RBN Playtester Contest
UPDATE: The contest will stop taking submissions on September 10, 2010!
Hey guys and girls, the members of the Creator’s website are always trying to come up with ways to interest others to join the team. One of the most in demand positions on the site is the playtester. We never seem to have enough testers, so this competition is going to open the doors to give everyone an opportunity to experience playtesting and join the community.
The Contest:
The contest is simple; just watch the videos of a sample song (see below) and perform a playtest just like you would on the Creators site. The difference of course being that in a real playtest you would be able to actually play the game, but this is the closest we can do for now.
Check out the full details after the break.
What you need to submit:
Pick either guitar or drums (DO NOT pick vocals or bass) and perform a playtest by answering the following questions:
GUITAR:
- Do you agree with the author’s difficulty rating for the Expert guitar part? (Difficulty should be based on Expert.)
- Are the charts for Hard, Medium, and Easy appropriate to this difficulty level?
- Expert – Is the chart a literal rhythmic transcription of the actual guitar performance?
- Expert – Is motion in the guitar line preserved in the guitar chart?
- Expert – Are sustains correctly charted?
- Expert – Is the chart free of three note chords containing both green and orange?
- Expert – Is the chart free of chords with four or more notes?
- Hard – Is the Hard guitar chart an appropriate reduction of the Expert guitar chart?
- Hard – Does the chart correctly avoid green-orange chords, three finger chords, or jumps from these gems?
- Medium – Is the Medium guitar chart an appropriate reduction of the Hard guitar chart?
- Medium – Are all chords from Hard represented as chords in Medium?
- Medium – Is the chart free of green-blue chords, green-orange chords, and red-orange chords?
- Medium – Does the chart focus primarily on green, red, yellow, and blue notes?
- Medium – Is the chart free of HOPOs?
- Easy – Is the Easy guitar chart an appropriate reduction of the Medium guitar chart?
- Easy – Does the chart focus primarily on green, red, and yellow notes?
- Easy – Is the chart free of chords?
DRUMS:
- Do you agree with the author’s difficulty rating for the Expert drum part? (Difficulty should be based on Expert.)
- Are the charts for Hard, Medium, and Easy appropriate to this difficulty level?
- Expert – Is the chart a literal rhythmic transcription of the actual drum performance?
- Expert – Are all notes represented on appropriate drum pads?
- Expert – Are any flams authored on two pads on expert?
- Hard – Is the Hard drum chart an appropriate reduction of the Expert drum chart?
- Hard – Have kicks been appropriately removed from drum fills in the original performance?
- Hard – Does the chart allow enough preparation time before double crash hits?
- Medium – Is the Medium drum chart an appropriate reduction of the Hard drum chart?
- Medium – Does the chart correctly avoid kicks and snares between timekeeping notes?
- Medium – Does the chart correctly avoid three-limb hits?
- Medium – Are all rolls playable with one hand?
- Medium – Does the chart allow enough time after a crash for the player to reset his hand position?
- Easy – Is the Easy drum chart an appropriate reduction of the Medium drum chart?
- Easy – Does the chart correctly avoid using more than two limbs at any given time?
- Easy – Does the chart correctly avoid pairing gems with kicks?
Any of these questions that you answer “No” to, you need to follow up with an explanation. Be as detailed as possible including locations in the song where you find the issues.
Also, just because a song follows all of the “hard” rules doesn’t mean that it feels right or is fun to play. If you feel the part is awkward or doesn’t match other songs, definitely point it out in your playtest.
Once you have completed your playtest submit it to matt at roseofjericho dot com as a text document or in the email itself.
The Prizes:
The best playtesters for guitar and drums will each receive a 4-month XNA subscription so they can begin auditioning and playtesting songs on the Creators site.
The best playtests will be selected by a panel of judges who are all current members of the creators site.
Restrictions:
You must meet all of the minimum requirements of having an XNA account to enter this contest. See the requirements here: http://creators.rockband.com/membership_details
The Song:
Click on the links below to view the sample song:
“Signed with Love”
Guitar Difficulty: 2 Dots
Drums Difficulty: 4 Dots
GOOD LUCK!!!
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Hmm… I might actually have to try this!
Awesome.. I will definitely have to poke at this later when I’m more awake.
Interesting. I always thought it was The Law that medium guitar never had orange notes, but rule 16 doesn’t actually say that. And some recent official DLC (the CCR pack) does have orange notes. I thought HMX had made a mistake when those came out, but apparently not.
Dorkmaster Flek Reply:
August 23rd, 2010 at 10:34 am
Those guidelines were updated recently. Easy and medium are now actually required to have blue and orange notes. They should still be appropriate for the difficulty level, but learning to shift your hand is what made the jump from medium to hard so brutal for most players. The reasoning is that by requiring them to hit all buttons even on easy, this transition will be smoothed.
For the record, medium and easy both use blue and orange notes almost as frequently now for their charts on guitar…I couldn’t tell well enough if you specified that correctly in the questions
HeyRiles Reply:
August 23rd, 2010 at 1:54 pm
Haha whoops, I’m pretty sure I handled that one the wrong way. I just read the requirements up there and wrote out all that was wrong with it and how to fix it, I didn’t answer any of those questions in the Email. Looks like I screwed up! Haha
Yo dawg, we put some playtest in your playtest so you can playtest while you playtest.
This is a good idea to recruit playtesters. Do they have something like this questionnaire on the actual RBN site to guide playtesters? This would be really useful to help the process.
The other big roadblock is that it actually requires an XNA membership. I know there really isn’t a way around this (at least not yet) since you actually have to be able to test the songs in the game, but this is honestly the single biggest roadblock to having more playtesters. The XBL Gold subscription isn’t that big a deal, since most people have it anyway and it’s useful outside of RB, but the XNA subscription is basically just for RBN playtesting. You’re asking people to shell out $100 a year at least just to test stuff with no payment. At least the people charting stuff will make money if it sells.
No need to enter since I already have an XNA account, but I’m just wondering if you meant to chart this badly to have more errors to report.
Because that chart has an array of flaws.
Casto Reply:
August 23rd, 2010 at 11:14 am
Yes, it is mis-charted on purpose. Having everyone review a perfect chart wouldn’t be much of a contest.
Man, I wish RBN development was available on PS3. I would love to do this.
Dorkmaster Flek Reply:
August 24th, 2010 at 11:16 am
“And I’d love to be the king of all Londinium and where a shiny hat.”
Seriously though, I sympathize, but that’s all on Sony. Nobody else has the kind of platform that MS has with XNA that makes something like RBN even remotely possible.
Dorkmaster Flek Reply:
August 24th, 2010 at 11:16 am
Aw hell, go me making the most basic grammar mistake possible on a nerd quote. “where” != “wear”
Question:
The guitar difficulty is 2 dots out of how many dots? I just would like to know the dot scale, please.
The difficulty tiering is based on 0 to 6 dots where 6 dots is devil tier.
Well I could get an extension of my XNA. Though I already work for an authoring company, so is that cheating?
A little off-topic:
I really hate how everybody keeps assuming fast parts on a snare drum = roll. A roll is not just playing fast – quit calling it that!
On topic:
This is easy. I’m doing this.
I’m trying to find a deadline, but no dice.
We are going to run the contest for at least 2 weeks to give people plenty of time to get their entries in. I’ll get Tommy the final date so we can post it here.