Why Is Harmonix Wiping The Rock Band 4 Leaderboards?

If you’ve ever played Rock Band 4, then you know the game was shipped completely riddled with bugs. In order to start working on getting rid of some very detrimental bugs, the Rock Band 4 dev team, Harmonix, had to take some drastic measures. One such bug affects scores and, well, it’s only fair that the team has decided to wipe the leaderboards as part of the bug-clearing process.

According to Harmonix’s blog post, the bug allows experienced drummers to

double-deploy overdrive by hitting the green ‘Overdrive’ gems at the end of dynamic drum fills.

In turn, scores are totally inaccurate and push players to the top of leaderboards when those not fortunate enough to catch on to the bug get left behind.

Harmonix laid out a very detailed plan for tackling the bugs in Rock Band 4, noting that they’re going to fix the exploits, but that means they have to wipe the leaderboards for every song — and their reasoning is very sound. Harmonix hopes to make improvements to the game that affect every aspect of it, including songs, instruments and even the level of difficulty in the game.

The last part of their plan to fix Rock Band 4 is more in-depth and involves

an adjustment to our code that will allow us, in the future, to address song-specific bugs and issue targeted leaderboard wipes.

This means that if something does go awry in the future, they can tackle the problem head on in a much faster manner without having to wipe the entire leaderboard again. Harmonix wanted to make it perfectly clear that this leaderboard wipe doesn’t involve wiping local saved content — that content will remain untouched.

Harmonix properly addressed fans’ concerns about having their hard work wiped out, but promised it would ensure that in the future, you wouldn’t be duped by a cheater using the exploit to get ahead. One Twitter user felt the effects of a cheater first-hand.

Rock Band 4 is the fourth addition to the Rock Band franchise featuring a musical gaming experience where you and your friends can play together on a guitar controller, a microphone and a drum set. Rock Band 4 actually allows backwards compatibility on the same platform between Rock Band games.

The update involving the bug fix and leaderboard wipe is set to go live in January of 2016.