Sunday, March 6, 2011

Can't Get No Satisfaction (Rock Band Dummies)

Something happened about two weeks ago that started to bother me again so I'm just going to share it.  It may sound negative in nature, but it's more informative than anything.  Sorry about the TLDR, I'm going for substance here.

Now as you know, I'm a big fan of Rock Band.  I own plenty of DLC songs.  Now some of these songs are fun to play, but some aren't.  That's why sites like RBDLC (which is gone now) were made so that the community could recommend what other people should buy in order to spare them the misery of wasting money on crap they don't like.

Now I've written some 200+ review for this RBDLC site, most of them for Guitar and Bass.  Stuff like "This song is hard, but it's also repetitive and not fun, 2-stars," or something like that.  You get the idea but in much greater detail.  As a system of checks and balances, people are able to upvote or downvote any review just in case you think a review is inaccurate or useless in any way.

I would like to consider myself a "good" DLC reviewer because I would post about two to three paragraphs for each song which IMO is overkill considering this is over a song that's worth $2, maybe less, big whoop.  But anyway, I started getting these waves of downvotes for no reason.  Why?  Fanboys, uneducated idiots, people who hate me, etc.

Let's take Megadeth's Rust in Peace album.  Now there's nine songs in the album and I bought them all because I like challenging songs and I know that Megadeth's always has good Guitar tracks.  I play the entire thing on Guitar and proceed to rate every song from a scale between 5 (very fun, must buy) or 1 (terrible, stay away).  I give out three 5's, three 4's, and three 3's.  Okay, that sounds reasonable--no album is perfect.  But then I get a flood of downvotes because I'm a stupid-ass cause I didn't give Rust in Peace all 5's.  Really?  I bought the damn thing, sat down, played them all multiple times, and gave my honest opinion.  Remember, you're supposed to rate THE CHARTS (aka, the notes) NOT the MUSIC ITSELF.

At that point, trying to contribute to the community was just useless.  Wasn't worth it.  Really, I was a reasonable reviewer--I knew what was good and what wasn't.  After 200+ reviews, I gave up with the damn site.  Good luck, have fun buying crap songs that you don't like.

Then this whole review thing resurfaced again. This time, it's on a site called DLCQuickplay.  The site's original intention was for people to mark down every DLC song they owned and find other players who share the same songs (you can't play a song online unless everyone owns it).  But the site later expanded to reviews.  This is where I start writing reviews for Pro Keys because I like it and I feel that other people should know what are the good songs to buy so they can share the same interest that I have.

My Reviews: http://dlcquickplay.com/reviews/eric4372

TBQH, there's plenty of crap Pro Keys DLC.  Some songs are just boring, easy, or annoying.  One song I happened to dislike was Night Fever by the Bee Gees.  My logic was that the song was a bunch of repetitive chords and wasn't fun to play.  I honestly didn't enjoy it even though at the time, I had the #1 spot on the leaderboard.  Not only that, but being proficient at Pro Keys, I figured that means my word is more reliable than, say, Joe Schmoe who just bought his keyboard and plays on Easy.


There's my WR, good riddance.  The reason why there's such a huge drop-off in scores is that if you miss a note, you lose a TON of points since it's nothing but held notes the whole way through, so you can hardly afford to miss any.  Now this is something I mentioned in passing in my review, but this led to an unexpected mutiny:

My review started to get downvotes.  One guy (who doesn't even play Pro Keys, mind you) said (paraphrasing), "You can't dislike a song because it's hard to 5-star, that's stupid."  Now, the difficulty to 5-star something was an aside to the review.  And even if I disliked it for that reason, so what?  I can rate it any way that I want--let them play it and see if they agree with me.  My response--"So what if a song is hard, doesn't automatically mean that it doesn't suck.  See Thrasher on Guitar & Truckin' on Drums."  The dude has the nerve to call me out again, saying my review was stupid despite the fact I went back and edited my review a little to clarify my position (taking away from the emphasis on 5-star difficulty).

At this point, I was two seconds away from kicking this guy's ass.  I swear, he made it so easy for me too--like putting the baseball on the tee.  First, he misquoted the song's tier difficulty (Tier 4, not Tier 2).  Second, he doesn't play Pro Keys at all (hell, hardly anyone has).  Third, he claims that he likes Thrasher on Guitar which doesn't really mean anything since the majority hates this song.  I wrote out my stern reply, saying that I did set the WR on the song so it wasn't like I came here to piss and moan about it as well as reaffirming my belief that there are many more fun songs on Pro Keys out there and that Night Fever isn't one of them.

 Batter UP!!!

But you know what?  Before I posted my reply, I took it all back.  I conceded the argument on the spot.  I deleted the review and thus ended this debate as if it never existed in the first place.  The way I saw it, if I continued to argue, odds are it would make me look like a jackass and that the wrath of the powers that be would rain blows down upon me, suddenly ostracizing me from the community.  Like I'd rather settle this case out of court instead of making this into a drawn-out debate, thereby wasting everyone's time.  So screw it.

This is like my Forza 3 online days where I shared hostile messages with other miscreants, but regardless of who's right, it's usually better to just zip it.  I don't want to have these bad thoughts hanging over my head--it instills a sense of dread in me.  It's like playing chess--you could suddenly be "checkmated" and thus embarrassed all over something so petty--just stay away and keep your ego intact.

And to rub salt on the wound, the rest of my reviews were vastly ignored.  Which isn't terribly surprising, but if you do something good, no one cares.  If you do something bad, then everyone hates you.  Just like the Green Goblin said to Spiderman, "They will always hate you," or something like that.

That's it, I don't feel like writing any more reviews for that site.  Really, it kind of sucks because there's a lot of crap Pro Keys DLC that may turn people off from the instrument altogether unless you download my recommended picks of course, thereby wasting their money.  I'm supposed to be trailblazer, but I guess not.  I give up, no use trying to help some people.  I don't hate anyone, but I'm not pleased by it.  I guess my lesson of the day would be to try to avoid petty arguments since it lead to much discomfort down the road.  Just step back, take a breath, and think things over.

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