Rock Band: Two #1 (in the WORLD*!) Expert drum scores, leaderboards question, Rock Band vs. Drummania.
Update: see lots of my 100% Rock Band 3 Pro Drum scores in this post.
That’s right, I have two of the HIGHEST ROCK BAND DRUM SCORES in the WORLD*!
Okay, this isn’t nearly as impressive as it sounds, but I’ve gotta milk this for all it’s worth, since this’ll surely last a whole…hour? (day? week?) Actually the first one is pretty good, five gold stars:
That was my fourth try, and it was so close to 100%. I missed maybe two notes (why no advanced stats?)! It’s an easy song, but there’s this part where it throws an extra snare note in, so it’s red/yellow, red/yellow. Everywhere else the second is a single yellow, so it always threw me off, and I missed a couple notes. I can definitely get 100% if I remember that.
Here’s my other #1, but really, it wasn’t a very good run at all (98% I think). It was on my first or second try:
Clearly, not many people are playing these songs, because I was nowhere near flawless. Both of these songs are downloadable, so not everyone has them. And most people are probably fighting for high scores on Metallica or whatever they think is the hardest song. And only the U.S. currently has Rock Band. *cough* Also, pretty much everyone, including me, has broken drums right now. Once everyone starts modding, things will be very different.
As far as the game goes, I have a big advantage here, because I play a lot of Drummania. To be honest though, I’m only an average drummania player (or a bad one, compared to most youtube videos). Most people who bought Rock Band have never played the drums before, so they’re learning for the first time how surprisingly difficult the bass pedal is — something I learned the hard way a few years ago. The truth is, pretty much any good DM player could destroy every song in this game (more on this in a minute).
Leaderboards vs. 100% scores:
This raises an interesting question: what happens to the leaderboards when people get 100%? This is different from guitar for two reasons:
- Guitar can activate overdrive anytime, which means people will be able to find better “routes.” Yes, drum overdrive gives you a choice, but it’s very limited, and waiting can actually can be detrimental because it’ll take away notes.
There’s also a guitar technique called “squeezing” where you activate SP right after a note, and hit the last note early, so it’ll still count (not sure if this works in RB though, it was a GH thing). Basically you just get a couple extra notes under star power.
- Guitar can whammy more overdrive out of sustained notes, which drums can’t do. Even if it’s just a split-second more, that can be enough to give a slightly higher score.
So when people get 100% on drum songs, and use all their overdrive…that should be the highest possible score. What happens to the leaderboards? Do the newest ones go to the top, or the oldest? If it’s the oldest, there should be a mad rush to 100% every song you can, first, to secure your spot.
There’s another interesting (weird?) thing about the leaderboards: you’re competing against all difficulties! You can see the checkmarks at the left side; they’re color-coded (black, bronze, silver, gold) to what difficulty it was played on. I guess Expert will always have the highest possible score? Still, not really fair, is it? Why would people playing on Easy want to know how they rank against Expert? I suppose this prevents Expert players from spamming the Easy leaderboards, but…eh.
Drummania vs. Rock Band:
So, back to Drummania. It’s way harder than Rock Band drums. Go watch any of the Extreme difficulty DM videos on youtube, and your head will explode. For a point of reference, here are two (the center column is the bass):
Children’s Sketchbook extreme FC (seeing what insane things people can Full Combo in DM makes RB look like child’s play):
DD4 ext speed x1 — his score isn’t very good, but he’s playing on 1x, which is really hard to read, but it makes for a good notechart comparison because RB is fairly slow:
One last screenshot. This one is by no means a high score (#1 is around 250k?), but just more proof that Rock Band isn’t very hard — because, again, I’m not a very good drummer. This was my first time playing this song on Expert (I played it a couple times on Hard), so it was a sight-read (I believe this is in the second-to-last tier of drum songs):
I was being cautious with the overdrive, since I didn’t know if the song would get harder, otherwise I would have had a higher score.
Right now it seems the hardware is holding a lot of people back, not the songs, but I’m sure we’ll see more insane stuff as DLC.
GH2 (Harmonix) did the score bundling. You combined career score was your best scores from all tracks irregardless of difficulty. GH3 (Neversoft) mostly did away with that. I can understand Neversoft’s decision from a strictly game-y competitive stand-point, but I think for accessibility Harmonix’s way is better. Not everyone is going to be a master expert player. Doing it like this, at least, allows people to rate themselves against people/friends on the same scoreboards. I can be competitive with my HARD scores against people on EXPERT and my friends on MEDIUM can be listed to — something that would never happen if each difficulty had its own scoreboard (the MEDIUM friends of mine rarely, if ever, play on HARD). It’s more communal this way and it doesn’t exclude anyone.
That’s true, and it does allow you to view your scores directly against your friends list. I still think they should let you sort your scores against your difficulty only, for people who want to know how well they’re doing against people at their level.
100% agreed to this article. I’m a decent Advanced DM player and getting into Rock Band, I’m all over the leaderboards for the PS3…
Kudos to the guy who made this article, something that should be mentioned :)
[quote comment=””]100% agreed to this article. I’m a decent Advanced DM player and getting into Rock Band, I’m all over the leaderboards for the PS3…
Kudos to the guy who made this article, something that should be mentioned :)[/quote]
Ive seen you up there but you are slipping people are passing you. Con is about to get passed to and im on my up to the top 10 :D
i can do ride the lightning on expert 100% its really easy how can you say its one of the hardest when its clearly not and the who i can get 100% to expert cmon you people arent very good if you cant get that !
Yeah, those people are pretty good at using punctuation though.
[quote comment=””]Yeah, those people are pretty good at using punctuation though.[/quote]
Hehe, completely agreed. Reading that was annoying and difficult :p Now, I understand how most people would want to play competitively amongst themselves and share their scores, but I myself don’t find any real joy in it. So much so that when I go to play it, I actually disconnect the Playstation’s internet connection before going into the game. For me, I’ve only found that competition leads to conflict and anger :/ Not my bag. I just want to play to have fun and enjoy myself with my friends. I mean, yeah, I’ll be the first to admit that I wish I had friends who could play any of the instruments on anything higher than Medium, but I don’t so oh well. I do, however, agree with the bit said about the hardware holding players back more than the actual songs. My idiot brother thinks that the only way to make the kit work is to beat the living hell out of it and have no regard for it’s well being. That kit’s lasted since day one for me though and I’m proud to say it :3 And that also just about does it for my input. Play for fun, enjoy yourself with your friends, if at all possible, and all that good stuff! But whoever can sit there and genuinely say that Enter Sandman is the hardest song on the game has serious skill issues xD For Christ’s sake, Dead on Arrival is harder than that!
[quote comment=”5837″]i can do ride the lightning on expert 100% its really easy how can you say its one of the hardest when its clearly not and the who i can get 100% to expert cmon you people arent very good if you cant get that ![/quote]
Who said RtL was the hardest? In the article I said that “most people are probably fighting for high scores on Metallica or whatever they think is the hardest song” — I didn’t say it was the hardest, and didn’t even specify which Metallica song. Blackened is still pretty high up there, but there are tons of new DLC (and RB2) songs that are harder (remember this article is pretty old now).
You are really good!