100th Rocksmith Blog Post! Moving On from the PC Release

This is my 100th post on this blog. Seems like a good opportunity to move forward and leave the whole DLC debacle behind us. Now we can move on to other debacles!

PC Release - I'm Not Getting It

I'll also be leaving the whole PC release behind. Not to say I'll never talk about it because I will definitely keep up with developments and improvements there. But, I made an economic decision to stick with the XBox platform and my current library of DLC songs. So, I won't own a copy of the full PC version and won't be able to comment on it. I tried the demo and it seems fine - although there have been some issues. It just doesn't seem to be that much better than Rocksmith on XBox. Not worth the cost of switching platforms for me.

Also, I'm not a techie. I have no interest in overclocking my video card for optimum performance or any of that. I don't know anything about that stuff and I'm not really interested. I'll post any significant milestones or discoveries that I hear about on the PC platform but that's about as far as I'll go with the PC side of things. For now.

Secret Squirrel Club - Buy Your Way In, Earn Your Way In, Or Just Let it Go!

The latest DLC releases have brought the whole Secret Squirrel Club song collection back to the fore. Now instead of unlocking these songs by getting a double encore, you can simply buy them. And, it's a pretty good price - $4.99 US for 6 songs? That's the sort of discount I'd like to have seen for the other "discounted" song bundles. (Dammit - I regressed back into talking about the DLC. . . ) Still, you've got people saying that they shouldn't have to pay anything for these songs.

I look at it this way: I'm not going to get my shorts in a knot over 6 songs that I've never heard of, didn't know I was getting, and unlocked very easily using my bass. I didn't buy Rocksmith because it had 6 Secret Squirrel Club songs buried deep within the bowels of event encores. I didn't even know there were 6 locked songs in the game when I bought it. I had never even heard of any of these songs (except of course the Star Spangled Banner, but I don't even think Rocksmith's SSB is the Jimi Hendrix version). I just don't see what the big deal is.

Apparently there are some high speed guitar players out there who unlocked all the SSC songs using their guitars before the bass expansion was available and now they cannot play the SSC songs on their basses. This is known as "The Bass Bug." Yeah, this is a bona fide flaw in the software, but again, so what? You didn't even know there was going to be a bass expansion when you bought Rocksmith, so you damn sure didn't buy Rocksmith to get the SSC songs for bass. You can still play them on your guitar, right? There you go. If you really, really just gotta have these songs for bass, set up an alternate bass-playing profile and unlock everything again. Or, pony up $5 and buy the unlocks.

I think I'll leave that issue behind, too, at least until Ubi/RS developers implement some significant changes to the double encore algorithm or fix the bass bug.

Moving Along: Event 24 - A Tough One

Event Location	Atlantic Coliseum	Notes
Date Played	10/16/2012	Unlocks:
Song	Score	Guitar	Vintage Gibson Les Paul Jr.
Bohemian Rhapsody - Combo	74116	Pedal
Run Back to Your Side - SN	63689	Tone
We Three Kings*	78041	Tone
Sweet Home Alabama - Combo	42762	Tone
House of the Rising Sun - Combo 1	70752
no encore
Minimum RSP	281,600
Event Score:	329360	Total Score to date:	12,956,067
117%

Check out this set list. Five songs and the easiest one was the Eric Clapton one? I got Run Back to Your Side qualified on the first try. It took a while to qualify everything else for this event.

I actually only played Bohemian Rhapsody 5 times to qualify, but that's because I worked the phrases up in Riff Repeater. I did that on this song because there's so much non-playing time between phrases. I got some phrases maxed pretty easily. Solo1 took 58 lives to max. I'll be stoked if I ever get this song to MM level.

We Three Kings took 7 plays to qualify at 81,000. No riff repeater work. Just ran through it until I got the score I needed.

Sweet Home Alabama. . . Whew! MQS was only 39,000 and it took 8 plays through the song to get there with no room to spare. I worked the intro riff, chorus, and interlude each in RR. After 30 lives, I only got these phrases up to the 80% mastery levels. Lots of work left to do on this one.

House of the Rising Sun only took 5 tries and no RR work. Plus, I got a 370 NS just before I qualified it. This song is MUCH easier when you realize that your picking chords. It would be nice if Rocksmith would include a chord ID above the RSNH on stuff like this.

I dropped the ball on We Three Kings and House of the Rising Sun during the event. Both performance scores were below their individual MQS. This may be why I got no encore even though my cumulative event score was 117% higher than the minimum.  Starting to look like a cumulative event score is good enough to get you through the event but maybe you've got to get the MQS on each song to get an encore.

On Event 19, I only had 105% of the EMS but I got an encore. However, my score on each song was higher than the MQS. (In one case my qualifying score was even reduced.) Pretty much the same story on Event 20. Only got 107% of the EMS and still got an encore; all songs scores were above the qualifying scores. On the other hand, I got 114% of the EMS on Event 21 and all songs had better-than-qualifying event scores, but no encore on that one.

I'm starting to think the first encore is a 50/50 crap-shoot, too, just like the double encore.