What's your stance on Save Editors? (BL2/BL3)

[Freya Crescent]

Since the topic was closed on the official Gearbox forums, I'll ask it here. Here's the OP's opening comment:

Let me first preface this by saying I love the Borderlands series as a whole, and I’m all for players of all types playing the game the way they want to play it; being a speedrun to level up on their first go, a slow playthrough every other night that takes a whole month for them to beat the game or even people who will purchase the game and use 3rd party software and divert the way the Game Creator’s intended play. But I do have some serious gripes about the last group.

I understand, cutscenes suck, leveling sucks, grinding sucks, but this is all a tradeoff for loot and a badass character that you can be proud of. Ideally, every vault hunter you encounter can get a sense of what you have gone through, respect if you will; and it is that feeling and sense of community self-sacrifice (10+ hours for the character, 50+ for damn good loot) that makes a closer bond between players and the community. This also means since little people will ever get THE PERFECT LOOT, there is always a reason to keep playing and an item to grind for in the end game.

Clearly Gearbox doesn’t want to de-sensitize the player base to good loot if you read the most recent hotfix notes 1 but if they don’t put in countermeasure to people just editing what loot they have, they make the grind useless to all other legit players.

In my opinion, as soon as people start to save edit and load in modded weapons they ruin the value of the hard work other people put in and will then cause other people not to care about the grind. Soon they too will just load in their items and eventually make the game dead for themselves as they have nothing to grind for. Please Gearbox, make me still want to play Borderlands for years to come <3
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Personally, I'm all for save editors. I'd rather play with someone who has user-generated, perfect loot than someone using a hack that one-shots everything to FARM for their preferred loot. The editor gets to enjoy the game their way, but the hacker ruins it for his whole party.

[Jerubius]

For Borderlands 3, I doubt I'll do any save editing, once I get around to picking it up. For Borderlands 2 though, I often ran into problems trying to play with friends where we'd be like 10 levels apart, and it just wasn't fun to play together. So I used it a fair bit to duplicate saves and scale characters up or down to match my friend's levels. Some built in system to address this was probably the single thing I wanted to see most out of the eventual Borderlands 2 sequel, so I was overjoyed when such a thing did get announced.

Although while I don't really see myself using going forward, I also don't really mind others using it either. I only really found Borderlands 2 fun playing with friends or solo, and I expect I'll feel the same way about Borderlands 3. What other people do in their games won't bother me one way or another. If anything, I'd be annoyed by attempts to stop it, as it'd likely have an impact on modding prospects for the game. While small, the Borderlands 2 modding scene had it's share of really quality mods.

[Zeon08]

save editors are not fun. progression is what makes the fun. if you get all the best guns and maxed out stats right away, there is no point in playing the game anymore.

[reptiliane]

I use it to sync my weapon to my level

[dontu_worry]

I use Gibbed to move gear around, and to redo missions for rewards. I do, however redo the missions instead of just adding gear to my save file.

[(N☆G) Jackal ★JJ★]

My thing is if you are using editors/hacks then you 100% should only be playing by yourself with invite only turned on so no one accidentially joins


If you want to go play with friends with perfect gear you shoild be homest what you did because I personally dont even like playing with someone who got everything by cheating and want to play with me, someone whose enjoying the grind.

[Dixon Sider]

I boot anyone with the slightest indication that they used a save editor. I think they should use VAC with BL3. That would make me purchase it on steam

[Whiplash]

I don't care at all how other people choose to play the game. As long as it doesn't affect me, they can do what they want.

[Dixon Sider]

Originally posted by Zylon:

They should add a seperate queue for playing with players with edited safe states and cheats.
And a queue for those that want to play together that play legit.

Done..

People will join the legit servers with mods. It happens in every game that does that

[Boromir <-------<<<]

A lot of good posts in here, I agree with the single vs multiplayer stance where in singleplayer anything goes and multiplayer should be legit. However now that we have instanced loot I would say it is better to not have a save editor just to keep the multiplayer legit. Fixing bugged quests, skipping awful tedious content and increasing your inventory to whatever size are such nice features though.

[Nakos]

Originally posted by Draekus:

a save editor will not give you Gold Keys. a Profile editor will.

Just as a minor point of order: The Mac save editor (Bordertool 2) will edit both saves and the profiles. So... for Mac players the two are the same thing.

[Draekus]

Originally posted by Nakos:

Originally posted by Draekus:

a save editor will not give you Gold Keys. a Profile editor will.

Just as a minor point of order: The Mac save editor (Bordertool 2) will edit both saves and the profiles. So... for Mac players the two are the same thing.

ah yes, should've pointed that out.

[Nakos]

As a counterpoint to my own first post, I do actually use save editors occasionally.

I use them to create mules.
I will occasionally change a gun sight (if I get something I really want to use and the sight is one of those monstrous Tediore TV screens for example).
Sometimes I'll reset quests to do them again.
And, occasionally, if I accidentally drop something I want and it falls through the floor, I'll use a save editor to reconstruct it.

The developers baked in the difficulty of the game, and baked in the pace of progression.

For most players, there comes a point where those things begin to wear. A point when they'd walk away from the game. That point is different for everyone. Some have almost infinite patience with the existing structure of the game, and would rather walk away then pull back the curtain and step behind the scenes. But many are less concerned with that, and a save editor can be used to extend enjoyment.

But too often, it becomes the path of least resistance, many players turn to them too quickly. It's one thing to strive, and fail, and conclude that you've achieved as much as you're going to. It's something else again to never even bother to strive in the first place.

[Thorveim]

I do use editors. Because once you finished mission, all you have left to do is then to farm bosses over and over, usually the same one at that... and when finally the right item falls, you bet something will be wrong about it, from the element to what sight it has.

I use that to cut the grind, and for me it turns Borderlands into a sandbox where I can choose the stats of my guns (although I limit myself to what would be legal within the game, no guns that 1shot everything), and try different builds without ever having to stop thinking my gun could be a better version of itself.

And I don't think it actually affects trading that much. People that edit guns have no need to trade to begin with, and probably didn't feel like entering the world of trade if they started editing; that limits the number of edited items that could be circulating. ironically in that regard, people making saves public may do more damage as people that can't get perfect items can use these saves to get bargaining chips.

This is why overall i'm kinda sad Gibbed isn't done yet for BL 3... his editor for 2 was exactly what i was looking for (can tweak anything, but little to no risk of ending up creating items that the game itself can't generate)

[Kweeb]

Borderlands 3 I cannot get the guardian rank stats to save

[gamename]

Responding to OP before reading responses:

Originally posted by Freya Crescent:

Personally, I'm all for save editors. I'd rather play with someone who has user-generated, perfect loot than someone using a hack that one-shots everything to FARM for their preferred loot. The editor gets to enjoy the game their way, but the hacker ruins it for his whole party.

I don't want to play with someone who's done either of those things. If I'm *not* playing with them, then I really don't care what they do. I really don't understand the idea that someone else cheating/editing/modding devalues my experience, if we're not playing together.

So I'm perfectly happy for it to be easy to cheat, as long as it doesn't effect me. Broadly speaking, the more 'open' a games internals are, the better ... if someone made some cool mods, I might possibly be interested.

In BL, I wouldn't mind an integrated/automated savegame-backup function, to save people from having their saves messed up by public game cheaters/modders/griefers (moot point for me since I haven't played multi in years) .. or even by the occasional weird glitch

The one thing I might use an editor for is inventory management. Hardly even seems like a cheat to me, just avoiding the tedium of moving things 4 items at a time through the Stash. Haven't done it yet, but maybe.

Aaaand, OK, I've sometimes thought about leveling. As in, after you've got 1 or 2 chars up to a point (level cap, end of UVHM-main-story), you've played the main story several times, it *is* pretty grindy to start from 0 again, so maybe it would be nice to ... I'm not really sure exactly what the good solution would be. 'Re-spec' half your levels onto a new char, and skip ahead some amount? IDK. Old idea. I just heard about this thing where you can start a new char at lvl 30 and end of NVHM (after beating Lil-DLC, I think) .. so, maybe that's a good solution, for those to whom it's available.

Ed .. Just realized this is an old thread with 1 necro. Oops. 1 necro that's not even on-topic ... uh?
(but as long as I'm here .. )

"skipping awful tedious content" ... Hmm. Well, if I ever play more TPS, I might look in to what options there are to never hear Pickle again.

Originally posted by Dixon Sider:

Originally posted by Zylon:

They should add a seperate queue for playing with players with edited safe states and cheats.
And a queue for those that want to play together that play legit.

Done..

People will join the legit servers with mods. It happens in every game that does that

I played a PvP game years ago that had 'cheat allowed' servers. I don't really remember if they were official servers, or just something some of the community came up with. It actually did a surprisingly good job of drawing cheaters/modders to those servers, and away from vanilla non-cheat servers, so everyone could play how they wanted. Not 100%, but most of the time.