#25

Not trying to be rude, but you saying that people asking for “balanced” games shouldn’t play borderlands games because they have over-the-top weapons, just shows that you don’t know what balanced means and don’t understand my complaint.
Every borderlands game, up until BL3 got mayhem 2.0, has been balanced. Sure there have been items that stood out, mainly red text ones, but generally there was balance.

To be clear, when I say balanced, I mean similar options are similarly attractive. So, if I took 100 players at random, for example, and asked them to pick between those similar options, around the same amount would pick each option. Like if the choice was between a Jakobs or Maliwan pistol, if 80 players pick the Jakobs, then it’s probably better than the Maliwan one. And this applies to weapons, shields, grenades, relics, skill trees, individual skills, luneshines/anointments, etc.
So, if they are the same level and rarity, two items should be similar in power and attractiveness. BL3 throws that out the window. You have huge differences in power level between items that should apparently be similar. That is bad balance, and it has nothing to do with over-the-top items, because some of the over-the-top items are way better than other over-the-top items. That’s the point.

And for the record, I did enjoy BL3. Mostly. It’s just that, ever since the game I bought and loved was ruined by mayhem 2.0, the game has gotten worse for me. The way gearbox has altered the game is not what I want, and I’m not asking them to ruin the game for other players, just give more options, so we can all play how we want. Let us pick between mayhem 1 and 2. Let us pick between a balanced game with decent scaling and the current “easy mode” setting where a random selection of gear is randomly buffed to overpower everything else. Let us pick between a game where anointments account for the majority of damage output and utility ones are worthless or a “true challenge” mode where they’re more like luneshines and you have to optimize better to deal high levels of damage.
Just let players choose to play the game how they want, and how they played every other game in the series.

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#26

This always makes me want to ask people about how long it took them to accumulate all those hours in Borderlands 2, and if they were among the people who tried TPS, didn’t like the loot system and endgame at launch, and went back to Borderlands 2?

I’ve been playing BL3 for 14 months and have 836 hours. I’d been playing BL2 regularly since mid 2014 and I have 968 hours. I don’t trust Steam’s calculations when it comes to online and offline totals, and I played BL2 offline more often than online. Regardless, between the Vanilla Game, UCP, Modpacks, and Overhauls I had been playing the game for six years before I switched to BL3. With two fewer characters. Part of the difference in hours between the two games is the sheer amount of content in BL3’s base game before you even touch the DLC. In addition BL3 has no UVHM so with each character I did the main story twice, and the DLC in NVHM with Mayhem active, and have been saving those in TVHM for final Level and Mayhem Cap when that is clearly and irrevocably established.

*To make the distinction more pronounced I’ll add the following:
In BL2 I took all 6 VHs to 80 at least once, Did all the DLC in ever playthrough with my first character, and at least all the DLC in UVHM with the other 5, and several playthroughs of Overhauls starting in UVHM, and a few from NVHM. So I didn’t skimp on the amount of content I played in BL2 to explain the difference between the two.

1 Like
#27

why of course it does not accumulate just be playing character once

for my example i took multiple axtons and zer0s to the peak and played 1life2live challenge and that is a lot of time plus mindlessly farming caustic caverns for vermi and generally just running the maps without any goal because i liked it. I have spent more time in dust and lynchwood alone than in bl3 and i have 1000 hours+ in bl3

i am not just a plyer i play with every gun and nade that makes any sense within game’s scaling i spend a lot of time just testing. who spends time to compare scout sniper or terror, well i do. while paper theory says terror, scout is best in the field. most bl2 players won’t even know wtf i am talking about without googling. because they spent all their time on p1mpernel and lyuda.

2 Likes
#28

The necessity of this statement confuses me, maybe because I’m working under the presumption that like myself, anyone else who accumulates hundreds, if not thousands of hours, did so in part by playing multiple saves of all the characters that they started from scratch.

Like you, I don’t limit myself to build guides, save files, and recommended gear. To be fair I’ve never used any of that in any of the games. Not that that’s the superior way to play, I just enjoy being able to discover everything for myself, over time. Eventually the game design pulls you in a certain direction based on success vs. failure.

One thing that I always volunteer is that I am not one for farming for long. I’ll do runs of certain maps once a play session, and do a few save quits if I am really eager to get an item for a particular moment, but this is by and large a very minimal amount of time in the scope of my game play. I enjoy mobbing and the progression of escalating intensity from a well designed map with well-timed spawns of varying difficulty.

1 Like
#29

did i sufficiently explain how i put those hours in game or not.

#30

Borderlands 2 has quite a few of such time sinks.

I myself spend several hundred hours just farming for the BNK3R and Henry heads and after all these years I still only seen 4/6 BNK3R heads drop a single time.

#31

In my original post on this subject I wasn’t questioning whether people accumulated those hours with one character vs. several. Maybe it wasn’t clear by pointing out that I played BL2 for six years, and have only played BL3 for 14 months maybe those extremely lopsided totals others are posting have more to do with the length of time people have been playing BL2 having a five year head start?

Now, the boredom with BL3 may mean that those same people never come back to BL3 to make up the difference between the two. Or maybe some fixes will be instituted to the end of support that make BL3 fun to play again for all the players who feel the game was better when it was within that first six months of release as an Epic and console exclusive during Mayhem 1.0?

Who knows, but that significant disparity in age of the games impacting play time was my intended focal point.

#32

while it makes complete sense logically (newer game fewer hours) i do not see myself playing bl3 as much as bl2 regardless of timeline. i thought you were asking about where exactly those hours come to 3k hour players when you seemingly did everything and did it in 800 hours. that is what i was answering to.

i’d have bunch more hours in bl3 if it had reasonable 1life challenge but that will never be a thing in bl3

3 Likes
#33

i only ever got bekah and twister once. i spent one whole day farming OOO and did not get it. then one day randomly killed him and he dropped jacobs grip one. i am not saying it was good experience it was horrendous but still better than anointed orange galore that bl3 became.

2 Likes
#34

That’s how I interpreted your response. I think it would be rude to reply that “That’s not what I was asking.” especially when I have a tendency to talk around my points, rather than express them directly. Thanks for taking a moment to clear things up.

I don’t expect anyone to change their level of engagement with BL3 anymore than I would expect them to with The Pre-Sequel. There are a lot of similarities with how they dealt with “endgame” farming during the initial releases of both these latter two games (TPS, BL3) that betray the direction they’re going with how the content will be “published”. I can only presume the DLC model we are seeing may have more in common with how they went about it with Battleborn with the Vault Cards and hotfix events? Maybe someone who kept up with that during the lifecycle of that game was active can confirm or negate that assertion?

1 Like
#35

Battleborn had a Season Pass just like Borderlands that added 5 new and highly replayable missions called story ops, imagine a beefy mix of a trial and a headhunter pack that had unique dialogue, challenges and unlocks, each time you replayed it.

Gearbox also released 5 additional characters for free, that you could unlock by spending ingame currency.

The closest thing it had to events were little fun stuff like a special PVP playlist that would for example reduce gravity or absurdly increase knockback…

Although it had atleast two special PVP “events” with a unique map for a short time but they were very specific like a mode where the only playable character was Benedict, the only character capable of flying.

Also I just want to put this out because I see this misinformation so often: TPS was always supposed to have 4 story add-ons but Australia cut funding for video games making producing them just not affordable for the 2 or 3 small studios on the whole continent, that is the reason why 2K Marin shut down and not like so many like to proclaim, that TPS didn’t met expectations.

Just wanted to put this out here, this wasn’t meant as attaking you @Isthiswill

Carry on :grinning:

5 Likes
#36

Oh none of that would have been taken as such. I didn’t volunteer the information about the original pre-release DLC discussed for TPS being four story DLCs, and then upon release the language being changed to “four pieces of DLC”. This shift to less DLC was made prior to the impending shutdown of 2K Australia, or at the least, it being made public, but it could have been in the cards. The official closure took place six months after TPS was released.

But in case anyone didn’t catch why I mentioned TPS earlier, it’s because, like BL3, boss farming was hampered by non-repeatable boss fights at launch and lots of unique gear not having dedicated drops, being in the code, but not the game proper, which ruffled the feathers of fans and content creators they had included in pre-release media coverage to hype the release the game.

1 Like
#37

Regarding my 6005 BL2 hours vs my approx. 300 BL3 hours, I simply found BL2 a lot more fun. That’s all I’m pointing out.

TPS just wasn’t very enjoyable for me.

BL1, for me, lot’s of fun and replayability too.

#38

I used to be quite active on the BL2 forums. I read many of the complaints about BL2, and there were frequent complaints about BL2’s “balance”. There were frequent complaints about many legendaries not being good, statements about “there are only a few good guns and they are required for the game”, “all legendaries should be better than lower rarities” things of that nature.
Complaints about OP (Overpower) levels being “unbalanced”. There were complaints about specific manufacturers and gun types (AR’s being a prime example). And complaints about the Vault Hunters themselves being “unbalanced” (a lot of Salvador haters out there!)

I made a comment once about not knowing what the BL1 forums were like (I started playing BL1 late and didn’t come to the forums much early on), saying I suspected the same kind of complaints were levied on those forums too. A moderator that was still active in the forums at the time confirmed my suspicions; these kinds of complaints have always existed in the Borderlands franchise.

Your belief that the previous Borderlands games were balanced simply isn’t true in the eyes of a lot of players. We can argue whether or not those complaints were valid for BL2 - and we can argue about whether or not they are valid for BL3, but the fact remains, a lot of people didn’t think BL2 was “balanced”. Or BL1. Your statement implying “any two items of the same level and rarity” were “balanced” in any of the previous games is demonstrably false.

So, I’ll give it to you that I don’t know what YOU mean by “balanced”; but I DO know what “balanced” means in general. The game I’ve played most besides the Borderlands series is World of Warcraft, and in that game, balance is a huge deal because PvP is a thing, and because competition for spots in dungeons and Raids mean class balance can be an issue (like, some people won’t want your Elemental Shaman in their group if it can’t compete with a Fire Mage). So, yeah, I’ve spent a large part of my gaming life playing a game where balance is REALLY a thing; I know about balance.

1 Like
#39

I think, from a business perspective, they would want to increase customer goodwill by fixing their product (AKA “making right their mistake at the restaurant”) so that people will actually believe they are a company worth buying products from thus increasing sales for Wonderlands.

5 Likes
#40

you are right but he means balance in something different

he means there was no 300% gap between core gear end endgame adjusted guns on raw stats.

if we are talking about real balance in bl2 it was horrible serpahs were bad most pearls were bad most legendaries were worse than best purples and between amnufacturers bandit was basically unusable (aside from rare tribarrel or quad barrel shotties) most hyperon and tediore gear was also ass comapred to vladof/jacobs

i am sure what he means is for example droog would have more single bullet damage than lyuda the power of lyda came from bigger crit and triple split pattttern which you had to hit from certain range. harold per bullet did lesss damage thang torgue griped slapper the power of harold laid into laying out bunch of projectles for overall less cost. etc etc. in bl2 gearbox tried to give power to the guns without doing basic stat bloat. for example hammer buster was just that a boosted up jacobs ar. but hornet for example is nothing like any dahl regualr pistol because it comes with splash. thunderball fitsts are absolutely nothing like regular maliwan pistols, you do not see on the card where it’s splash damage potential lies on secondary projectils.

4 Likes
#41

That’s fair enough. I did say the previous games had some exceptions , but maybe I should have phrased it better.
I’m not saying “everything in every game was perfectly balanced”, because obviously that’s not true. What I was trying to say was more like “the levels of balance in previous games was much, much better than BL3, where the difference between some items is thousandfold, and every player would pick some options over others that are supposed to be similar.”
You can point to certain items in BL2 that were overpowering others, but you didn’t have an SMG with higher damage values than similar level and rarity rocket launchers, for example.
There are items in BL3 that nobody would pick and items that almost everyone would, and they are supposed to be similar in values.

Sure borderlands games aren’t PvP, so the balance is worse, but BL3 doesn’t even come close to being balanced, in SO many areas that previous games (while not perfect) were way better.
And I’m not expecting perfect balance, but something like 60-70% picking one option is fine, whereas 95%+ is not.
Hope that makes it clearer what I’m trying to say.

2 Likes
#42

On the “Underpants” what’s come out so far has turned me cold. Names for voice characters, some I don’t like, have to buy a new console to get the Chaotic version. Content drops we pay for not unnecessarily DLC’s, only online co-op no couch co-op play, and now there is an option to reward the developers that so successfully hacked up BL3 to a point I can’t even play it anymore by paying them part of your pre order as a bonus to encourage them to do as good a job in this as they did in BL3. Boys and berries I’m out. Back to Pandora and BL2.

3 Likes
#43

I remember Mists of Pandaria being well balanced in PVP because every class has some broken stuns and interactions (that was the last expansion I played). Enter Classic and is literally mages running around in low quality gear owning the game, only to be replaced by Warlocks in the next expansion (and DK in Wrath were grossly OP).

Even with the importance of PVP, WoW still has it’s issues to this day. Fun times were had though.

It is true that Bl3 doesn’t have a balance between legendary items and every other rarity, simply because Gearbox has decided that, for this entry, legendaries are the endgame gear (Mayhem 5 and up and 95% legendary items) whereas the other rarities are obsolete past the M6 bar (generally speaking).

However, when people talk about “balance” in BL3, they usually refer to how many available weapons you have at your disposal to clear the highest content in the game with a moderate amount of success and that’s where this entry shines and others like BL2 fall apart.

It doesn’t matter that a legendary gun doesn’t have 10x times the damage of a blue if I’m still not gonna use that legendary because it sucks compared to particular quest rewards. It doesn’t matter that your game has 9 different weapon rarities if your tier 3 items dominate the meta and the weapons you get from those raids are way worse than quest rewards. It doesn’t matter that your endgame is plentiful if people only use the same 15-20 guns over and over again because every other option sucks or isn’t up to par to clear the humongous amounts of health raid bosses in BL2 had.

If you have a game where you have between 100-200 legendary/highest rarity guns that are viable in endgame content (there are some blues/purples that are good as well, but that’s not the point) and a game where people use the usual 20 suspects across 9 rarities, half of them being quest rewards/tier 3-4, do you really believe the later is better or that is well designed? I honestly don’t think so.

1 Like
#44

What you’re talking about is (as I understand it) build diversity.
Balance is literally a word meaning keeping 2 or more things level to prevent leaning towards one in particular, and balance in a video game is about not having one option weighted more than another, causing players to lean towards it.
Maybe there’s a lot of people using the term differently (wrong, IMO), but that’s why I explained what I meant. If in doubt, check we mean the same thing and work from there.

As for the quantity of gear that could be used for endgame or hardest content, I’ll agree that BL3 does have more, definitely. As long as you’re online so you get all the hotfix buffs, but sure. It achieves that by making a bunch of gear MASSIVELY unbalanced, meaning that gear “breaks” the game if you obtain it before reaching endgame, but yeah, the terrible balance has increased build diversity, if that’s your main focus.
But if what you want is build diversity in terms of gear, they could just buff everything to the same level of OP and then you’d have even more gear you could use to clear endgame content. Would that make a better designed game? Or would a game where just a few OP items can be used at the highest level of difficulty because most gear is set to a slightly lower baseline so only the best players clear the hardest content and it acts as a real challenge to strive for, be a better designed game?
It’s a matter of opinion, but I preferred BL2, where I could play Axton with good purple loot and a wide variety of orange loot on most of the higher difficulty levels. It’s not a popular opinion, but not everyone should be able to waltz through the hardest difficulty levels of the hardest content with any old gear. Either they should need the best gear or lots of skill.