<3

Unpopular opinion time.

The update was fine. While it came with new bugs that needed fixing; overall, it was a welcome change that we've been waiting for since Florchestra was released. Search for velocity in the composer discord, you'll find most the people complaining in this thread doing the very same thing about the old (now, current again) system.

The devs didn't break your songs, they fixed a broken mechanic you've been manipulating to your advantage. Admirably so, for the record. This doesn't change the fact that it was broken, and needed fixing. Any change to an existing instrument will have potentially negative side effects upon previously composed titles. You want mute as a technique? I'm inclined to agree, but this still "breaks" your old songs that relied upon the velocity brackets to trigger the effect.

So, could this have been handled better? Sure.

The real issue here is how long it took to fix this bug. Had it been resolved swiftly, there wouldn't be a vast catalogue of songs impacted by the change. We wouldn't have developed techniques to make the most of a bad situation.

A little warning would have gone a long way to mitigating the fallout from this change. As others have mentioned, we have no idea if this made it to glabs or not, because it is practically impossible to access the server for most of us. I certainly didn't see it mentioned in patch notes until it was live. This results in reactionary feedback which is almost always negative, because only the people negatively impacted are motivated to comment. Deploying the fix to glabs in advance and informing us of the upcoming change (isn't this what community managers/reps/ambassadors are for?) would have quickly identified this issue, as well as the aforementioned new bugs that came with the updated system. The music system doesn't get updated often as it is, and if delaying for an additional week or two means sparing us all (devs and players alike) from situations like this, I doubt anyone would mind.

Finally, for the composers; you need to decide whether you value your old work more than the health of the music system as a whole. This was a change for the good, hamstrung by an understandable focus on past content instead of what you could do going forward under the new system. As I've already stated, changes like this will break your old songs. Either we live with that, or the current music system as it stands.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to rollback all the changes I made to my songs following the patch.

To be fair I did activly try to get people in game who enjoyed the update to give their opinion on it so it was more of a community decision than the one of people who were upset, but they didnt care to do so. It's valuable feedback to get the perspective from both sides.

I don't think that this should be rolled back now but instead make muted notes a seperate 'effect' in the drop down. This would please everyone to a degree.

Hoping this gets fixed.. again. The update effectively removed the soft piano hits from the game, ruining a ton of older songs with no way to fix them, and restricting the ways people can make songs in the future. I think a system with separate note techniques for the harsher/softer hits would be ideal, as Nurr suggested.

I've wrote tons of original music in this game and this update took half my song library and made it impossible to recover the original sound.

Now the piano sounds smoothly without sustain.. with the sustain pedal, it sounds the same as before. I understand that everyone who writes music knew the difference between 100 and 99 (and not only this subtlety), and we got used to it and adapted melodies based on it, however! Does all the music have to be adapted to this now? this may seem normal to some (for beginners), but there are people who have a lot of written music in the game and adapted to the old sound, and now they don't sound the way they originally thought, and to redo such volumes for current updates would be just madness! I do not know about you, but for me they touched something that was already too late to touch.. instead of adding an electric guitar or increasing the number of notes, in this update they violated what we have already adapted to.. as for me, it's too late to change anything with the volume of the notes.

The changes should have been split into a seperate effect and the existing settings left as is.  Not taking into account backwards compatability is honestly confusing to me, and this is me speaking not as a player but rather as an experienced programmer of 15 years.  Having the legacy code maintained to keep songs written with those settings would be very easy to implement, the only reason I could think to not do this would be if the system is hardcoded which would honestly be even less acceptable.  The code clearly exists for the old functions, since the pianos sustain pedal still sounds the same as before, and simply adding a new option to the list leaving the old sustain and sustain pedal alone would have easily sidestepped this whole problem, with the only possible difficulty again being if it was all hardcoded.

In regards to how people feel about this, in the BDO Music Academy discord a few people who either made a lot of songs in the past or are activly making songs are rather upset. I'm not going to push this forum post as hard as I did last time to make sure people saw it but just know there are more people disappointed with this than are here replying.  

I'm glad they listened...
BTW we waited for the same "fix" for about 1 year, 3 months and 28 days. 
I hope that this "fix" update is only a start to the "music updates" and we will see actuall content or at least some QoL for music album

I also just saw that there was a small update that I'm not too happy about either . the piano volume at 90 is no longer the same as before and I have melodies that work with notes of volume 127 and "90" that we could barely hear. Some of my titles (example: Dance of the Moonlight Jellies) sound very bad. it's a shame but it's not dramatic either. ^^.

Perhaps we shouldn't touch these parameters so as not to modify everyone's compositions? It's true that the piano sounds better. But there is no longer a drop in Volume between 127 - 120 - 110 - 100 - 90 - 80 - 70. I only start hearing it from 60. This is what needs to be corrected.