Replacement 1 (Guitar): Not unusual, downstrum stopped working on the original guitar, did the online replacement and had the new guitar in literally 3 days. So far so good.
Unhappiness level: 1/10
Replacement 2 (Drums): Original drumset's yellow pad started cracking. I thought maybe I was hitting the drums too hard, so I just popped the pad off (they come off easily with no tools) and put a crapload of tape on the plastic pad so it wouldn't crack anymore. Since I did that, I've looked on the rockband forums and have learned that the yellow or blue pads cracking is a common problem. Anyway, a week or so later the blue pad stopped working at all. I popped the top of it off and could see that part of the drums must have been hitting where the wire plugs into the circuit board and almost completely broken the plug off the board. I could have easily fixed this myself, but why should I have to? I sent for a replacement. It came in about four days.
Unhappiness level: 3/10
Replacement 3 (Drums): This is where things get a little interesting. I unboxed the second set of drums and set everything up. Started a song and immediately failed. It took me a second to figure out that the bass pedal wasn't working, or if it did work it would register like 100 hits at once and make you fail instantly. I plugged the bass pedal back into the old drums to make sure that the pedal itself wasn't bad, but it was fine. Turns out the plug where the bass pedal plugs in is messed up. I messed with it for awhile and was able to get it to work by having the plug pulled out a tiny bit and angled certain way. Obviously you're hitting the dumb things though and it stops working after 5 seconds. I even tried taping it down various ways and could play a song or two, but it would eventually get messed up. Ridiculous. I'm going to send away for the third set of drums today.
Unhappiness level: 5/10
The sad part about this is I'm not even that mad. I love the game so much that I'm wasting all this time trying (and having $125 holds on my credit card for each instrument replacement, $375 hold right in time for the holidays!!) to get a full set of working instruments. God help us when the warranty runs out.
How about you guys?