Welcome moms and racers tour groups

As part of our effort to promote the many GH tour groups out there, I'll be welcoming and featuring tour groups here in The Notebook.

This week I'd like to give a big welcome to Moms that Rock and the NASCAR Rockers tour groups.

Moms that Rock is a tour group that lives up to its name. You'll find the group leader, Xara, all over the tournaments here at Edison...and she can dish out, as well as the bad ass mothers on her team. Because working and managing a family just isn't enough. Get more info on Moms that Rock at their official site, MomsThatRock.org

And NASCAR Rockers is for all the racers out there. If your ass is planted on the couch on Sunday afternoons, then this is the group for you (but I guess we shouldn't expect you to play in any afternoon tournaments, huh?) Join and represent your racer of choice. Are you a Jeff Gordon or a Tony Stewart? A Chevy or a Ford? Leader rover8680 wants you to rock out and settle the debates once and for all. Hit up the NASCAR Rockers on their GH Tour Group page.

If you run a tour group and want some love, just drop us a line and include a link to your tour group page. We'll pimp you here in the blog along with a link to the site. And if you have a banner, we'll add those to the full site rotation as well. But it doesn't matter if you're team member or a lone wolf, we're all here for one reason.

This is why we compete on-line

While checking out GameSpot I came across video from the Rock-tacular GH3 Tournament. After watching only the first 10 minutes (and skipping ahead at that), I quickly realized why we compete on-line and why we should ALL compete on-line. Just watch the first three players' performances and you'll know what I mean.

Check out the video at GameSpot

Guitar Hero is a one half solo game and one half spectator sport. Live tournament play is where games like Rock Band belong, not Guitar Hero. Performing music is part technical skill and part showman ship. In a band you can pass out such roles. In Guitar Hero it's a little harder - you have to be technical and show off at the same time. But as the game usually boils down to score (like in our tournaments) the show gets the short end of the shaft because in the end that doesn't impact your score.

In the video you'll see three judges. I really didn't pay much attention to find out what they were judging, but they don't look very entertained in the video. Of course, how would you look if you had to watch four people play "Welcome to the Jungle" over and over without there being any "show" to watch.

Ah well...we should all just be happy that we compete on-line and hide behind a player name and an avatar. It saves us from what would undoubtedly shameless embarrassment. I mean, I love to ham it up as much as the next guy/girl, but if I'm either playing well or jumping around - I can't do both. I haven't been able to do that since high school. But, props to these guys for trying - I guess someone had to win.

Looking at normalizing scores for all-in tournaments

I've been working with Pete (dataguru) over in the message board discussing the possibility of normalizing scores for tournaments. This would mean a tournament would not have a set skill level. A player could play a song at any difficulty and through the magic of math, all the scores would be normalized so they would all be comparable. So a score on Medium would be made to a fair comparison to an Expert score.

Others have discovered that each GH3 song has at each difficulty has a multiplier number. This multiplier is used to make any Easy/Med/Hard score into an Expert score. It's all based on possible song scores and is, frankly, way over my head, but I've run some tests on scores and it seems reliable. You can read our discussion thus far in the forum.

But why bother with all this? In short, it means anyone could join any tournament and have a fair chance at winning. You're a master Medium player but you can't do squat in Hard yet? No problem. Your Medium score is run through the magic math machine and out comes an Expert score. So all those tournaments that only get 2 players and end up being canceled could be a thing of past. More winners, more tournaments, more good competition.

There are flaws with this system, but there are flaws with the current system as well. Right now the restrictions are based on career percentages. Some people join tournaments with profiles that have zero percent for all career levels, which means they can enter any level tournament - an Expert could enter a Medium and, in theory, blow away the real Medium players. Yes, it's a very cheap way to win, but it happens. This new theory doesn't change that workaround, per se. Experts could still play at Medium, but then their score would get normalized to an Expert score too...so they wouldn't always win.

I'm just wondering if this "all-in" style of tournament would result in more playing, more often. My concern is that the mathmagic behind-the-scenes would be confusing and unsettle players. I know if I was new and excited about playing in a tournament only to find out my scores gets hit with some seemingly arbitrary math I'd be skeptical. But if I was a player stuck in Medium world, it would be nice to see how I'd fair against Experts.

If you have any thoughts, please drop a comment or post in the forum.

Tuesday/Wednesday tournaments may get thrown out

It was just brought to our attention that tourney scores were not being recorded properly. After a quick inspection, it turns out GuitarHero.com changed their site around and thus threw our systems off. We have made the appropriate changes to the system and scores should now be getting recorded as before.

We're unsure how long this problem was around. A recent mail suggests it first effected Tuesday night brackets. Tuesday's bracket was canceled automatically as a result of this bug. My apologies for those that played in that tourney.

We'll let Wednesday's (tonight) bracket finish up and see what happens. If you played in a Wednesday night tourney and your scores do not show up in the final bracket, please comment here or send us mail and we'll throw out the tourney to be fair to everyone.

My deepest apologies for the trouble. We're at the mercy of GH.com and they don't announce such changes so we don't know until it's almost too late. If anyone notices any other weird things going on, please drop us a line so we can investigate.

Shop and help keep tourneys free

Angry Edison relies on your donations and sponsorships to keep our tournaments free and open to everyone. We can't thank enough the list of folks that have already made donations right out of their pocket. We know donations aren't everyone's cup of tea so we've registered as an Amazon.com affiliate, which means you can help us every time you shop on-line!

Next time you shop at Amazon.com, just use the search tool here on the site and anything you buy will instantly give us some kick back. It doesn't add anything to your purchase, so there's no worry.

And Amazon now has a on-line music store, AmazonMP3. Similar to iTunes, you just search for the song you want and download. But what's better is that Amazon MP3s are DMA-free, so you're not required to use an iPod or even iTunes. A lot of the MP3s at Amazon are also only 89 cents. Bonus!

So please, if you enjoy what we offer here at Angry Edison, consider donating or even just use Amazon so we get a little kick back. Regardless how you help, it all goes directly back into the site to keep tourneys free and full of prizes for everyone.

Memorial weekend will be rockin

We've scheduled a ton of tourneys for the long holiday weekend. And we've thrown a new prize into the pond - a $10 iTunes Gift Card. Just what you need to help fill your player for the summer. And don't miss Monday's expert marathon, there's a prize for every tournament throughout the day.

And don't forget about Search&Destroy! Win at certain songs and you could win without having to win the entire bracket. Just find the songs in this weekend's tourneys and enter.

Angry Edison at Fake Plastic Rock

Stop on over to Fake Plastic Rock for a happy write-up on Angry Edison. Fake Plastic Rock is a blog dedicated to our favorite music games including all Guitar Heroes and Rock Band. From home mods to intelligent conversation on the games, FPR is a good stop on your rock and roll tour. And thanks to Jeff at FPR for the nod!

Calling all tour groups

If you're a member/leader of a tour group and have a web site other than the pages at GH.com, please comment to this post with a link to your site. Some changes in the GH posting policies mean we'll need help spreading the word around about the tournaments and events. I'll be working on improvements for tour groups real soon and will need some volunteer groups to help test and try things out. Any help is appreciated. You can post in the forum too.

How should we use tour groups?

With the release of the Private Party Tournaments aimed squarely at tour groups, it's time to start thinking about how to better incorporate groups into the site and into the tournaments.

If this site wants to follow the rest, then tour group scoring is certainly on the map. Tour groups would register and then players pledge their allegiance to a group and the sum of players' scores ranks each group. This will probably happen but I find that rather boring, so I'm looking for feedback on how to utilize tour groups in a more creative fashion.

What do you like about GH tour groups now?
What don't you like about them?

One thought that entered my head was allowing players to pledge scores per tournament. So player Bob could pledge his score to Group A in one tournament, and then to Group B in another tournament. This could promote some interesting dynamics between players and groups.

Another idea is scoring based on associated members...some how set the group scoring to be dependent on the number of members. So the more playing members there are the higher ranked the group will be. This will hopefully encourage groups and players to play more often instead of just joining a group to be part of the "cool people."

OR...the site can create its own leagues and not consider official GH tour groups. In other words, an Edison-only tour group. This would have its advantages, but why recreate the wheel?

Please comment with your own thoughts. We have a chance to enhance tour groups and make playing even more fun.

Site news now on blog

News and announcements for Angry Edison are now being posted here in the new blog, Edison's Notebook. These updates will include system updates, rule changes, and new feature information. The posts will now also include any featured content on players, tour groups, and other GH topics.

In short, Edison's Notebook will be the source for all things Angry Edison + Guitar Hero.

Please add a comment to any post that gets your interest.

If you have questions regarding the site, the tournaments, or need general support, please send e-mail or use the Morning Toast forum. Thanks.

Now that's what I call dedication

A story in the local newspaper, The Dispatch, highlights a new store in Reynoldsburg, Ohio that hosts live gaming time. The store, Gamerz, has a bunch of big screen TVs, all the consoles, and an ass load of games. You then grab you friends and rent time by the hour to play the games you don't have on the equipment you don't have.

A neat idea that I can see being the new after-school addiction. Back in my day it was running to the laundry mat to buy candy, but I would have rather had a sweet ass arcade to waste my money at.

Gives me an idea to have a marathon of tournaments. Shorter blocks, like an hour or two, one right after another for some crazy length of time.

Score-based player difficulty limits

Right now a player's difficulty level is based on the percentage they've completed per level. If you have over 80% complete in a single career, you are locked out of lesser levels. However, it's been noticed that some players (either intended or not) are entering various leveled tournaments because they're simply not playing in career mode, so thus there's no percentage to check.

I obviously can't make people play career mode, so the suggestion was made to start determining player skill levels by score. This makes sense but I'm not sure what type of "formula" would be fair for all players.

There's a few ways this could go, like sum score per level, number of tournament wins, song wins...or even a combination of those. For example, lets say if a player scores a combined total of 5 million points in Hard tournaments they are then pushed into Expert level, regardless what their career percentage is.

In some ways I think this is more fair than career checking because it can't be cheated - or at least has less likelihood.

Feedback is appreciated.

Search&Destroy, turning losers into winners

I just launched a beta for a new "mini-game" at the site called Search&Destroy. The game is based around collecting song wins and every person that signs up for a regular tournament is automatically playing. The first player to collect a win for each selected song wins a prize.

Search&Destroy means you don't have to win a tournament to win a prize, but it does mean you have play in more tournaments. You'll have to search through the tournaments to find the S&D songs, sign-up, and then win that song in the tournament (that would be the destroy part).

The other nice thing is that Search&Destroy continues until someone wins, which could be weeks, months...who knows. It all depends how diligent you are in showing up and playing.

Search&Destroy is currently in beta testing right now, so the prize is just your standard issue key chain. But if testing goes well and response seems positive, when S&D is final the prize will be more than the standard tournament prizes - after all, you're on the warpath and you deserve more.

Please check out the Search&Destroy Hit List to see what songs you need to take out. And leave your feedback and experiences here or in the forum.

Ready to amp it up

In an effort to hopefully get more feedback from players and possibly get a few new ones, Edison's Notebook is the official blog of Angry Edison. Here I'll be discussing points about tournaments at Angry Edison, updates, player interviews, gamer research and more.

If you're a new reader, grab your axe and stop by the Angry Edison home page to join and play now. Our on-line tournaments are designed for players of all ages and any connected console can play along.