Thursday, April 30, 2009

The Macas in the top 100 for "All Songs"

Last night we played 32 unplayed DLC and gained about 29 million points. This is enough to move us up about 30 ranks in the "All Songs" Leaderboards (116th to 85th).

Highlights:
- Sylvie (Bass and Vocals) and Trapper (Bass) replace a sick Raikan.
- Bongoo is the Top Performer for the most songs (14), followed by Phoenix and Sylvie (8 each), and then DMan (6). That adds up to more than 32 due to ties.
- DMan and Bongoo have the most FCs (2), followed by Sylvie (1). The calibration was adjusted after 16 songs. If it had been done earlier there would have likely been more FCs.
- Phoenix does some great voice-overs over many songs, the most memorable one being his "metal" rendition of "Body I Occupy"! :)

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Goal for tonight: be top 100 for "All Songs"

This week we have our first normal session since the launch of RockBandStats.com. Because the website has some "All Songs" Leaderboards, we will take the opportunity to play a lot of DLC.

"Original 84" All-Console Rank: 30th
"All Songs" All-Console Rank: 116th

We only need 6 million points to be in the top 100 for "All Songs", so that will be our minimum goal. We'll play any song that is unplayed or that has a low score.

My main goal for my scores at RockBandStats.com is to eventually play all songs on all instruments. I've started using a pseudo-random way to go through the songs with no scores in the song list and we can borrow that strategy tonight for variety:

1. Pick the "Make your own setlist - 8 songs" gig in Reykjavik
2. Song list appears sorted by difficulty
3. Select the first song with no score (or the first below a certain score if they are all played, ex: 500K)
4. Change the sorting category once, and then repeat steps 3 and 4 until 8 songs are selected

The sorting change makes for some nice variety, with the occasional set with the same artist multiple times in a row (By Name -> By Band -> Genre -> Decade, etc...).

As usual we will track the Top Performers and the # of FCs.

Rock on Macas! :)

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Top Secret RB Session Tonight

Unless someone's not in town, we're going to be having a top-secret Rock Band session at my place tonight.

Our goals? We can't say, but if you stay tuned, you will see! :D

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Total Rock, Total Rewards Rock Band Competition - Las Vegas, Nevada

I was in Las Vegas, Nevada over the past week, and had the chance to take a look at this US-wide RockBand Competition (I say US-wide because the competition only has one stop in Canada, which kind of sucks donkey parts...) Prizes for the competition included cash amounts (going all the way up to $10,000 USD) and the opportunity to be the opening act for the B-52s.

So with such awesome prizes, what did I think of the competition?
Well, I don't know...

You see, contest information states that the competition will be held between 8pm and 12am at the Harrah's in Las Vegas. So we made our way to the Harrah's for 8h20pm, hoping to drop in, have a look at the competition, and then go play some slots. When we arrived at the bar where the competition was being held, we learned it would only start at 9pm.

Dissapointed and with 40 minutes to wait, we decided to head back to our hotel (which wasn't far from the Harrah's) with the intent of coming back later in the night. While we waited, we began to play penny slots, and took advantage of the free drinks offered by the casino. After losing 5$ and drinking ±7 drinks, we drunkenly found out it was midnight and that we'd missed the competition.

So, I'm guessing that the competition went well and wish to congratulate whoever won and will be representing Las Vegas in the final rounds. Hopefully you guys win and get the chance to open for the B-52s!

As for me, the experience of getting drunk off free beers and rum was enough to make for one hell of a memorable night!

Dman... (aka the drunken Reject)

Sunday, April 12, 2009

RockBandStats.com - Your Scores with Stars + Unglitched Expanded Leaderboards

Update: The website will soon be closing due to the unavailability of reliable Leaderboard information from RockBand.com.


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You want star information with your Rock Band scores? You want uninflated Leaderboards? You just want more stats in general?



The RockBandStats.com website has now launched! It is an evolution of the Rock Band Score Reader.



Instead of having everyone use their own Score Reader to browse through all the pages in the RockBand.com Leaderboards to get their scores, it is run once for this website and everyone can see their own scores much faster!



On RockBandStats.com, you can satisfy all your statistical needs by:



- Getting a list of your scores and star ratings on the My Scores page
- Looking at a list of the unglitched (uninflated) leaders on the Leaderboards page (including All-Console, All-Solo and All-Song options)
- Getting a quick view of who is the best in the world on the Hall of Fame page
- Comparing your stats with other players and bands on the Compare page
- Getting song info, including which are most popular on the Songs page
- Getting your own stat banner to track your stats on the Banners page



The database currently holds 67 million scores from 2.8 million players and bands. This includes the top 10,000 scores for every song, plus every Gold star beyond that range.



All the stats on this website will be completely refreshed about twice a week. The times in the "Last Update" column indicate when your scores were last retrieved from RockBand.com and are for the Eastern Time Zone. This website is brought to you by Bongoo, a member of 3 Macas and a Reject (this is our blog). If you have any questions about this website, please post here or send an email to "bongoo11@gmail.com".



A big thanks to Harmonix for creating this great game, to Phoenix5096 and DMan3021 for their contributions, to Kawigi for providing star cutoff information, to elsif for the stat banner functionality, to jpiceman for providing some star cutoffs, and to everyone who gave some suggestions.



Enjoy!

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Free DLC Night + Rockin' for a year already!

Tonight we played at DMan's place and it was a feast for eyes and ears. He has a great projector and a powerful sound system. Unfortunately, due to Pheonix's perpetual leg injury and his queeziness due to the size of the screen, we couldn't increase any of our scores.

With Raikan playing remotely, we decided to play some of the free DLC since both PS3's had those and we had yet to play many of these as a band. Bongoo had the most FCs (6), followed by DMan (4) and Raikan (2).

When we lost our connection with Raikan, Trapper took up the Bass for the first time in a year and we played some random DLC. After helping us with paths and seeing us win 2nd place at the competition a few weeks back, he has a new interest in the game.

It's hard to believe but it's already been about a year since we started playing weekly. The original band name was "3 Macas and a Trapper", but after he stopped playing it was "3 Macas and a Random Guest" (we had new people every week). In June, DMan joined the band and "3 Macas and a Reject" was formed. 2 months later we cracked the top 10 and started this blog, eventually going all the way to #2 for RB1 PS3!

After also climbing the leaderboards in RB2 and catching up to some great online superbands, we finished off our first year with two live competitions, getting 2nd place in the first one. I'm sure there will be lots of neat highlights for our 2nd year!

With DMan in Vegas next week, we'll take a week off, our first since starting a year ago. In two weeks, we'll have another session at DMan's, this time to work on a special project. After that, you better watch out "Happy People" and others, we'll be continuing our RB2 leaderboard climb! :)

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Goal for tonight: a Blast of Peace, Love, &...

Note: The special session is postponed until the next time everyone is available. It's a normal session tonight.

Original post:
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Tonight we'll have a special session at DMan's. He has a great projector plus it's a change of atmosphere which can be good.

Unfortunately that means that we won't be able to increase our RB2 career score unless Phoenix brings his PS3 over. Phoenix: I have a special PS3 carrying case I can lend you if you need it.
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Tonight we'll make progress towards passing 11th place band "PEACE, LOVE, & FUK U..." (in the real Leaderboards). In the process we'll move past glitched band "Blast". Raikan is playing remotely so we won't be playing some random DLC.

We are currently in 20th place but there are 8 bands ahead of us with inflated scores (at positions 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 12 and 19).

Minimum: Gain 4K points, to beat glitched band "Blast"
Main: Gain 240K points, to be halfway to 11th place
Optimal: Gain 481K points, to beat "PEACE, LOVE, & FUK U..." for 11th place

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Amp Energy Rock Band Competition Results

We just participated in the Amp Energy competition at the University of Ottawa today. The picture above shows when the Reject finally took over the stage! =)

The video of our performance will eventually be posted on the Facebook page of the event. We also filmed so we'll eventually add an embedded Youtube video to this post.

I think we performed well and had a good choreography to match our band name, but unfortunately we didn't advance to next week's Facebook voting round. We diverged a bit from what we planned in our practice session but that can be expected.

The main reason we lost is that the only criteria for victory was having the most votes from the crowd and passers-by after a 30-minute+ voting period (and yes, I did say 30). The competition being near a busy corridor, most people who voted didn't see anyone perform. As the organizer told me: "This is just a popularity contest"...

One piece of advice for participants in future weeks is to make sure you're allowed to test the calibration. We weren't, and you can imagine the effect that it has... for example having to rely on the monitors a whole lot more than usual.

We also learned after playing our song that the "No Fail" mode was on, plus the official camera didn't even see the game screen, so a lot of bands just played on "Easy" (we were all on "Expert") and concentrated pretty much only on their moves.

What counts is that we had lots of fun, and that we now have even more "Live" experience! That can only help in future competitions. Hopefully most "performance"-based competitions in the future will have judges, so being the winner actually means something. The one we participated in two weeks ago was strictly "score"-based.

Rock on Macas!

The Macas and the Reject are RICH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh boy! I just won the 5 Million $ 6/49 prize!!!! Wth? I guess these actually do pay off!!!!

can't even type anymore :)

PARTY!

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