Randy Pitchford is sometimes known for posting through it—most recently, trying to justify massive performance problems in Borderlands 4, a game I otherwise really like. He’s since quietened down considerably, though he did hop in briefly to play CEO tech support, ran face-first into a bug and—to his credit—didn’t try to tell anybody it’s a premium game made for premium gamers or anything.
For context: In the Borderlands 4 post-game, there’s a vendor called Maurice’s Black Market, a vending machine that changes location every week and sells a number of legendaries that are rolled on a per-player basis. However, a recent patch introduced a bug that meant players in co-op games couldn’t interact with the Maurice machines in their friends’ worlds.
It’s a so-so system—it can be disappointing to rush to your own personal Maurice box, only to find out that none of the rolls are useful—but Pitchford does make a solid argument that this system lets communities band together to share their rolls and pick a buddy to skim good legendary weapons off. But, like, in gamer vernacular.
“Bro”, Pitchford writes, “Get in a group of people who post their rolls every week and jump into each other’s games to get the gear you want. Game that shit!” When X user Gothalion points out that they cannot, in fact, “Game that shit!” Pitchford replies “Well, shit”.
And hey, if we’re giving kudos where kudos are due, that’s character development. No jabs at justification, no comparing Gearbox to the Beatles, just throwing one’s hands up and going—well, crap, I didn’t know that.
There’s good news, though. A day later, after seemingly conferring with the devs at Gearbox, Pitchford confirmed that it was a “Confirmed known bug. Fixed and will be in an upcoming patch within the next two weeks” with nary a bro in sight.
I’m personally not too wrapped up in getting the perfect gun myself—well, I have been grinding a little—but I can see the arguments for and against the way the black market in Borderlands 4 works. It’s kinda neat to have incentive to play co-op with your mates by checking in with their rolls, and it’ll be good to see this bug fixed so you can actually, uh, do that again.
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