Improved BL3 Hunt Rules v3.2

An average completion takes approximately 60h. Taking an average 8h/day of sleep and 8h/weekday of work, there’s only 72h of free time in a week - creating a quite tight margin. To allow an average person to comfortably complete the hunt within the allowed time range, we up the duration to two weeks. This comes to an average of ~4.5h/day required playtime.

As will be explained later, vault cards are allowed. Completing vault cards during the competition provides a (slight) advantage. Aligning the start time with the weekly reset prevents people from accidentally completing their challenges early, or from specifically farming up all but one ahead of time to complete it more easily during the run. It also provides a simple extra way to signal the start of the competition - “You may start once your weekly challenge looks like X”.

You may of course ignore this when playing along casually.

This makes it possible to verify that you followed all rules.

You may of course ignore this when playing along casually.

The reason for progression first should be obvious - the whole point of the competition is to try get as many items as possible. The amount of time it takes is the next thing to rank by, the person with the best route (or best luck) should win. Progression ties are expected, we deliberately design to allow an average person to collect everything, we need a tiebreaker.

There are three possible ways we could track time:

• Real time
• Stream time
• Character time

Real time is absolutely insane, no contest should ever use it. It means the only way to win is to happen to live in a timezone where the competition starts right as you wake up, and have no other commitments so that you can no-life it from the very beginning until you finish, with as little sleep and as few breaks as possible. Trying to add playtime restrictions does not, and can never prevent this. Say you can only play for 16 out of every 24 hours, and you expect to take 60 hours total - during the first three days you can put in 48 hours whenever you want, but you have to do your last 12h exactly 72h after the start of the competition. None of this is remotely acceptable, we want to allow an average person to be able to compete, and forcing people to start at an exact time, avoiding food and sleep, is completely antithetical to this.

So the real argument is between stream time vs character time. This has been decided based on play testing. When trying to optimize, character time is simply more comfortable, since you’re able to pause at any point without losing time, whether it be to interact with chat, look up notes, make and submit clips, or simply to take breaks to eat or go to the bathroom. Stream time is far more stressful simply since you have to be efficient the entire time you’re live, any break is time lost compared to others.

Using character time simply means there’s no need for restrictions. There’s just no benefit to playing longer - in fact you could argue it explicitly hurts, fatigue leads to mistakes which cost time.

Doing this also resets your character time, hiding any time you spent on failed attempts.

This is the unfortunate downside of using character time - Gearbox is bad and broke the timer half the time. Arms Race takes a significant portion of the run, and includes the rarest items in the entire competition, so simply allowing players to keep their timer paused the entire time and claim it all for free is unacceptable. Play testing has shown the above rules generally (though not flawlessly) manage to unpause the timer, and they’re simple enough that requiring them is more reasonable than the alternatives. Other possible solutions were switching to stream time just for Arms Race (awkward needing to track character time before/after and doing maths), or just switching to stream time in general (more stressful as discussed above).

These should mostly go without saying. We want everyone to be playing though the same game, mods and older game versions may completely change things. While some mods may have no effect, we cannot be expected to exhaustively validate this, so it’s better to enforce a blanket ban.

The Hunt Tracker was explicitly designed for this competition, so is of course allowed.

DXVK and VKD3D may help with performance issues, and are widly used and known to not interfere, so are also allowed. Anyone playing on Linux under Proton will already implicitly be using one of these, we might as well explicitly allow it for Windows users as well.

Again, this should go without saying, save editing skips through content, you have to you collect everything you use legitimately.

That being said, this is a Borderlands game, there are many ways to hardlock. In fact, Vermilingua has a very unique hardlock where you can actually finish the quest and move on to the next one, but he never respawns (if you SQ before talking to Ma at the end), so you might not even realise you’ve hardlocked until hours later. It’d be remiss to say that one simple mistake like this should ruin your entire run, and it’s not always easy to find another player to join to fix your game, so given sufficient explanation we can leave some leniency here.

Abusing this by deliberately hardlocking just so that you can save edit ahead is not allowed.

The point of the competition is to gather everything starting from a new save - so obviously we don’t want to allow starting from a level 13 save, or a save you already started on earlier.

There isn’t any justifiable reason to limit the amount of characters to create - so we just don’t.

While it could be argued that after reaching some point on your first character, you should be allowed to start additional characters at level 13, this would allow them to immediately jump into Arms Race. The Arms Race COMs are character-weighted, COMs for characters in your party are far more common. If we allowed level 13 saves, they instantly become the only viable way to get these COMs because of how much it buffs their drop rates. Weighing the time it takes to level a new character up to 13 against the buff it provides is an interesting point of strategy, and it keeps other strategies such as coop or a “traditional” single character run viable. Therefore, we require all characters to start from scratch.

As above, the point is to get everything starting from a new save, so you have to get everything new on those saves.

It is difficult to make the distinction between items added to the Lost Loot on your current character vs an older one, hence the blanket ban.

I’ll be honest, I don’t really have one for this. We want to keep everyone playing at the same level, and using easy just kind of feels wrong.

We still don’t actually know what exactly the difficulties change, so it’s possible this rule doesn’t actually have a practical effect.

I kind of gave it already, each of these give big advantages to people who’ve played before. We want an average person to be able to compete, so we don’t want them to immediately be outclassed by some hardcore fan who’s saved up hundreds of diamond keys to immediately put together a full build upon making it to Sancturary the first time.

Ideally, these would be banned, as they introduce outside influence. Even with two separate competitions under the exact same ruleset, technically one of them would have easier challenges, making comparisons between the two unfair.

There’s one problem though: there is no way to disable them. The moment you complete the challenge you instantly get it’s reward, and you can’t deselect a vault card. The only way to prevent the challenges from triggering during the run is to complete them beforehand on another character - but this is unreasonable, especially since they may roll over in the middle of a session.

In practice, everyone gets the same challenges, so as long as no one can pre-farm them (due to starting the competition aligned with a reset), no one has any unfair advantage. Additionally, the actual rewards are so minor they don’t really have an impact even if they were per-player.

We are able to remove vault card challenges with mods, but we want the ruleset to remain console compatible.

Which missions are accessible depend on who your friends have recently killed, allowing outside influence into your run. While the extra XP is not great, it’s a conscious choice to pick these quests up, so it’s an easy thing to ban.

The first three events all introduce outside influence into your game, which may provide an unfair advantage to those on Twitch over other platforms, and those with more viewers over those with fewer.

I’m not sure this rule really needs to exist given it’s being shut down, but there’s also not much reason to remove it, in case it even gets revived.

As explained later, these items would not be able to be redeemed as drops, but they are still banned. The Black Market is simply too easy. In a run where you’re constantly farming drops, money is no obstacle, so it’s completely free legendaries you can keep coming back for, and you can trivially farm for certain parts or anoints. During the weeks of 2023-01-03 and 2023-12-19, the Free Radical was available in Skywell-27 - you could’ve used it for your entire run starting at as low as level 15. This sigificantly impacts the run between competitions, or even just for practice or casual run throughs.

Note for the interested: I have reverse engineered the Black Market RNG, and have written a predictor for it.

The main thing we’re trying to avoid is mass duping and selling off all the duplicates to be able to afford an early Crit/Hail during the first visit to Sancturary. This gives coop players a large advantage.

If multiple players want to use the same item, it is a bit of a slog farming for multiple copies, especially if it’s just something like a blue shield or a snowdrift. It would be nice to be able to dupe the first copy. However, there are already many other advantages to playing in coop, so requiring extra farming helps balance them out a bit.

Firstly let’s start off with just switching between Mayhem Levels.

Banning going down Mayhem Levels is unacceptable because it becomes way to easy to softlock your run - if you turned your level up beyond what your build can handle, there’s no way out. The only bonus you can get by dropping Mayhem Levels is using higher mayhem-leveled gear on lower level enemies - but this only comes out to x2.37 weapon card damage in the most extreme case, plenty of individual skills or items will do more for you build than this. Additionally, banning restricts route creativity, as it essentially forces all optimal routes to do all no/low mayhem content first, then all M4, then all M6. Combining all these, allowing switching between levels at will is just a no brainer.

Now allowing turning Mayhem off, and using that to farm underleveled enemies, is a more interesting discussion. This specifically concerns visiting an area once at a low level, then coming back at 72 to farm the low level enemies, the distinction between 72m1 and 72m0 is no different to the above.

The first thing to note is that, even with Mayhem off, most of the enemies you need to farm will scale anyway - and as we said 72m0 is fine. Then there’s the fact that it’s relatively easy to make a build which instantly kills a good number of on level enemies - and we can say there’s no real difference between instantly killing 72m1 enemies and 30m0. In a majority of cases, kills on Mayhem 0 practically aren’t really any different to those on Mayhem 1.

Now this is not to say there’s never any benefit to disabling Mayhem. There definitely are still some really impactful enemies which don’t scale, e.g. SpongeBoss BulletPants, who has the single largest health pool in the game. These are a minority, but unfortuantly the very fact that they’re impactful, and that we’re having this discussion, also means that it’s impossible to create a clean rule banning them. If we ban disabling Mayhem, then you’ll simply level lock and farm them before ever enabling it. If we also require enabling Mayhem as soon as you unlock it, then you just won’t finish the main story until later. Ban doing dlcs? There are some enemies you might want to do it to in base game. Are we supposed to force people to speedrun the story, not allowing any side quests, just so that they enable Mayhem as soon possible to avoid this?

The only other option is some sort of level range restriction - “You can’t kill enemies more than 10 levels below you”. But even this is complicated. Does mayhem-leveled gear count towards the range? Since it doesn’t award skill points, should count for less? What happens if you’re in coop with a few levels between you? Enemy levels are partly randomized, what if just one in a group is out of range? What about half? Not to mention how bad it’d feel to have to give up a farm halfway just because you outleveled it - assuming you even noticed, and didn’t accidentally break the rules.

Rather than add all this complexity, it’s better to simply allow disabling Mayhem at any point, accepting that most of the time it won’t really matter.

Kind of said it all already, we want to allow coop, but we want to prevent power leveling. Some level variation between players is natural, so we arbitrarily limit it to a max of 3. This value has not been play tested, a different number may be more suitable.

This is going to be a bit of a long one.

Scripts

Firstly, you can see the scripts used to generate the list here and here. Note these scripts contain decent amounts of “data massaging”, manual hardcoded fixups for specific situations - for example there’s a massive list of non-unique items to ignore. The scripts exist to make sure nothing is missed, not to completely avoid all human input.

What counts as a unique item?

The next point to discuss is what exactly counts as a separate item, we’re using the Item Balance. In any situation where the game needs to roll an item, it finds the relevant Item Pool, which is a list of balances, and picks one at random. Once it has a balance, it looks through the data on it to determine how to roll parts. By saying we’re using the balance to distinguish items, we’re essentially just saying we don’t care about what parts roll.

Now while this seems simple enough, there are of course some exceptions which may make it a more controversial decision. The single balance:

1
  /Game/Gear/Weapons/Shotguns/Jakobs/_Shared/_Design/_Unique/TheWave/Balance/Balance_SG_JAK_Unique_Wave.Balance_SG_JAK_Unique_Wave

Can, based on parts, drop with one of the following titles:

• T.K’s Wave
• T.K’s Heatwave
• T.K’s Shockwave
• The Tidal Wave

So why not count those as 4 separate items you need to get? Well if we’re just going off of the, title, that would mean the Shredifier and Super Shredifier are two separate items, as are the Sickle and Boom Sickle, or the Dark Army, Exceptional Dark Army, and Exceptional Dark Army +. These are not prefixes/suffixes, these are the full title. This is the case anywhere in the item list where multiple item name are listed, separated by slashes. So what about red text? Well the King and Queen’s Call have the exact same red text. Requiring you farm for specific parts is just extra mindless busywork - and some of them, like the Super Shredifier, are very rare to begin with. We might as well require getting a CMT. The only meaningful way to distinguish items is to use the balance, just as the game does when picking a drop.

Now on the other end, there’s also a case where using the balance adds extra items - the Company Man. Each manufacturer has it’s own unique balance - and it’s own set of primary stat bonuses. They are for all intents and purposes, completely separate items, just with a shared name, so we treat them as such. Additionally, play testing has shown requiring them makes Hemo more interesting. If you only needed a single variant, it’s possible to finish Hemo in just two kills, whereas it takes an average of 25.46 Company Man drops to collect each variant (the Coupon collector’s problem). This leads to decisions such as weighing the more drops per kill at high Mayhem Levels, against the quicker kill speed at lower levels, or the need to spend eridium vs being able to bleed out with Vermi still alive. In an optimized run, Hemo will tend to be last (so you can collect eridium throughout the rest of the competition), so this also means Hemo becomes a boss rush at the very end of the run, which just feels appropriate.

The final point to discuss is the unique Artifacts/COMs which world drop. Originally, it was only possible to get these items via world drop, but Gearbox later patched in dedicated sources. The world drops use a single combined balance, which we’d normally all count as a single item, but the new dedicated drops each use dedicated balances, which we’d count separately. Since it’s impossible to distinguish them in game (you could get a world drop from the dedicated source), we count them as separate items, as if they were all the dedicated balance, and let you redeem the generic balance as if it were the dedicated one it rolled as.

Which items should be required?

So with the list of distinct items decided on, the next thing is to decide which of them to actually count. Obviously, we remove items with no valid sources, including those we previously banned like the diamond chest or vault cards. We then remove mission items: requiring them essentially adds 100%ing on top of the rest of the run, making the competition even longer; they’re no challenge to get, they’re just given to you freely; and there are some missions where you have a choice, and you’d need a second playthough to get all.

Coming at this from the other end, we obviously want to include all items which can drop from an enemy, the whole point of the competition is to farm them to get their drops. Vincent is the only case where a non-respawnable enemy has a unique drop, and even though he’s guaranteed to drop the Initative, we exclude him since missing your one shot requires a whole second playthough. We then add all items which are only obtainable from world drops, since that’s still a drop you can farm for. Finally, we add the Arms Race drops, mostly on a technicality - Harker does not have any of them as a dedicated drop, he simply world drops at a higher rate, but they each have a dedicated source in their chest room, so they don’t count as items only obtainable from world drops.

Now this leaves us with a small handful of leftovers, which we can sort into a few categories.

Pay to win:

• Cheddar Shredder
• Deluxe Badass Combustor
• Diamond Butt Bomb
• Girth Blaster Elite
• Hyper-Hydrator
• Ultraball

Like the category name suggests, you pay, and then you immediately get these items for no effort, so there’s no sense in requiring them.

Completionism:

• Bekah
• Ember’s Purge
• Miss Moxxi’s Vibra-Pulse
• Scoville

In world interactions:

• Burning Summit
• Crit
• Hail
• Kaleidoscope

Play testing has simply shown both of these categories aren’t fun. Some of them are completely free to get along the way, others are super tedious. None of these items are a traditional “kill enemy and get drop”, only the Kaleidoscope even drops in-world, so it’s simply not worth adding complexity to the rules for items which are just boring. Additionally, if you’re unlucky you might not even get the Vibra-Pulse on a character, there’s no guarantee, which’d require a whole second run to end game, so we’d have to remove it anyway.

Quite simply put, if an item’s harder to get, it should be worth more, rather than simply being worth more due to falling in some arbitrary category. The Hot Drop is a blue launcher with a 3% drop rate, while the Ion Cannon is a guaranteed legendary launcher - the Hot Drop should be worth far more.

The new point values have been put together through much play testing. The exact values are subjective, and they are not just a perfect proxy of drop rate. The rough process for coming to these values was follows:

1. Start with 5 points.
2. If an item drops more commonly, roughly divide it by how much more common it is - e.g. Blue/Pink Power Troopers are 2 enemies, so their items are only worth 3 points, while Black/Yellow/Red are 3, so their items are only worth 2. Note some enemies (e.g. the Crawlies) already have lower drop rates, so don’t have their points affected.
3. If an enemy takes a while to get to (Trials, Takedowns), add a point or two to their drops.
4. Subjectively add and remove extra points for particularly rare or common items.
5. The final value of each item is the lowest of each of it’s sources - just because you can get a Sand Hawk from Scourge doesn’t mean you’re not an idiot for not just getting it from Katagawa.

It’s worth noting mayhem restrictions have absolutely no impact on the point value. Any decent endgame build will have no trouble handling mayhem levels, how lucky you get has a far larger impact on the total time spent, so there’s no point handing out extra points for it.

Too many items look alike in order to be able to trust just seeing them on screen. With enough practice, you can learn how to distinguish them, however we cannot expect an average player to be able to do so. Viewing the item card ensures everyone is always aware of exactly what the item is.

This is mostly common sense - you have to get the item from it’s listed dedicated sources.

In a lot of scenarios, you cannot tell the difference between getting a dedicated drop, or getting a world drop from the dedicated source - so we simply allow both. The most common way to tell is when you get two dedicated drops at the same time, allowing both is a nice bonus for getting lucky in this case.

Extracting Arms Race drops is extra unnecessary busywork - the hard part is getting the item, not running to an extractor afterwards, so we simply don’t require it.

While there are too many world drops to allow redeeming every single one, allowing a few in leads to more interesting routes. Never allowing any world drops means there’s a single, static, best route. If you can redeem some, it suddenly becomes a lot more dynamic, there’s some on the fly routing, if you get the right combination of world drops you can skip entire areas.

This is the third iteration of the “some world drops are allowed” rule, and it’s turned out to work quite well in play testing. Awarding more tokens for completing campaigns incentives completing them - and more points for subsequent campaigns is an extra incentive to try help balance out creating extra characters. You start out with a single token, since it’s disappointing to find a useful world drop in your initial playthrough, before completing anything, and not be able to redeem it.

We don’t allow retroactive redeems, and we don’t allow changing redeems, as this removes all risk. The optimal strategy becomes recording every single world drop you ever get, and at the end of the run swapping your last N items to be from those world drops. By restricting it, every time you redeem a world drop there’s a slight risk, “will I get the other items from this enemy before getting it as a duplicate”, you actually have to strategise.

One nice side effect of this system is we also don’t need to carve out extra rules for cases like the Slaughter Star bosses, which keeps the rules simpler. You can either risk losing your drops to the void, or you can spend a few of your tokens to completely bypass it. We can expect every run to obtain at least 8, from one full playthrough, which is more than enough to cover this while still leaving plenty of room for other interesting routing.

This grealy simplifies the rules: it’s either explicitly a drop from one of the dedicated sources, or you use a token. No exceptions.

We don’t require purchasing items in vendors since money isn’t really an obstacle, requiring it adds complexity for no real benefit. It’s difficult to find a useful item in a vendor to begin with, so this doesn’t have a big impact on the run.

These tricks kind of break the spirit of the challenge, they provide a lot of legendaries for zero effort. If there were allowed, they become the single best way to gear up - and a very useful way to farm world drops to use your last tokens on.

The given list is exhaustive, because this kind of trick is very “I know it when I see it” - and fuzzy inexact rules have no place in any competition.

Arms race is explicitly given as an allowed example since it’s something that appears similar to the others, like it might be something missed from the list. It however has a far smaller impact. You can only photo mode exit clip the chests in the Plunderdome and Seepage and Creepage, and one of the chests in Shipping Encouraged. In the former two areas, you’re actively under attack while you try do the clip, it’s not completely free, and the parkour out of Plunderdome early isn’t the easiest either. None of the three rooms have one of the COMs, so doing it doesn’t impact the actual long Arms Race farm either, so it’s simply not worth adding extra complcity to the rules to avoid it. In fact, allowing it adds some interesting variety to Arms Race - having a few regions you can clear quicker adds some interesting decisions each run, you might pop into a room you wouldn’t normally if had to do a full clear.

Does this need explanation? It’s the single most powerful build in the game, based on a rather obvious glitch, and it causes large flashing lights which will prevent anyone photo sensitive from watching. It’s also allegedly not possible on the PS5 or Series X versions.

An obvious glitch, which if allowed would be the most powerful build in the run. It’s also not possible, at least not to the same effectiveness, on console/controller.

Other forms of emote cancelling, such as cancelling the slam animation, are mostly harmless, and hard to get out of muscle memory once you’ve started.

An obvious glitch, which can be added to any other build with zero effort to get a massive free damage boost.

While not true invulnerability, both of these are obvious glitches, which in the right circumstances allow you to just sit there and grind through M10 bosses without a care. If allowed, they become the single best way to deal with these bosses.

These are both obvious infinite stacking glitches. While not useful during farming, since SQs will reset them, they can be abused to great effect while working through the story.

Gearbox only patched the simple method, it’s still possible in coop by spawning a car on the same frame as the level transition countdown ends. This makes it a lot more difficult, and requires other players, but it could save hours if you manage to get it on Wotan. We want solo players to be able to compete without missing out on any large advantage like this. It’s also yet again, a very obvious glitch.

Similarly to above this requires other players, and it’s of course an extremely obvious glitch, which is difficult to pull off, and creates single best but boring build.

These are a bit less egregious than the others, but they still saves a decent amount of time off of something that’s a relatively obvious glitch, and is only possible on one character. We don’t want a glitch to make a single character the obvious best.

Note that in coop the crystals take longer to charge, two people charging simultaneously is different to Dakka Bear + 1 Player.

There is no place for inexact rules in any competition. If something new is discovered, it should be explicitly added to the above list, banning things based on “you know it when you see it” is just plain wrong.

This is very similar to drop reloading from BL2, a small glitch sure, but it doesn’t have a particularly large impact, and is extremely difficult to get out of muscle memory once you start doing it. We’re obviously not going to invalidate someone’s run if they accidentally do it - so what’s the point in banning it?

Note banning swap reloading does not prevent Cold Bore abuse - you just end up quick swapping after reloading normally. It’s also possible to swap reload on controller by only equipping two weapons and using the “swap to last” button.

You simply cannot draw a line beyond “I know it when I see it” - which has no place in a competition rule set. There are out of bound sequences which never clip through a wall, and there are areas entirely in bounds where you can easily accidentally walk straight through one. Or there are places you’re clearly meant to go which are not displayed on the map, and there are places on the map you cannot reach. Additionally, the total impact of OOB sequences is hillariously minor, they save less than 5 minutes total across the entire competition - though there being no valid way to define the rule means this doesn’t even need to be considered.

This kind of leads on directly from the last point, since you don’t generally use these tricks outside of going out of bounds. If we’re not banning out of bounds, there’s no real reason to ban these.

There’s also problems in drawing a line this case - an enemy shooting a rocket at your feet will knock you back, causing an accidental rocket jump, and obviously we don’t want that to invalidate your run.

Half of this falls under “you are allowed to emote cancel”. Since the scroll abuse got patched, this doesn’t really have much of an impact - like yes Zane can keep his kill skills up permanently, but he could already, or we don’t really care if you skip half of an animation.

These are all obviously minor glitches, but you still need to fight the enemies again to get another drop, it’s not free. More importantly, they all avoid extra loading screens, which is greatly appreciated.

This takes a bit of effort to set up, and needs you to actively search for eridium piles. It also ends up being the fastest way to gain eridium in a lot of cases, so it helps speed up the boring farming if you run out while rerolling or going for Hemo kills.

This isn’t really a glitch, you’re just stacking bonuses, we wouldn’t ban a Zane from stacking too much speed. It also takes quite a bit of specific gear to setup, and ends up a lot more restricted than the previously discussed invulnerability glitches.