Post-Rocksmith Rocksmith - Playing Events After Level 11

Now that I've reached Level 11 - Rocksmith Status - the question of whether I'm still playing events has been raised. I am. That is when I play at all.

I've always found the events to be fun, for one thing. I've gotten a lot better on guitar, but, let's be honest, it's pretty unlikely that I'm going to play a set in front of an actual audience of cheering fans. Ever. The Stones were famous before they got old. I sort of missed the deadline.

But, beyond the self-delusion, I find the event structure to be helpful. It lets me build up songs little by little while keeping me from agonizing over any one song for too long. I adopted the event-focused approach last Fall back when I lost my game save data and had to restart my Journey from the very beginning. Prior to that, I never played an event until I had at least 70k on each song in the setlist. On Journey II, I play events as soon as I meet the minimum qualifying score (MQS). And, as often as not, if I can't qualify the song before RS asks me if I want to lower the MQS, I lower the MQS. Not always, but often.

This approach has been much less stressful for me. Before that change I came dangerously close to throwing my guitar through the TV on more than one occasion. That's just me. I'm sort of impatient with myself about the wrong things. Trying to get a song from 0 to 70k at one time is a bit much for me to take on. Events let me build songs up in smaller increments.

For example, here's how one of my Mastered songs has progressed:

Title		Use Somebody
Artist		Kings of Leon
Play Count		7
Date	Score	%	Streak	Notes
26-Sep-2012	61012	81	92	Event 4  Q = 21,900
26-Sep-2012	71647			Event 4 Performance
4-Oct-2012	74933	83	95	Event 19  Q = 90k
4-Oct-2012	94592	95	211	Qualified
4-Oct-2012	102469			Event 19 Performance
14-Feb-2013				Event 38 - Q = Prequalified
14-Feb-2013	100423			Event 38 Performance
14-Feb-2013	106034	93	105	lvl: outro maxed
				MASTERED

This is pretty typical for me. Obviously, it takes more time and effort to qualify some songs for events than others, but as a rule by the time I play something in three events I have it close to mastered. On Use Somebody, all I had to do after the third event play was to clean up the outro phrase and - boom! - mastered. Anything with a significant solo takes much more work.

Pre-Qualified Songs

90k is the maximum MQS. It appears from my notes that once you score 100,000k or more on a song during an event that song will be prequalified for future events - you'll never have to qualify it again. If I'm correct, the next time Barracuda (combo) shows up on a setlist for me, it should be prequalified. I'll let you know when that happens. Songs may also show up as pre-qualified if you play them for the first time as encores in a previous event. For example, the first time I played I Got Mine was as a second encore. It showed up prequalified on the setlist for my very next event.