Hey everyone –

The Rock Band dev team is currently hard at work on our January update, which will include more exciting clothing assets for your characters, an enhancement to one of our game modes that we think you’ll love, and, most significantly, some big changes to our codebase that dramatically improve the integrity and stability of leaderboard scores.

Rock Band 4 shipped with a handful of gnarly bugs, including an issue where experienced drummers can double-deploy overdrive by hitting the green ‘Overdrive’ gems at the end of dynamic drum fills. But with your help, we’ve identified (and are fixing) potential score exploits that compromise the integrity of our leaderboards.

So here’s what we’re going to do about it: First, we’re going to fix the exploits (of course). Second – and this is the most important detail – we have to wipe all of the leaderboard scores for all songs. Why? Because we’re making improvements that affect almost every song, instrument, and difficulty in the game. Finally, Step Three involves an adjustment to our code that will allow us, in the future, to address song-specific bugs and issue targeted leaderboard wipes. We’ll also be rolling out some score fidelity fixes to individual songs. These individual fixes will continue through the spring.

We know that many of you have worked hard to climb the leaderboards, and that wiping your scores sucks. That said, these changes will ensure that in the future, you won’t be unseated from the top spot by someone using an exploit. And if we do discover an issue down the road, we can address it much more quickly and easily.

We also want to make sure we’re absolutely clear that we’re only wiping the high scores you’ve posted to leaderboards. Those of you who are racking up Full Combos won’t lose that data on your local saves. You’ll also hold on to the ‘song plays’ stat visible on the Player Stats screen. As far as your song library goes, it’ll continue to display the accuracy and star count for your highest-scoring performances to date. These stats will be replaced the first time you re-play each song after the update goes live.

In other news, when the January update goes live, all scores you earn on songs in ‘Play a Show’ mode will post to leaderboards, just like Quickplay scores! We know a lot of you have been citing this as the main reason you’ve been shying away from the new mode. ‘Play a Show’ gets players closer than ever to the experience of live concert performance, and in January, you’ll have one more reason to jump in and vote on songs, field audience requests, and soak up the glory of an epic encore. (PS, this mode is great for parties).

Oh, and next month, following on the success of our partnership with Bethesda and the Fallout 4 Vault Suit we added to the Rock Shop, we’re teaming up with another amazing studio for a set of tie-in clothing assets that we’re pretty sure you’ll be psyched about.

(If you have any questions, be sure to check our our FAQ on the Rock Band Forums).

Regards, Matt Derby, Lead Designer & Helen McWilliams, Creative Lead Rock Band 4 Ongoing Features Team