BL3 Alt Hunt Rules v2

The original BL3 hunt had some questionable rules, which were overly restrictive and obviously made without properly considering their impact. It also suffered greatly from all runs being essentially the same - there's a single optimal route, and the only deviations relied on the random world drops you were allowed to turn in. These alternate rules address both points.

I've also redone the drop sheet - adding more items, rebalancing the points, sorting by world, and adding a bunch of automation (some specific to the alternate rules).

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bCdFreDzg213wKBg-KmcpRaqNXc6SGvR8EwD_D8_LWM/edit?usp=sharing

Note that this sheet uses a lot of complex formulas and relies on some Google Sheets specific features, so exporting it to an Excel sheet may cause you to lose functionality.

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Basic Rules
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The hunt will run for exactly one week, from <dates>. There is no limit on how long you can play during this time, though note an average completion is expected take around <duration>, there's no need to no-life it.

You must stream your entire playthrough, so it's possible to verify that you followed all rules.

Players will be ranked by progression first (see below) and stream time second - if two players have the same amount of points, the one with less stream time is ranked higher. If one player has 20h more stream time, but got 5 more points, they're still ranked higher. This ensures you're not punished for having other commitments or needing to sleep. If you want to switch to another game, it's recommended to quickly stop the stream to split the VOD, to make your playtime clearer and avoid accidentally being misranked.

You must play on the latest version of the game, with the latest hotfixes. You may not use any mods, even if they're only visual. We all want to be playing the same vanilla game.

Any character you use must be created at level 1 during the event. You may create multiple characters, both points and playtime are combined between them all.

You must play on Normal difficulty.

There are a number of things that provide unfair advantages to those who've played before, or worse, to those who've save edited them to insane levels:
- Guardian Rank - You must disable it
- Borderlands Science - You may not spend any tokens or use any boosters started before creating your character (though you may enter the machine to finish the quest)
- Vault Cards - You may not redeem any items, or even just open the chests you get for completing levels (as these can give eridium).
- Golden and Diamond Keys - You may not spend either

You may only use items you collect on your new characters during the event - you may not use any items from the Lost Loot machine, any items mailed to you by friends or ECHOcast events, or any items in your bank from another character. Items mailed by Manufacturer Challenges or NPCs are fair game, and as long as you keep careful track of what you put in it, you may still use your bank.

You may not use any of the Super Deluxe bonus items, though you are allowed to redeem them and instantly throw them on the floor. These items require paying to unlock a small advantage, while not providing any new loot sources to farm.

You may not buy any items from Maurice's Black Market. This gives guaranteed easy sources for a few items, but changes frequently enough to dramatically impact practice runs or people following along casually ignoring the time limits.

You may not pick up any of the rare spawn missions. Which ones are accessible depend on who your friends have recently killed, allowing outside influence into your run.

The Moxxtail, Pinata, and Badass viewer ECHOcast events must be disabled, as they'll all affect your game, and may provide an unfair advantage to those on Twitch over other platforms. You may leave the rare chest event and extraction event on.

Once you enter mayhem mode or start TVHM, you must always have mayhem enabled in normal mode (though you may still disable it in TVHM). Additionally, before you get to this point you may not farm any enemy more than 10 levels beneath you. These rules prevent farming low level enemies with end game gear.

You may play in coop, as long as all players follow all the other rules. There must be no more than 3 levels between the highest and lowest level players in your party, to prevent powerleveling.

You may duplicate items, but only to give to other players, you may not keep duplicates yourself. This restriction prevents mass duping items to sell for an early Crit/Hail.

Drops
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To have proof of a drop, you must look at the item card and clip it. You may also grab the item and show if off in your inventory. If an item drops out of bounds, and you can't see the card or grab it, it will have to be refarmed. Too many items in this game look alike to be able to trust just seeing an an item on screen, the only way to verify is by looking at the card. You may use photo mode to grab items which are out of reach. Items found in vendors must be purchased to count. Items found in Arms Race do not need to be extracted to count, as long as they follow the previous rules.

When playing in coop, if using instanced loot, drops only count for the player that found them. If playing with the same loot, drops count for all players, though only one needs to see the item and make a clip. This echos the actual item accessibility.

Each item has an associated point count, roughly corresponding to how much effort it takes to get. When you get an item to drop from one of it's listed dedicated sources, you may redeem that item, and add it's points to your overall progression. These "Progression Points" only exist to draw comparisons between players, they're a better metric for your overall progression through the whole event than just a naive drop count.

If you get an item that you've already redeemed from one of it's dedicated sources, you can instead redeem that item's associated point count in Duplicate Points. When you get an item from somewhere other than it's dedicated sources (i.e. usually a world drop), you may spend 2x it's point value in Duplicate Points to redeem it as if it was from a dedicated source. You may not retroactively redeem a drop, and you may not later refund an item you redeemed in this way.

Duplicate Points introduce a bit more randomness back into the hunt - there is no one optimal route anymore, you have to adjust based on what happens during your run. The high point cost ensures that farming up Duplicate Points and then looking for a world drop is not a viable strategy compared to just farming the dedicated source however. Together, this provides a little bit of compensation for when you get unlucky during a farm, while also providing interesting routing opportunities, potentially letting you skip specific enemies or even entire questlines.

Some items have "World Drop" listed as one of their dedicated sources. This works exactly like you'd expect, you can redeem them off of a world drop and you can redeem Duplicate Points off of world drops if you find duplicates.

Items from the Eridian Fabricator, mail, slot machines, vendors (including Earl's), the dedicated loot rooms, and mission rewards all count as world drops - you will need to spend Duplicate Points to redeem them. No freebies this time, this simplifies the rules.

You may only collect the items in the Bounty of Blood Bank once per playthrough, during the final story mission - you must (re)start tvhm to get another chance. You may not photo mode to collect these early.

You may not refresh Vaulthalla by leaving and coming back, you must kill Psychoreaver once per farm.

You may dashboard/read-only farm, as long as you only keep and redeem items from the last run. This restriction prevents you from building up easy points off of certain loot sources without needing to reset playthrough.

Glitches
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Banned glitches/exploits:

- Complex Root AoE Boosting
This is an extremely obvious glitch, which may actually cause seizures in epileptics, and just easily becomes the single best build while being incredibly boring. It's also fixed on next-gen consoles, making it inaccessible to players there.

- Car Warping
This still actually works - gearbox is incompetent what a surprise. It is an extremely obvious glitch, which is (now) rather difficult, but in some cases (Wotan) saves an incredible amount of time - someone who pulls it off could easily save hours over others.

- Phalanx Doctrine Stacking
This is an extremely obvious glitch, which makes a single best build, and is only possible on one character.

- Skill Point Duping
This again is an extremely obvious glitch, which is incredibly difficult to pull off, that makes a single best but boring build. It's also completely inaccessible to people without friends on the same platform.

- Emote Cancelling the Pestilence, Multitap, and Gargoyle reloads
Once again, an extremely obvious glitch which makes a single boring best build. This also requires an emote key, it's inaccessible to console players.

- Infinite Re-Volter or Toboggan duration glitches
Yet again, extremely obvious glitches which make a single boring best build. The Re-Volter is especially egregious, it's a completely free 100% damage boost on top of any build for 5s of work.

- Using Dakka Bear to charge crystals in guardian takedown, or to skip Scourge's teleport phases
This is a bit less egregious than the others, but it still saves a significant amount of time off of something that's a relatively obvious glitch, and it's only possible on one character. Note that in coop the crystals take longer to charge, two people charging simultaneously is different to Dakka Bear + 1 Player.

Anything else not listed above is allowed. This includes (non-exhaustive):

- Swap reloading
This is very similar to drop reloading from BL2, it is actually possible on controller (by only equipping two weapons), and most importantly, it is *extremely* difficult to get out of muscle memory once you start doing it.

- Rocket and Grenade Jumping
This is very easy to do accidentally, even from an enemy, it would be very hard to draw a line.

- All Out of Bounds
It's very hard to draw a line again, the previous "clipping through a wall" attempt had some serious holes, and it actually saves less than 5m over the whole event, it's of little consequence.

- All forms of action skill cancelling
This is very easy to do accidentally, and is no longer possible to abuse by binding to scroll.

- Emote cancelling outside of the banned situations
These are easy things to get into muscle memory and difficult to remove, and are all of little consequence.

- Resetting Scraptrap spawns by walking in and out the arena, and respawning Rampager by entering/exiting the vault
While these are minor glitches, they avoid extra loading screens, greatly appreciated, especially by console players.

- Stacking melee elements to dupe eridium
This is a minor glitch again, but it requires a bit of effort to setup, and needs you to actively search for eridium piles. You're going to need a decent amount for Hemovorous anyway.