The Hardest Feat in Rock Block

Scott Hardie | March 22, 2017
When I designed the new-and-improved Rock Block, I wanted to make most of the feats easy to achieve as long as you kept playing steadily (such as "win 100 concerts"), but I also wanted to make one extra-difficult feat, something for the truly dedicated players to chase for a long time. That's how I came up with "have every artist in your label." It sounds simple, but it's the hardest feat in the game, because:

1) There are a lot of artists! The game started with 110 and it's up to 225 now.

2) A new artist is added at the rate of one per week, so it keeps gradually getting harder. (I fell behind with adding new artists while moving this past autumn and winter, but I'm slowly catching back up.)

3) Each win gets you an artist, but only at R1. An R2 artist requires two wins. An R10 requires ten wins. As of now, it would take you 849 wins (or 1698 draws) to pay for all of those, and that's without having to replace any artists lost along the way. Tournament participation can earn you some bonus ranks in a hurry, but we don't have enough active players to run many tournaments.

4) You cannot collect all artists by winning concerts alone. The Collection Guide only offers you an A/B choice of new artist when there are two artists available. After you collect all but one of the artists in a rank, the page will cease to offer you that last one. The only way to get it is to defeat someone in a trade concert.

5) Each time an artist is added to the game, there's a good chance of other artists getting promoted up the ladder. You might have played several trade concerts to finish collecting the last artist of a rank, only to have an uncollected artist get promoted into the rank and force you to start over.

6) All ten ranks, even the high ones, have to be finished via trade concerts. It's easy to pry away an R1 or R2 from opponents, but convincing someone to risk their R9 or R10 is not easy. And you'll probably have to play multiple concerts at that high level to collect the artist at last, each time risking another loss and having to rack up even more wins to replace what you lost.

7) What's even harder than convincing someone to risk an R10? Convincing someone to risk an exclusive. Once someone pulls off a rock block and makes their favorite artist exclusive, good luck adding that artist to your label. Your only options are to wait six months for the exclusivity to expire, during which time many more artists are added to the game, or to convince that player to risk losing what they played so hard to acquire.

As you can tell, this feat is only for the most determined players! I hope that it is sufficiently daunting. The play rule that you unlock by achieving it should feel appropriate. (There's also an excellent concert theme, imho the best in the game, that is unlocked by having this and most of the other play rules.)

Speaking for myself, I knew that I was going to go after this feat for as long as it took -- it's my game, after all. I also knew that I wanted to hurry before more artists joined the game, and especially before someone earned an exclusive. I'm proud to say that yesterday, I pulled it off: After nearly a year of pursuing the final artists off and on, I finally collected the 225th artist, and gained the hardest play rule to unlock. It's such a sweet feeling! I still have two other lesser feats to unlock, but the hardest is behind me.

I'm writing this partly to share insight into why I made that feat so hard, but mostly to encourage you all to go after it in spite of the difficulty. The chase is fun, the anticipation is fun, and the spoils are fun. Every serious player should give this a shot. Good luck, and happy hunting!

Scott Hardie | November 11, 2017
The hardest feat just got a little easier: You can now convert artists, taking a duplicate of an artist from your collection and transforming it into a new artist that you haven't collected yet. It's expensive, costing you many ranks of new artists, so it's not something that you can afford to do often. But if you're a completionist who is trying to go after every last artist in the game, or if you just want a shortcut to acquiring your favorite performer, the option now exists.