Topics

1

Discussion / How often are reported scores actually investigated?

« on: May 05, 2011, 12:58:03 am »

I had the displeasure today of discovering that one of my scores had not only been reported, but that it had actually been reduced to 2 (which presumably means that a moderator checked it out and deemed it to be cheating, since I didn't report myself). That was a bit of a bummer. It was a bit of a lucky run, sure, but it was done legitimately with the album version of the song in question (Radiohead's "Bloom").

I'm sure many of us have had the experience of getting an awesomer-than-expected high score and then wondering if it's going to look so astronomical that someone else would report it. I just figured the extended stats would be enough to prove it's legit, and not a hack (which I wouldn't know how to do if I tried, but that's neither here nor there). What irks me most isn't that one of my scores was reported and removed (I ran the song again and got the throne back), but rather that some of the obvious cheats/anomalies I've reported (clearly incorrect track shapes, impossible statistics such as the longest chain being longer than the song itself, even one case where the guy admitted the game glitched and gave him all whites) have been there for endless months, with seemingly nothing done about them.

So what I'm curious about is: What's the system for moderating these scores? Presumably one or more humans do this, which means it's probably a judgment call on their part. OK, but if this system produces false positives, that's a bit of a buzzkill when you're playing the game the way it's supposed to be played. Perhaps in the future, we could suggest a system where the person whose score is reported gets notified of the report, and can dialogue with the moderator(s) if necessary to explain what in-game mechanics produced the high score? (If they're telling the truth, it should line up with the extended stats - say a huge cluster that came from red paint x4, or a lot of paints showed up on the track, etc.) Does the system track which player reported the suspicious score? (Just in case I did screw up and report myself without realizing it - though you'd think I'd have noticed the effect immediately upon doing so.)

Honestly, up until today, I had never once seen a reported score actually get demoted (reporting my own mistakenly labeled tracks notwithstanding).

2

Discussion / The Device Has Been Modified

« on: April 13, 2011, 03:30:44 pm »

I'm surprised not to see any comments about yesterday's "hack", which vetoed the first song you selected when loading up the game yesterday, forcing you instead to playing "The Device Has Been Modified", which is apparently a song advertising the upcoming release of Portal 2. It adds an [as-portal] tag that mods your ship and the bricks in a rather amusing way. I could see how this would be annoying if you weren't familiar with or didn't care about Portal, but I thought it was hilarious.

3

Discussion / How much does bitrate affect track slope?

« on: April 13, 2011, 03:03:59 pm »

I noticed something rather odd last night, after a killer run on a song that turned out to be a lot denser and more downhill than I initially expected. Though I was playing the album version of the song (U2's "Lemon", from Zooropa), I had a significantly steeper track than most of the others. This probably tipped the playing field significantly in my favor, considering my score came out almost 500K above the previous throne-holder (who is a pretty darn good Pointman player).

http://audio-surf.com/song.php?t=popular#236243

I checked iTunes and realized that this track had been ripped at 96kbps. So I was wondering if a lower bitrate might somehow introduce more "noise" to a song or otherwise cause Audiosurf to pick up more spikes (and thus place a lot more bricks) when reading the mp3 file into memory.

Others seem to have temporary bumps in the intensity of their version comparable to where mine are, but an overall uphill slope compared to my downhill. I'm not sure if this is because most folks use a higher bitrate (I normally use 192, but stuff I ripped to my computer ages ago when I had less space available is typically 92 or 128), or if it's because multiple recordings of the song exist (if so, it seems unlikely that most folks would have played something other than the album version).

But this might explain why some folks appear to be cheating when they actually aren't. It's just be interesting to understand exactly what causes it.

4

Discussion / Your most formidable opponents

« on: April 05, 2011, 05:33:25 pm »

Who are the people you see on the scoreboards most frequently, that you just can't seem to beat? Or, if you have an incredibly fortunate run and manage to dethrone them, they'll take that throne back alarmingly soon?

Here are some of mine. Consider this a compliment if you are one of these players. (And feel free to correct me if I assumed you were a he, and you're actually a she.)

MeCubed: The toughest Pointman Pro player I've run up against. Will generally retaliate in short order if you top any of his scores, and if you do enough of that with the same artist, he'll just run through the entire album to tie up loose ends, resulting in a string of 5 or 6 dethrone Emails showing up in your inbox within the same hour. Particularly distressing when it's a high-traffic song that was a fight just to get through with Eraser or Pusher.

Kaveman: Also has some crazy awesome Pointman scores, though he doesn't seem to be active any more. Tends to show up on a lot of my old-school favorites from the days when I was big on Christian rock (Jars of Clay, dc Talk, Newsboys, etc.)

weeblegrrl: Another ridiculously talented Pointman player. I think I can safely assume this one's a "she".

hellfaucet: I don't tend to run into as many ridiculously insurmountable Vegas scores these days as I used to, but this guy's the reason a lot of Animal Collective thrones (as well as those by other electronic acts) remain out of reach for me. People say good Vegas scores are just lucky, but I think it must take a lot of tenacity to get this good with Vegas (the game has to give you the right powerups, but you also need a really good sense of timing regarding when to use them).

onetrueboo: Darn good Pusher player. Seeing that his Pusher scores could regularly outstrip my Eraser scores inspired me to learn what exactly makes Pusher tick. Now it's my favorite character.

XenoRizos: OH DEAR GOD. Just quit while you're (almost) ahead if you see this dude on a scoreboard. He usually plays Eraser, but will mess around with other characters just for fun if you dethrone him with one of those characters. Seriously, the guy's like FedEx. Dethrone him, and he'll return your dethrone Email to sender within a guaranteed 24-hour turnaround time. Dethrone him again after that, and he'll just end up driving the high score up to something so ridiculous that you'll wish you'd left well enough alone. Witness the following:

http://www.audio-surf.com/song.php?t=popular#167488

I worked pretty hard to get that 359k score, topping a score of his in the 300k range that had already seemed rather impossible to reach. Then I woke up the next morning and saw that he'd nearly doubled it. WHAT.

5

Discussion / Audiosurf right before bedtime... maybe not a good idea.

« on: April 05, 2011, 05:11:54 pm »

I have to laugh about the seizure warning thing. Not because people actually having seizures is funny, but because I had a dream the other day that I was playing the game, the track started getting a hell of a lot faster and curvier than normal, it started to make me dizzy, I thought, "Oh shit, the seizure thing is actually real!", and I passed out.

In reality, this is what happened:

5:30 AM: Woke up in the middle of the night and didn't feel tired any more.
6:00 AM: Decided to play a little Audiosurf while killing time and waiting to become tired again.
7:00 AM: Finished my Audiosurf session and started feeling tired enough to go to bed again.
8:00 AM: The above weird dream occurred (my brain was simply going over what it had been most recently occupied with) and it abruptly woke me up.

The really weird thing was that passing out in the dream was the "kick" that woke me up in real life - kinda like how it works in Inception - so my brain was very confused for a second, as if I had fallen asleep in one room and then woken up in the adjacent room.

Usually, the effects of playing the game right before going to bed are more mundane - my brain is too active and I can't get to sleep right away. So I've learned that I need to do something mellow as a "comedown" between playing this game and going to bed. Anyone else ever have that problem?

6

Feature Requests / Let's fix comments, please.

« on: January 01, 2011, 08:22:17 pm »

Really Irritating Bug that Should Be Fixed ASAP:

I submit a comment on a song and it just vanishes. *poof* This usually happens from within the game. If I re-type and re-submit, it usually goes through just fine, but I don't see why a submitted comment should ever fail to register (barring obvious problems like the server being down, which isn't true in this case because I just ran a song and the score registered on the server).

Other Nice-to-Haves in the Comments Section:

The ability to click anywhere within what I've already typed to make corrections, rather than having to backspace all the way to my mistake and retype everything. Y'know, like any text field anywhere on the web ever.

The ability to track comments on a song like threads on a message board. Say the dude who dethroned me left a taunting message about it. So I replied and called him a poo-poo head. I'd sure like to be notified of his next comeback, rather than having to check for it once an hour.

In a similar vein, the ability to respond to a specific comment and have it show up as such. Similar to quoting someone on a message board.

7

Troubleshooting / Every song I play gets logged as "Derezzed"

« on: December 19, 2010, 10:27:20 pm »

No matter what song I play, I get the scoreboard for "Derezzed" by Daft Punk at the end of it (which doesn't show my own score, which is probably a good thing since it would have looked like I cheated). "My Page" on audio-surf.com seems to confirm that it thinks this is the last song I played, using Pointman Pro. (I played "Don't Speak" by No Doubt and "Faint" by Linkin Park, both using Pusher. These don't show at all in my Recent Songs.)

I'm using YAAP, not sure if that makes a difference. Other songs I played earlier this evening without YAAP show up as they should. I've never had this sort of problem before, with or without external playlist managing applications.

8

Discussion / Figuring Out Which Character Is Best for a Song

« on: October 27, 2010, 06:37:36 pm »

There have been a lot of discussions here about balancing the different characters so that they all have roughly equal scoring potential. I've gone back and forth on whether I think this is a good idea, or whether I even think it's possible. As I play the game more and more and start to build up confidence with characters that previously mystified me, I've become more and more convinced that certain characters just aren't gonna cut it on specific songs. This is mostly due to track slope and the ability to create a chain. I'm sure most of the expert players know this all too well already. But for those of us who want to be prolific, I thought it might be interesting to share our strategies for picking the best character for a specific song.

I mostly play Pro difficulty, with some dabbling in Elite, so I'll discuss those characters here. Feel free to chime in if you play Casual more than I do (which is almost never).

Eraser: This character has become my bread and butter. It's the easiest for me to control and make huge matches with on the fastest songs - and those are generally the most fun to play. basically I'll default to this character if it looks like there aren't too many "gaps" where pretty much all characters will lose the chain, or if the "gaps" don't last too long. A track shape that is all downhill, maybe flat at the mildest, is ideal for Eraser in my mind. I'm finding that keeping a chain is almost effortless in fast songs, to the point where paints on their own, amplified by the chain, can get me more consistent results than the random luck of Vegas can. Eraser's next to useless on most uphill songs, though, unless they have a strong enough beat to keep the chain going, but still, those are generally calm enough that other characters can do better.

Vegas: I used to play this one constantly until Eraser won me over. I still experiment with it occasionally, especially when a track is a bit of a crapshoot (so slow that nobody can keep a chain reliably, or else lots of ups and downs, basically a situation where most other characters will be at a disadvantage at several points). Due to the extreme luck factor, scores depend largely on what bonuses get thrown at you, but I've found that it takes a lot of practice to be consistently good with Vegas. Shuffling to keep the chain going on songs where you can't rely on matches naturally falling into place quickly enough takes practice - especially if the pace is hectic and you don't want to suddenly crash on a column that wasn't full a split second ago. Maximizing the potential of multiplier x paint, while this creates most of the high scores that piss people off, also requires careful timing if you want to hang onto those bonuses until you've got a good enough chain to launch a combo into the high 5-digit or even 6-digit range. I still overfill with Vegas, and end up needing to restart the track, more than I do with most characters, so it's the most frustrating and time-consuming way to play the game if I'm gunning for a high score. It's also notable that outside of those big bonuses aided by powerups, the average cluster size in Vegas is generally smaller than that of Eraser or Pointman, because your only control over block placement is to shuffle the grid. I try to only resort to this mode when the existing high score was attained by Vegas, or when all other options have failed me.

Pointman: Initially one of the most frustrating modes, but now I find that it's a lot of fun, and actually outperforms Eraser on a lot of the slower songs. As long as the beat's solid enough to keep overall traffic to 90+, solid chaining and the ability to stack blocks exactly as I want them can make it easier to get good scores, where Eraser only diminishes the value of already small matches that disappear too soon. I tend to chicken out once the traffic approaches 150, though. My biggest gripe with Pointman is that I'm so busy dropping bricks I just picked up that it's easy to miss one that I wanted, right-click to drop what I thought I picked up, and instead fire off that paint or multiplier I've been saving up well before I intended to. That's just a lack of skill on my part, and also much less of an issue in Elite mode (where firing off a lightning bolt too early doesn't feel like as much of a waste - though I guess those six extra bricks on top of an already sixable field of reds would make a difference there). Just getting to the point where I could survive a fair amount of hectic songs without overfilling was a major milestone for me, though I'm still nowhere near competitive with this player if a throne is highly sought after. I'll generally choose this as practice when a song's not too fast and I don't expect it to be popular with the serious players.

Pusher: I'm just barely starting to get the hang of this one. I feel like it does well in the same situations where Eraser does, but with a handicap that neither Eraser nor Pointman have, in terms of the flexibility of placing bricks where you really want them. It takes me a lot longer to correct my mistakes here - partially because I haven't fully trained myself to ignore the whites and keep things from stacking up. The scoring potential seems bigger with this one, especially in Pro - essentially any paint powerup will get you double what it gets any other character (assuming you let the results of it disappear without stacking a non-matching color on top, anyway). But it's really hard to adjust to this mode and take full advantage of the clear bonus when other characters have taught me to just keep stacking whatever I can even if it doesn't all match at the same time. (Slow songs are frustrating as hell because of this - I get impatient and collect stray blocks for the sake of the chain, then lose it anyway when I get a tower of nonsense in the middle of the screen than I have to pass up a ton of bricks waiting for the few that I need.) So I see the potential, but I have a lot to learn here. I've started using it more and more as I've delved into music from my past that is fairly up-tempo, but that almost no other players seem to have touched.

Double Vision: Yeah, right. I still don't get it. Fun as a two-player mode, but I am baffled as to how good players take advantage of it to the point where they can get scores which rival those of good Eraser/Vegas players. I suppose there's a lot of potential in the bonus for "across the line" matches, but I don't know nearly enough to coordinate those well, and you get literally no leeway to change the placement of blocks. I screw around with DV on rare occasions, but I find myself wishing it had a little more control over its circumstances - especially with only 6 rows to fill.

Mono: Not competitive at all, except with fellow Mono players, and I think that's OK, but agree that it needs to be its own class with its own separate scoreboard. I despised this mode at first due to not liking the instant failure condition that you can't recover from. However, I've come to appreciate it as a training ground, since it's all about pure timing and precision. Mono tracks will give you colored bricks where there would be reds and yellows in Pro mode, so a good Mono player should be good at avoiding blocks of lesser value in Puzzle mode (where it's often advisable to pass up purple). Also interesting is intentionally hitting grey blocks in Elite mode just to help keep those long chains going. You lose Stealth, but I've seen a few situations where you can sustain the chain to get large enough clusters it might actually be worth it.

Well, that's how I play the game - look at the track shape and then change the character, based on whether I want a high score or I think it'll be good for practice. I think trying to become prolific with all the characters gives the game a ton of replay value. What are your thoughts/strategies on this subject?

9

Troubleshooting / Dethroned by a Phantom

« on: October 27, 2010, 05:52:11 pm »

I got an Email a few days ago saying that I'd been dethroned by a player who doesn't actually appear on the scoreboard. The "Dethroned" tab on my Page confirms this:

samppaee dethroned you on 'Cut' by Plumb.
They lead you by 1,018 points

The scoreboard still has me at the top:
http://audio-surf.com/song.php#367406

I actually replayed the song after getting this, and established a new high score that was a good 10K over my old one. Theoretically, that would have regained my lost throne. But since the other player didn't actually have a high score listed, I can't get this item to be crossed off on my "Dethroned" list. Not a big deal, just... weird.

Could it be possible that the person cheated, was reported, and had their score taken down before I had the chance to look at it? (Yeah, right.)

Maybe the more realistic possibility is that they played a remix of the song (one does exist, as I believe it was released as a radio single in remixed form, being a fairly sparse, slow song and all), realized for themselves that they were on the wrong scoreboard, and reported their own score, immediately dropping it off the global boards? If so, that indicates a possible glitch in the tracking of who has thrones - if you get "re-throned" when a cheater or someone who mistakenly mislabeled a song previously had you at #2, you might never know.

10

Feature Requests / Who Stealthed It First?

« on: September 29, 2010, 10:43:49 pm »

I'm just getting up to speed (har har) with Mono. Stealthed a few songs the other day that I never thought i'd Stealth due to their density. And I thought, it must be a bummer for the more dedicated Mono players to be relegated to their own little subsection of the score boards. Wouldn't it be neat to give some of the hardcore Mono players something to brag about?

So, I started wondering about which songs had been stealthed and which hadn't. And I figured, it probably wouldn't be too hard to track (a) whether a song's been stealthed yet, (b) who stealthed it first, (c) how many players have stealthed it, and (d) how many songs a given player has stealthed (and how many of those where they did it first). I bet enough people have stealthed TTFAF by now, but wouldn't it be cool to have been the first? Or to be the first on a new song by your favorite band?

I realize that having an achievement which depends on getting there first could have the unfortunate effect of encouraging illegal downloading of songs before they're officially released. (Not that I have a problem with that, personally, but it'd suck to get beaten to the punch weeks before that brand new album you just downloaded from iTunes was officially available). But it'd still be nice to have as a "just for fun" thing. It might encourage folks to play a wider variety of songs from their personal libraries.

11

Discussion / Friends Vs. Following

« on: September 22, 2010, 02:11:58 pm »

So, I haven't played around too much with the Friends feature. I'm generally cool with accepting Friend requests, but I don't initiate them. A while back, I got my first Friend request and accepted it. By chance, I later dethroned this person from a song (somewhat unexpectedly). I didn't get the Brutus achievement. When I looked into it, I found out that my Friends page says I'm "following" the person, as well as two of his other accounts. If he initiated the request and I accepted it, shouldn't the system seem us as Friends?

(Unless he later stopped following me. In which case, this is awkward.)

12

Discussion / Are these really my most played artists?

« on: September 20, 2010, 12:53:03 am »

When I login to the audio-surf website and visit "My Page", and click the "Artists" tab to see my Most Played artists, I seem to have fewer plays logged for many of them than I know I've played.

For example, it says I've played Arcade Fire 23 times. (Not The Arcade Fire, which would technically be a separate artist by Audiosurf's rules. The artist name is consistently tagged in my iTunes library.) This is rather surprising, given that the group has 3 albums with a combined 37 songs between them all, and I've played through all of them at least once. One might argue that these plays are not getting logged by the server, but I'm visible on the leaderboards for each of these songs, and I've taken many a run at some of them to get thrones. ("Keep the Car Running" is shown on my Most Played Songs list, at 10 plays. I've missed it by that much too damn many times!)

So, what's going on here? Left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing, I take it?

13

Discussion / Finding a strategy for low-traffic songs

« on: September 20, 2010, 12:47:02 am »

I've noticed that a lot of low-traffic songs (meaning, songs that either have too slow of a beat, or the beat doesn't register as blocks due to being too soft, often the case with songs that don't have much in the way of percussion) don't get nearly as much attention on the scoreboards as high-traffic songs by the same artists, and that's generally for good reason. They often aren't as fun to play. You get plenty of time to think, so perhaps they're good for noob training, but once you get the hang of chaining, it's disheartening to play a song where it's impossible to keep the chain because there just aren't enough bricks, so the results are often left to luck. It's especially dull for me, since I primarily play Eraser nowadays, and that's about the most useless character on such songs.

To me, the possible strategies for throning such a song (assuming there's competition to begin with) are as follows - not sure all will work, but just theorizing for the possible Eraser alternatives:

1) Play Pointman and keep a backlog of bricks handy to bridge the gaps. You'll probably still have more gaps than bricks to fill them with, but you might be able to get some meager amount of chaining going when the sound "spikes" due to a vocal or instrumental part getting more intense. Save up a paint (assuming you're not playing Elite mode, of course) and intentionally stack 21 bricks in disarray just to get that bonus out of the way early. Save up lightning bolts until you've got the most of that color to add them to, and save up multipliers until you've got a big match ready to go. (Saving up anything is still a challenge for me, as I have a bad habit of right-clicking furiously when I want to dump stuff.)

2) Play Vegas and grind, baby grind. Kind of feels like cheating, but clever manipulation of the paint/multilpier combo can sometimes launch you beyond the high score in one fell swoop. Shuffle a hell of a lot to see if you can get a chain going with measley small matches again and again before doing this. (I've managed good results with patient "shuffle chaining" used to augment a big paint bonus in lieu of a multiplier on occasion.)

3) Play DV, and bank on the bonus for matches "across the line". High scores for these songs tend to hover in the 50-60K range based on length, so with the number of matches typical in a given song, combined with score bonuses at the end, this might be reachable based on that 1,000 point bonus over and over, more so than what's actually being matched.

4) Pusher gets to double everything if you do it right. I still suck with this character, but keeping the board clean could make a difference here, given the skill to do so.

Does the match window actually change slightly based on the character? If so, that might make the difference between keeping vs. losing a chain for a character where the beat is just ever so slightly slower than the timing of the match window.

I often use slower songs as my training ground for Elite mode, since the match window is longer and it's interesting to see how long I can drag out a match. But that won't dethrone a Pro score, obviously.

What's your favorite approach on slower songs?

14

Discussion / Classic Audiosurf "Screw You"s

« on: September 17, 2010, 10:07:00 pm »

We've started many other threads to complain about bugs in the game. This isn't about that. This thread is for perfectly legitimate ways that the game likes to screw us over without actually being buggy. Basically, unexpected occurrences that are within the established parameters of the game, but that are fun to gripe about due to how they can ruin a perfectly good run. Some of my favorites:

1. You're nearing the end of an Eraser run, and the song is gradually fading out or otherwise winding down to a calm finish. You anticipate the lack of yellows and reds and erase those colors, only to leave a solitary purple block on the track while purple is the only color that fails to appear for the rest of the song.

2. Variation on #1: You know the track well and know where that one last purple brick is... and this time it's white. In the same column as the purple brick you can't erase.

3. Discovering for the first time that Vegas's "Glowing Storm" (the lightning bolt that produces a vertical string of 3 wild card blocks) doesn't match with itself. You will invariably find this out at the very end of a song on an otherwise clean track.

4. Also fun with the "Glowing Storm": Firing it on top of a full column. Oh look, it just matched away the entire column! Wait a minute... (Bonus fun if you were about to fire a red paint and the Glowing Storm appeared in your arsenal at that precise microsecond.)

4 1/2. Really, I like to view the Glowing Storm in general as Audiosurf's version of giving you the finger. It's often more trouble than it's worth.

5. You're just about to attain Match21 when the track corkscrews and you crash into a brick in the wrong column. (Variation: The track changes rhythm and speed so drastically that your field of vision starts to get hopelessly obscured by the tunnels and other weird "ceiling things" floating above the track.)

6. You've got a clean track at the end of a song that either ends abruptly or bleeds into the next track on the CD, and a white brick shows up right before you disappear into the swirling vortex. You grab it... and it's not done falling before the track ends.

7. Good News: You've got a really awesome chain going, and a full field of assorted bricks, with a red paint coming up in the margin. Bad News: There's a purple paint hiding immediately behind it.

15

Discussion / Erasing a Glowing Brick

« on: September 17, 2010, 09:29:57 pm »

Possible glitch in the game that some of you Eraser players may have seen as well. Normally, erasing a glowing brick (the wild card that can match with two of any color) just erases that one brick. But on rare occasions, erasing a glowing brick erases EVERYTHING on the grid. It remembers the colors and placements of all bricks, as if I had simultaneously erased all 4 colors + white. Needless to say, this can really screw me up when I'm expecting to shift one color out of mixed positions on the bottom and immediately dump them back on top - I usually end up throwing a full column back into play just as I hit the next brick (which otherwise would have landed atop a match and forced a clear).

So... what up wit dat?