most recent scores available, courtesy of the Score Reader:

3 Macas and a Reject.xls

There is also a link to the latest scores in the "Band Info" section.

Enjoy!

Optimal goal reached, but we'll have to wait to beat some n00bs...

Tonight was awesome as we managed to reach our optimal goal by gaining 2M points! We played 20 songs so we once again had an average increase of 100K per song.

Before the session, both "n00bs 'R' Uz" and our band had a temporary inflation of points on the Leaderboards but it now seems to be under control. It is evident that the "n00bs" have also been playing recently since they are still about 1.2M points away, even with our 2M point increase. We'll have to wait till next week to pass them...

Highlights:
- Phoenix gets his brand new Roland set, it can't connect to the PS3 yet but it is really fun to try on its own!
- Our best increases were for "Shoulder to the Plow" (480K) and "Rob the Prez-O-Dent" (325K)
- We are now 5th for "Shoulder to the Plow", 1K ahead of Interrobang! It's great that our scores now appear on the Score by Song Leaderboards!
- Bongoo learns that it's not a good idea to click "Yeah Sure" at every message before the start of a set: we play a full song without realizing no energy sections appeared...
- Sylvie helps out by replacing Raikan on Bass
- Trapper makes some nice beer pancakes!

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Goal for tomorrow: catch up to the n00bs again!

It seems like our rivalry with the Gods in RB1 ("The Gods of Bands") has now transformed into one with n00bs for RB2 ("n00bs 'R' Uz")! Like in RB1 for a while with the Gods, we keep alternating positions with the n00bs as we passed them last week and they are now ahead of us again.

We will need about 1.5M points to catch up to them, and that will be our main goal. To accomplish that, we will need an average increase of 125K per song if we play for one hour (12 songs), 63K per song if we play for two hours (24 songs) and 42K per song if we play for 3 hours (36 songs).

Minimum: Gain 1M points, a good increase
Main: Gain 1.5M points, would go from 21st to 20th to beat the n00bs
Optimal: Gain 2M, a great increase
Bonus: Play some random DLC on our breaks

One great thing about this session is that our score increases are now supposed to show up on the Band Song leaderboards (this was fixed in a patch this week). Once we increase our score on every song one more time, this will finally allow us to get accurate rank information from the Score Reader.

Now if they could only fix the Band Career leaderboards once and for all so our rank doesn't keep dropping due to a few band's inflated Career scores...

Thursday, November 20, 2008

We are no longer n00bs!

Tonight we played 20 songs and gained about 1.2M points (60K average increase per song), enough to move past "n00bs 'R' Uz" for 16th place.

Highlights:
- Our best increases were for "Girl's Not Grey" (327K) and "One Way or Another" (237K)
- DMan gets many FCs on vocals!
- Phoenix falls out of his chair and hurts his ankle, he should get gamer's insurance...

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Goal for Thursday: get another 2M in a remote session

On Thursday night we will try to gain 2M points to match last week's output. That would move us up from 17th to 16th, ahead of "n00bs 'R' Uz".

Bongoo's boy was born on Sunday morning! He and his wife will leave the hospital sometime tomorrow.

If Bongoo is available Thursday night, he will play remotely. Sylvie might need to be the guitar backup for part of the session.

Minimum: Gain 1M points, would put us in 16th place ahead of "n00bs 'R' Uz"
Main: Gain 2M, would match our result from last week
Optimal: Gain 3M, would be within reach of our old rivals "3 on a Match" and the "Killa C,o,m,m,a,s"
Bonus: Play some random DLC on our breaks

To reach our main goal of 2M points, we will need an average increase of 167K per song if we play for one hour (12 songs), 83K per song if we play for two hours (24 songs) and 56K per song if we play for 3 hours (36 songs).

Friday, November 14, 2008

Someguy gets gold star for "Good Mourning/Black Friday"

Check out this amazing video!

Out of all the RB1 and DLC songs available before the launch of RB2, there was only four I couldn't pass on Expert drums ("Burn", "Good Mourning/Black Friday", "My Last Words" and "They're Red Hot").

Getting a gold star for arguably the toughest of the 4 is very impressive. Someguy also got an FC for "They're Red Hot"...

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Almost 2M more

Tonight we played 20 songs and gained about 1.9M points, which was once again close to an average increase of 100K per song.

Highlights:
- We started by playing the worst songs by spread to #1, but our manually written spreadsheet was incorrect so we wasted time on a few songs we had played well before
- We increased our score by 538K for "Bodhisattva" right off the bat
- We manage to tie our score for "Rob the Prez-O-Dent" to the thousand
- Our two song set of "Aqualung" and "The Trees (Vault Edition)" conjured up some interesting images...
- Phoenix learned that playing too much Fallout 3 can make these sessions tiring
- DMan does a great job playing two instruments at once (Bass and Vocals), allowing us to unlock the 8 song "Make Your Own Setlist" gig
- Bongoo finds a RB2 bundle for Raikan so we can now have online Maca sessions with all band members!

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Goal for tomorrow: move up one rank to 11th

This past week, 4 bands passed us in the leaderboards, including "Happy People Playing ROCK BAND" and the "Killa C,o,m,m,a,s". This week our main goal will be to move from 12th to 11th, ahead of "n00bs 'R' Uz". That will require about 3M points.

With our sessions being shorter due to breaks for vocals and drums, that might be a challenge but if we play the worst songs by spread to #1, it might still be possible.

Minimum: Gain 1.4M points, for a total of 101M
Main: Gain 3M, would put us in 11th place ahead of "n00bs 'R' Uz"
Optimal: Gain 4.7M, would put us in 10th place ahead of the "Killa C,o,m,m,a,s"
Bonus: Get one #1 score, but we won't know if it is valid because the song leaderboards are broken

To reach our main goal, we will need an average increase of 250K per song if we play for one hour (12 songs), 125K per song if we play for two hours (24 songs) and 83K per song if we play for 3 hours (36 songs)

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Score Reader 2.2 released!

Download Here


New features:
- Optimized code so searching is at least twice as fast as in version 2.1
- More accurate runtime estimates because the tool now analyzes score retrieval time on the fly

(Original Post)

Just under 100M

Tonight we played 37 songs and gained 3.6M points, which is close to an average increase of 100K per song. We ended up only 400K away from our main goal of 100M points.

If it wasn't for the arrival of two new top 10 bands (one whose rank is too good to be true if you look at their Stats page), we would have moved up from 8th to 6th but our final rank was 8th. Nonetheless, we finished ahead of our RB1 rivals the "Killa C,o,m,m,a,s" and "Happy People Playing ROCK BAND".

Highlights:
- A different strategy this time, we played the easiest songs by difficulty and end up getting 6 stars for 35 of 37 songs (only missed getting 6 stars for "Welcome to the Neighbourhood" and "A Jagged Gorgeous Winter")
- We increase our score by at least 300K for two songs ("Conventional Lover" and "New Kid in School")
- Our new benchmark for songs played seems to be around 36 so about 3 hours of play

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Goal for tomorrow: get to 100M for 6th

This week our main goal will be to move up to 100M to go from 8th to 6th but our optimal goal will be to have 102.5M to be 5th. To see the latest rankings, please refer to the in-game leaderboards because the RockBand.com leaderboards are still not up-to-date.

Minimum: Gain 2.7M points, would put us in 7th place ahead of the "Killa C,o,m,m,a,s"
Main: Gain 4M, moving to 100M would put us in 6th place ahead of "Happy People Playing ROCK BAND"
Optimal: Gain 6.5M, would put us in 5th place ahead of "n00bs 'R' Uz"
Bonus: Get at least one #1 score, but we won't know if it is valid because the song leaderboards are broken (only shows the first score we did for each song)

With a potential of 40 songs played during the session, we would need a 68K increase on average per song to reach the minimal goal, 100K for the main goal, and 163K for the optimal goal.

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Score Reader 2.1 released!

Download Here

New features:
- No need to login anymore, a "Player Name" section has been added to the main page. This fixes some of the browser issues and the mismatch for some between the RockBand.com username and the in-game player name
- The tool is now twice as fast because the time between requests was reduced
- An "Estimated Time Left" indicator was added
- You can now modify the minimum rank that the Score Reader will search for your scores (ex: before you could choose do a search between ranks 1 to 1000 but now you can search between ranks 500 to 1000 if your scores are in that range and you want to save time)

(Original Post)