On The Hunt With Borderlands 3

In this article, I’m going to talk about the idea that Borderlands 3 streamers will be able to host their own hunt event. Because if we are going to talk about Borderlands community events ‘The Hunt’ has always been one of the biggest community events for the game. The very first loot hunt was organized by Gearbox themselves which had some cool prizes. That event was a success and was beloved by the Borderlands community. Therefore a group of dedicated community members decided to organize their own version of the event. The Hunt event was a hit and spawned several follow-ups and a new one is being worked on. With this much excitement and engagement around a community event I have one question:

Has Gearbox been paying attention?

Because this could be beneficial for both Gearbox and the community. Will Gearbox facilitate the community with features to complement these types of events in Borderlands 3? This way, we as the community, get our event that we already like and show our commitment to it. On the other side Gearbox and 2K Games get ‘some’ social marketing from it. Because these days people are rating games more on how well they perform on Twitch. Your game has to be on the top of the leaderboard or else it isn’t “a success”. Events like The Hunt can actually help with achieving that goal. You can see more and more video games are getting some kind of Twitch integration. They do this to stimulate the engagement between the broadcaster and the viewers. More viewers mean that you have a higher ranking on the leaderboard. In a previous article, I covered some of the basics like what type of rewards are possible. However, in that article, I focused on having special broadcaster missions that would provide unique value. What if twitch streamers are able to create their own mini-hunt challenges for their communities?

The Hunt Event

If you don’t know what The Hunt event is then let me fill you in. The Hunt is a community event where the participants play Borderlands (2) and go and obtain a specific set of gear. The list mostly contains legendary gear as these have a specific drop location but not a guaranteed drop chance. This forces players to grind specific bosses in order to obtain the specific weapon. While a drop might be random and some players are luckier than others, there is a level of skill involved to be efficient. The whole run must be streamed online to check if the player actually played fair.

The Hunt Event for Borderlands 3

What if Gearbox took away the downside of the community event and made it an official mode in Borderlands 3?  Currently, there is a lot of manual checking, so what if this was all done by the game itself? A (Twitch) streamer can start a Hunt event for his own community. Everyone who is viewing and has their game linked can participate in the hunt event. Because the games are linked a leaderboard can be generated by the game. I think that the number of items should be predetermined. This way each community can decide how much time a hunt will approximately last. The list with required items will probably be randomly generated but a custom pre-set would also be cool. But let me know what your thoughts are on this topic in the comments.

2nd Mode

While the community version of the hunt is awesome, the variation that Gearbox organized was also a blast. With the Loot Hunt players needed to sign in with SHiFT. This way they could contribute to the Hunt. Each day players needed to kill a specific enemy and reach a certain amount of kills. A reward was provided if all participants combined reached the set goal. This way everyone can jump in and help a tiny bit with the community event. But this mode would probably need another name than Loot Hunt because it’s confusing with the name; The Hunt. Also, the name would not be descriptive of what you would be doing. Slaughterfest would be more descriptive. Maybe Sir Hammerlock can have his own bounty board where you can select your favorite hunting season/mode.

Gearbox Software’s Response

This article was updated on 05/23/2019

Earlier in this article, I asked the question; Has GBX been paying attention? Well, now that 1,5 years have passed I found some new info that answers the question. The answer is YES!

“And then the things the community developed themselves, like the hunt, where they had their own huge excel spreadsheet of this is what you’re looking for, this is how many points you get if you get it – we definitely took note of that.”

Kate Pitstick – Mission Designer

Thanks for your time and let me know what you think of this idea 🙂