Offical Rock Band 2011 Contest Information

[numair42]

To all aspiring Masters of Rock:

    The K-con Rock Band 3 competition will be held this year down in gaming. Participation is open to all attendees of the convention and the prize this year will be four (4) tickets to Kumoricon 2012. To participate, you first need to form a group of four and then read all of the rules below.

How to enter the contest (aka: the easy part)
    Starting at noon on Saturday, bands can audition for the Rock Band Finals. To audition, attendees first form a four (4) person band and choose a band name. Attendees can only be a part of a single band. A band is made up of a vocalist, guitarist, bassist, and drumer. Once the band is formed, the band chooses a song and fills out the auditions sign up slip. When it is their turn to perform, they hand their audition slip to the rock band organizer and their score will be recorded by the organizer. A band can audition multiple times throughout the day until the cutoff time at 11PM.

    So if you and your friends are already down in gaming, you might as well give it a shot. An audition takes the same time that a normal round would take. We encourage everyone who wants to go to K-con 2012 for free to come down and audition.

How we determine who performs in the finals (aka: The Scoring Guide)
   When a band chooses a song, the individual part rating and the difficulty attempted are also recorded. When the band finishes their song performance, the percentages of notes hit per member are recorded. The part rating, the difficulty attempted, and the percentage of notes hit are calculated for each band member and then added together to get the band score. The following calculation is used.

Where:
P = Percentage of notes hit
D = Difficulty Attempted
R = Part Rating

P x ( (D / 4 ) + .5 ) x R = Score

Example:
A band decides to play Dead on Arrival by Fall out Boy. Each member decided to play the song on normal and each got a 95%. Using the calculations above, each member gets the following score.

Guitar:         95 x ( ( 2 /4 ) + .5 ) x 4 = 380
Drums:    95 x ( ( 2 /4 ) + .5 ) x 5 = 475
Vocals:    95 x ( ( 2 /4 ) + .5 ) x 2 = 190
Bass :        95 x ( ( 2 /4 ) + .5 ) x 4 = 380

The final band score would be: 1425


Audition Results Announcement (Aka: Organizing the finals)
    After auditions close on Saturday, the organizers will review the entries and determine the top five (5) bands. When gaming opens again on Sunday, these bands will need to check in with the MC’s for song selection before noon (12PM).

   Bands that do not check in Sunday morning will be disqualified from the contest.

    During this check in meeting, each band is to come up with their top ten (10) songs that they wish to play. The organizers will build a 15 minute set list for each band based off of the song list provided. The bands will then have some time to prepare for the contest and will be told where the contest will be held and at what time they need to meet.

Rock Band performance (aka: The Finals)
    A half hour before the start of the contest, the qualifying bands will need to meet at the competition location. The contest organizers will at that time select the order for the contest.

    Bands that do not arrive to the competition location on time will be disqualified.

    Only thee bands will compete in the finals. The top three auditioning bands will be first picked and must be ready to perform. If a top band either shows up late or is missing a member, they will not be allowed to perform. In the event that one of the top three bands is disqualified, the next highest band will take their place.

    Scoring of the songs in the finals will follow the same rules as the qualifiers. Each song’s score is then averaged to get the first part of the final score. The other part of the score is based on stage presence, rock band related costumes, and a positive audience reception. We will add these points together to get your final score. The band with the highest score will be picked as the winner.


Now that we got past that, here is some potential questions that relate to the contest as well as rock band in general.

Q: What version of Rock Band will we be playing?
A: Rock Band 3 for PS3.

Q: Can we switch out someone for the keyboard?
A: No, the keyboard is not allowed in the contest.

Q: What happens if a song has more than 1 vocal part?
A: A band is only allowed a single vocalist but the other members can sing those parts if they want for extra stage presence points.

Q: Can we play on Pro mode?
A: No, only the normal game mode is allowed.

Q: Can I bring a “Personal Instrument” from home?
A: No.

Q: If one of our band members went home before the finals, can we substitute another person?
A: No, only the auditioning members of the band can perform. Make sure that all of your members will be able to make it to the finals.

Q: So how will we know if we made it to the finals?
A: Come down to gaming on Sunday morning. We will only announce the finalists on Sunday. Only one member of the band really needs to be down there.

[DancingTofu]

Not to be condescending or anything, but having run a number of Rock Band and Guitar Hero tournaments myself, I'd advise you to simply use the in-game scoring system (star rating) to determine scores.  It's much better than a percentage-based system because the game's main focus is comboing and well-executed star-power deployment.  The difficulty rating system isn't very accurate either (a song that's relatively difficult on hard mode may be fairly easy on expert, or vice-versa), so using it as a score multiplier is a bad idea.

When I ran the Rock Band tournaments for Kumoricon, I based it mainly off of performance and that was a real hit because it let the people have fun rather than merely compete, so it's nice to see you're factoring that in.  I used the song difficulty as a small piece in the judgment, the difficulty on which the song was played as another piece, and the star rating achieved as another; I didn't even look at the percentage of notes hit because the game's star rating system is actually pretty darn solid.  RB3 opens up some possibilities that RB2 didn't have as well: Each player's solo score is given in addition to band score.  This means you can score based on everyone's actual score rather than percentage of notes hit.

I tried running a GH3 tournament in 2008 using percentage-based scoring and it just caused problems, and by popular demand I wound up using the in-game scoring system for judgment instead.  So I'm just hoping to help you avoid those problems by PLEASE using the in-game scoring system since it factors in much more than just percentage of notes hit.

How I'd do the scoring:
Each member's difficulty played on + each member's difficulty rating + band difficulty rating + each member's star rating + band song rating
This gives you a score between 5 and 76 so there's plenty of room for variation but with less wildly different scores than you'll get with multiplier.  A full band playing Panic Attack on Expert automatically has a x15 multiplier.  Even if they each only get about 80%, which would only be 2 or 3 stars (AKA pretty darn bad) depending on how well they utilize star power, they're still looking at having 4800 points, which is going to be 2-3 times what a band playing a slightly easier song all on hard mode would be CAPABLE of getting.  By comparison, the barely-passing all expert all demons all 2-3 stars band would receive 58/76 points, while a band playing all on hard, with difficulty ratings between 3 and 5, and scoring a gold star would receive 62/76 points.  In other words, the band that plays a solid, enjoyable set at a difficulty they're comfortable at would score better than the group that picks the hardest song in the game and barely passes.

If you don't mind me asking, what scoring formula will be used to determine performance scores, and how will judging be done?

[numair42]

We will take your suggestions into consideration for next year. We will not be making any changes to our scoring method this year.


Performance points are added to the averaged song score during the finals. Audition scoring is based off of game percentages only. During the finals, the performance score is judged by a small panel of gaming staff. They will base their score off of stage presence, rock band related costumes, and a positive audience reception. A band on hard who has a good performance will beat a band on expert who stands on stage and does nothing.

Our recommendation is that bands spend some time to playing together to practice their stage skills. We don't expect jumps and dives, but we really want people to do more than stare blankly at the screen.

Good luck

[DancingTofu]

Understandable; it's kind of late to be making modifications at this point.  I'll probably plan on attending if I can get a band together... kind of a bummer that Pro mode/Keyboards aren't allowed since that's what I'm good at but I guess I'll just have to deal

[allstarsniper32]

A band on hard who has a good performance will beat a band on expert who stands on stage and does nothing.

So a band that can get %100 and perfect stars on expert on some of the most difficult songs will lose because they can't move around so much on stage? I know that some people out can give good performances and still pass songs on expert but having bonus scoring for performance just means that a band doesn't need to get good scores.

Even though it is very close to the con you really should reconsider basing the outcome solely on score. How can the most skilled band win if in the finals all the band don't need to play on expert?

Even though I say that there should be some good performances if the current method is kept in place.

One last thing, is there going to be a list posted with songs that are going to be available to play? and is the person running rock band, both the tourney and the free play set-up, different this year than last?

[numair42]

So a band that can get %100 and perfect stars on expert on some of the most difficult songs will lose because they can't move around so much on stage?

In a word, possibly. It really depends on how the other bands do. The judges will favor a band that has better stage presence than a band that can gold star their songs. That doesn't necessarily mean that better stage performance will always win. We want bands to strike a balance between stage performance, song performance, and song difficulty. A band who has a good balance of each has the best chance to win the finals.

That being said, the preliminary round (aka auditioning) will be completely based on score. So being able to complete a difficult song with a high percentage is still an important part of getting to the finals.

As for the song list, we have the same person from last year coming back to run Rock Band and will have the same songs that we had last year for sure. We haven't bought anything new this year so if it came out after the last K-con, we probably won't have it. We will add more songs before con, assuming we have the funding for it.

See you at the con