Guild Wars 2

Hey Guys

If you farm keys on EU maybe you know me as ‘Ebonala’
I farmed 1000 Black Lion Keys and opened them yesterday (11.08.)

Here is the video I made for youtube:

Click Me for 10m video

And here are the results on imgur:

Click Me
Click Me

and here is the full-length video with german commentary on twitch:

Click Me for 1h+

It took me almost 1h to open them all, so I speeded it up
I think this is the record
Youll find a geraman video guide for the farming on my channel, ignore it, its old and not all starts are in there

Story:

Me and my friends used to farm some keys from time to time
I decided to make a guilde for my guild, so I spent a lot of time to figure out how to do it faster and faster last january + february
After ~250 Runs I ended on guard with GS and wrote the guide down
To keep the guide up to date i decided to farm 1-2 Keys each day
After I hit 400 Keys in May/June I saw that video where someone opened 500 Chests (with bought keys)
I wanted to beat that and to set a new record, but without wasting my gold on keys
So I set up my goal: To Reach 1000 Keys until the end of the year
In July I got lazy and didnt farm a single one, i was on 465 keys
After the last patch came online (Dragons Reach 1) my guildmates asked me again and again if i will open my chests to perhaps be lucky and get one of those hairstlye contracts
I didnt want to open them without hitting my goal of 1k keys, so I decided on Saturday (02.08.) to farm the last 535 Keys until next patchday
It was a tough challange, no real life, 5h sleep max per day and only short breaks to eat or bathroom stuff
I would never do it again xD It was rly hard, the last 100 keys were a torture

It was not my goal to get the money but to set the record to 1000 keys without buying
I did that, I’m rly happy and proud that i didnt gave up
And my fingers + legs hurt
Thanks to my [AofT]-guildies for the support and to all the people who set road markers in queensdale
And thanks to Arena-Net for this awesome patch on wednesday (tickets and scraps chances doubled), without you I wouldnt have made it

Here are some impressions that i want to share:

Come join the key farm army!
The key farm army helps poor farmers for charity
Even Big Nose Ted joined the key farm army

I want to use this post to thank Anet for this amazing game and the great living story content we get every 2 weeks
Sry for my bad english and greetings from germany
Patron/nicron.2794/Mr Disco Stu/Ebonala

You can watch the extended version of this post (including all the maths) on reddit:
reddit Post

So out of 1000 chests, you only got 1 Name Change contract? Wow. XD Just goes to show how incredibly rare it is.

Still, congrats on your effort and on all that loot!

By the way, what is that item with the arena logo on it? The one to the right of the Transmutation Charges.

i got 1 trading post express contract ^^ there s no name change contract

the item with the arena net logo is a time token for custom pvp arenas

Oops. Meant to write the Permanent Hairstylist Contract. So that wasn’t what you got either?

You farmed 535 keys in 10 days, which is amazing. Judging from the stack of unid dyes, all you bl tickets, the minis, and the permanent contract you got, it was a valuable haul of loot. Congratz!

Congrats on reaching your goal.

i salute you! now i envy what you have! hehehe. again, i salute you! and congrats!

Hmm, full tickets are rarer than even I thought. Scraps are in par with predictions. Thank you for the data.

Wow. That’s dedication. I can barely get myself to do one a day. Nice loot though.

And here is a picture of OP after the 1000th key run. ^^

I was aiming for 250keys XD.. but caved at near during the perm style contract,

How many hours did it take you to farm all that :O ?

Well on the plus side you got about 4000g worth of loot, so now you can buy the hairstyle contract!

Well I think this is an open and shut case. Any time Anet says an item is “very rare”, it truly is very rare and not worth gambling for unless you are like OP. Do not spend real $ on keys.

Vol.7601:

Well I think this is an open and shut case. Any time Anet says an item is “very rare”, it truly is very rare and not worth gambling for unless you are like OP. Do not spend real $ on keys.

I agree. Yet farming some keys can pay off because it only takes opening that one chest to get something worth a lot. I mentioned somewhere in the forum I think that one guildmate went on his first key run after coming back from several months away from the game and ended up with the contract for the BL trader, worth 300g. First key, first run. So, you never know. Personally, most I ended up with was something worth about 85g, although now I can’t remember what it was.

I wouldn’t recommend spending as much time as the OP, but a few runs a week is a way to maybe earn something extra. I like to do one or two runs on each weekend morning while I’m having my coffee. For me, this has replaced the time I used to spend doing the FGS champ train. I find it relaxing and I can turn my brain off for an hour and get a couple keys.

That said, every time I think I’m done buying keys, I ended up buying more. But then I also go to casinos occasionally :p so I’m predisposed to enjoy a little gambling!

ozmaniandevil.6805:

Vol.7601:

Well I think this is an open and shut case. Any time Anet says an item is “very rare”, it truly is very rare and not worth gambling for unless you are like OP. Do not spend real $ on keys.

I agree. Yet farming some keys can pay off because it only takes opening that one chest to get something worth a lot. I mentioned somewhere in the forum I think that one guildmate went on his first key run after coming back from several months away from the game and ended up with the contract for the BL trader, worth 300g. First key, first run. So, you never know. Personally, most I ended up with was something worth about 85g, although now I can’t remember what it was.

I wouldn’t recommend spending as much time as the OP, but a few runs a week is a way to maybe earn something extra. I like to do one or two runs on each weekend morning while I’m having my coffee. For me, this has replaced the time I used to spend doing the FGS champ train. I find it relaxing and I can turn my brain off for an hour and get a couple keys.

That said, every time I think I’m done buying keys, I ended up buying more. But then I also go to casinos occasionally :p so I’m predisposed to enjoy a little gambling!

Rng is Rng. Your friend is in a very, very small minority of people who get something valuable on their 1st run. The large majority don’t get anything.

So the Perm Hair style contract which is said to be a very rare drop doesn’t even have a 1:1000 chance LOL, let that be a warning kiddies, do not buy BLKeys with Gems or $$

Ok I Did It.2854:

So the Perm Hair style contract which is said to be a very rare drop doesn’t even have a 1:1000 chance LOL, let that be a warning kiddies, do not buy BLKeys with Gems or $$

The drop rates must be extremely low for all those permanent items. I saw a set of archived black lion chest drop rates. One set of 1000 had one item out of the 3 possible drops.

Anyone who opens in expectation of getting one of these “rare” drops is going to be disappointed. People do pay for these, but imo they do it because essentially they like to gamble.

To be fair, you’ll never get anything if you never open a chest. You have the chance to get something if you do open a chest. Is it likely? No, of course not, but someone will get lucky. It’s like playing the lottery. You can’t win if you don’t play. And if you’re not playing, then don’t be all jealous when someone else wins.

the data is slightly skewed, they doubled the rates for black lion tickets i believe.

Yes, that’s one of the points being made.

Astral Projections.7320:

Ok I Did It.2854:

So the Perm Hair style contract which is said to be a very rare drop doesn’t even have a 1:1000 chance LOL, let that be a warning kiddies, do not buy BLKeys with Gems or $$

The drop rates must be extremely low for all those permanent items. I saw a set of archived black lion chest drop rates. One set of 1000 had one item out of the 3 possible drops.

Anyone who opens in expectation of getting one of these “rare” drops is going to be disappointed. People do pay for these, but imo they do it because essentially they like to gamble.

There are 2 possible drops per chest, 1 of the 3 slots always is a bosster

ozmaniandevil.6805:

To be fair, you’ll never get anything if you never open a chest. You have the chance to get something if you do open a chest. Is it likely? No, of course not, but someone will get lucky. It’s like playing the lottery. You can’t win if you don’t play. And if you’re not playing, then don’t be all jealous when someone else wins.

I don’t have a problem people farming key or buying lottery.

I’m only suggesting if people intend to spend lots of real money or ingame gold on black lion key… don’t.

Look at the cost of 1000 key. That is 84,000 Gems or 10,650 Gold. And look at the return, 3,700 gold returned.

If you really want a black lion weapon, or permanent license, you are much better of buying it directly from the trading post, instead of throwing “large sum of money” away. Since the odds is against you.

If I told you let’s flip a coin, if it is head give me 5 dollar, if it is tail I’ll give you 1 dollar. You won’t bet with me right?

It’s foolish to think you can buy keys and convert the results into income at a rate better than exchanging the gems it cost into gold (assuming you paid cash). Only works if you farm keys and even then it’s a lot of farming to get maybe 410g. We are talking 240 chests for 7 tickets on average. That’s 80-120 hrs or 3.5 to 5g an hour.

Also the 3700g figure is only tickets. What about the rare minis (80g) and whatever he gets from the 10, 3-pack minis. Or the 253 unidentified dyes (70g) or the 111 dyes from the dye 3-pack? The trading post contract is 300g.

Then there’s the 9,600 gems worth of hair and total makeover kits. The 4,200 gems worth of transmutation charges. Sure you can’t sell those but the can be worth a lot to a player. 3,300 gems worth of backpack skins. 13,500 gems worth of BLSKs. The account bound stuff I listed is over 30K worth of gems. Point being it’s not all booster and stupid blue tonic crap.

3764 gold included tickets+ dye, minis, and the trading post contract. Without those the ticket is only 3100.

I personally think it is totally not worth it to spend gold or real cash on the black lion key. And we have a double drop rate event. Without the event you’ll be spending 10k gold for 2k gold return.

I dont’ know why you keep advertising for Anet Behellagh.

Another advantage of blc that haven’t been mentioned is many of the booster can’t be bought directly with gems. I like maxing stats, & having speed, strength, & armor boosters, are good for extra performance.

Players like Smooth Penguin (started a thread suggesting P2W) who have the extra money to spend, and want an ingame advantage, can already have one. The keys are better value then they used to be a year ago. I think they are worth buying if you got extra money and don’t need anything else from the gem store.

Nicron.2794:

Astral Projections.7320:

Ok I Did It.2854:

So the Perm Hair style contract which is said to be a very rare drop doesn’t even have a 1:1000 chance LOL, let that be a warning kiddies, do not buy BLKeys with Gems or $$

The drop rates must be extremely low for all those permanent items. I saw a set of archived black lion chest drop rates. One set of 1000 had one item out of the 3 possible drops.

Anyone who opens in expectation of getting one of these “rare” drops is going to be disappointed. People do pay for these, but imo they do it because essentially they like to gamble.

There are 2 possible drops per chest, 1 of the 3 slots always is a bosster

I was referring to the 3 permanent items, not the 3 slots in the chest. The hair kit, trader and merchant. That out of 1000 chests, only one of one of these had dropped.

laokoko.7403:

3764 gold included tickets+ dye, minis, and the trading post contract. Without those the ticket is only 3100.

I personally think it is totally not worth it to spend gold or real cash on the black lion key. And we have a double drop rate event. Without the event you’ll be spending 10k gold for 2k gold return.

I dont’ know why you keep advertising for Anet Behellagh.

After converting he has 62 tickets. Best 7 ticket is is 430g and best 5 ticket is 360g. So eight, 7 ticket and one 5 ticket is 3800g while twelve, 5 ticket skins are 4320g. So I don’t know where you get 3100g. Heck best one ticket skin is 100g. That’s 6300g but I doubt the price can be maintained at 100g for that many, even if sold only one at a time as to not flood the supply.

I don’t know why you keep putting ANet down laokoko. I guess you hate lock boxes/grab bags.

My opening paragraph did say it wasn’t worth it if you bought keys with either cash or gold. If you don’t care about makeover kits or uni dyes or minis or backpacks then you wouldn’t be farming for keys because the gold per hour rate is relatively low even if you can farm 4 keys in an hour, that’s still only 7gph.

Astral Projections.7320:

Nicron.2794:

Astral Projections.7320:

Ok I Did It.2854:

So the Perm Hair style contract which is said to be a very rare drop doesn’t even have a 1:1000 chance LOL, let that be a warning kiddies, do not buy BLKeys with Gems or $$

The drop rates must be extremely low for all those permanent items. I saw a set of archived black lion chest drop rates. One set of 1000 had one item out of the 3 possible drops.

Anyone who opens in expectation of getting one of these “rare” drops is going to be disappointed. People do pay for these, but imo they do it because essentially they like to gamble.

There are 2 possible drops per chest, 1 of the 3 slots always is a bosster

I was referring to the 3 permanent items, not the 3 slots in the chest. The hair kit, trader and merchant. That out of 1000 chests, only one of one of these had dropped.

There were 4 contracts: Hairstylist, bank access, merchant and tp-express
The hairstylist now is removed so its 3 again

Behellagh.1468:

laokoko.7403:

3764 gold included tickets+ dye, minis, and the trading post contract. Without those the ticket is only 3100.

I personally think it is totally not worth it to spend gold or real cash on the black lion key. And we have a double drop rate event. Without the event you’ll be spending 10k gold for 2k gold return.

I dont’ know why you keep advertising for Anet Behellagh.

After converting he has 62 tickets. Best 7 ticket is is 430g and best 5 ticket is 360g. So eight, 7 ticket and one 5 ticket is 3800g while twelve, 5 ticket skins are 4320g. So I don’t know where you get 3100g. Heck best one ticket skin is 100g. That’s 6300g but I doubt the price can be maintained at 100g for that many, even if sold only one at a time as to not flood the supply.

I don’t know why you keep putting ANet down laokoko. I guess you hate lock boxes/grab bags.

My opening paragraph did say it wasn’t worth it if you bought keys with either cash or gold. If you don’t care about makeover kits or uni dyes or minis or backpacks then you wouldn’t be farming for keys because the gold per hour rate is relatively low even if you can farm 4 keys in an hour, that’s still only 7gph.

I took the minimum gold i can get for sure, that was 50g for the 1 ticket weapons
I didnt look for more expensive weapons ^^ So yeah, perhaps its more
And ofc I can wait til prices get higher, but thats my own speculation, not the real profit from the chests

Nicron.2794:

Astral Projections.7320:

Nicron.2794:

Astral Projections.7320:

Ok I Did It.2854:

So the Perm Hair style contract which is said to be a very rare drop doesn’t even have a 1:1000 chance LOL, let that be a warning kiddies, do not buy BLKeys with Gems or $$

The drop rates must be extremely low for all those permanent items. I saw a set of archived black lion chest drop rates. One set of 1000 had one item out of the 3 possible drops.

Anyone who opens in expectation of getting one of these “rare” drops is going to be disappointed. People do pay for these, but imo they do it because essentially they like to gamble.

There are 2 possible drops per chest, 1 of the 3 slots always is a bosster

I was referring to the 3 permanent items, not the 3 slots in the chest. The hair kit, trader and merchant. That out of 1000 chests, only one of one of these had dropped.

There were 4 contracts: Hairstylist, bank access, merchant and tp-express
The hairstylist now is removed so its 3 again

The archive set of 1000 chest results that I was referring to, were at a time when there were only 3 contracts. So that set only had results for those 3 and that is what I was talking about. I didn’t bring up the fourth since it had no information concerning it.

OP: thanks for all the data! Well done on your amazing ride to 1,000 keys (and your patience in waiting to open them all).

For me, this provides sufficient evidence that ANet has always intended BL Keys to be a lottery and not as a primary tool for acquiring any of the goods or services they might drop.

• Even during double-scrap/ticket week, OP only earned about 35% of the coin value to buy 1,000 keys; even including gem value of non-sellable items, the OP’s net gain is less than 70-80% of the cost of the keys. (During normal weeks, the returns would be even worse.)
• As Behellagh.1468 says, when ANet writes “rare,” they mean “almost never drops.”

The true value of the keys is the excitement generated when you open a chest; most of us will never see a good rate of return. It’s the anticipation of good fortune that makes them worth acquiring.

!http://zippythepinhead.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/98/images/ZIT80507.gif!

In other words: if you really want an item (skin or contract), buy it from the TP.

It only became a “lottery” once they added and promoted weapon skin tickets and that’s because most players simply discount the other items that are dropped. I have a bank tab set aside for boosters, tonics and services that get dropped by chests. I have another for BLSKs. Maybe someday I’ll decide to use them. But I never doubted that a chest with no ticket didn’t have an average value equivalent to the price of a key.

That’s some serious keyrunning…..

/bow to the Master….

Behellagh.1468:

laokoko.7403:

3764 gold included tickets+ dye, minis, and the trading post contract. Without those the ticket is only 3100.

I personally think it is totally not worth it to spend gold or real cash on the black lion key. And we have a double drop rate event. Without the event you’ll be spending 10k gold for 2k gold return.

I dont’ know why you keep advertising for Anet Behellagh.

After converting he has 62 tickets. Best 7 ticket is is 430g and best 5 ticket is 360g. So eight, 7 ticket and one 5 ticket is 3800g while twelve, 5 ticket skins are 4320g. So I don’t know where you get 3100g. Heck best one ticket skin is 100g. That’s 6300g but I doubt the price can be maintained at 100g for that many, even if sold only one at a time as to not flood the supply.

I don’t know why you keep putting ANet down laokoko. I guess you hate lock boxes/grab bags.

My opening paragraph did say it wasn’t worth it if you bought keys with either cash or gold. If you don’t care about makeover kits or uni dyes or minis or backpacks then you wouldn’t be farming for keys because the gold per hour rate is relatively low even if you can farm 4 keys in an hour, that’s still only 7gph.

I didnt’ make up those number, the OP wrote those number.

If you mean there are some old black lion weapon that is selling high at the trading post… the reason they are still up there because they are not easy to sell.

And Anet really like events, so you never know they’ll put another event which reduce ticket cost for old weapon like they had one before.

I don’t know what you mean by me putting Anet down. I’m telling people if they have lots of money they are better of not gambling on something that give them bad odds. They could have just buy things directly from the trading post.

You probably look more suspicious. I don’t know why some players care how much money Anet makes to give people advice that they’ll loss lots of money.

What did I say wrong? I said it is ok if you want to treat the RNG box as lottery, but you are better of not spending lots of money or cash on it, because the return is really really bad.

Behellagh.1468:

laokoko.7403:

3764 gold included tickets+ dye, minis, and the trading post contract. Without those the ticket is only 3100.

I personally think it is totally not worth it to spend gold or real cash on the black lion key. And we have a double drop rate event. Without the event you’ll be spending 10k gold for 2k gold return.

I dont’ know why you keep advertising for Anet Behellagh.

After converting he has 62 tickets. Best 7 ticket is is 430g and best 5 ticket is 360g. So eight, 7 ticket and one 5 ticket is 3800g while twelve, 5 ticket skins are 4320g. So I don’t know where you get 3100g. Heck best one ticket skin is 100g. That’s 6300g but I doubt the price can be maintained at 100g for that many, even if sold only one at a time as to not flood the supply.

Just because something is selling for that price dont’ mean that item is worth that price. Some of those old black lion weapon have very low supply, so players are selling for any price they want. Or they are selling for that price because they hope in a few month or year it’ll rise to that price.

You might as well say the OP have 3100 worth of black lion ticket that is worth 10k in 1 year.

If that’s the case, if someone have 10k gold why not just buy 10k worth of black lion weapons on the trading post.

Behellagh.1468:

It only became a “lottery” once they added and promoted weapon skin tickets and that’s because most players simply discount the other items that are dropped. I have a bank tab set aside for boosters, tonics and services that get dropped by chests. I have another for BLSKs. Maybe someday I’ll decide to use them. But I never doubted that a chest with no ticket didn’t have an average value equivalent to the price of a key.

It’s always been a lottery, but the “big prizes” weren’t very attractive and didn’t seem obtainable.

Regardless, I suspect we’re only quibbling about the word choice and agree on the main point: buy (or farm) for BL Keys if you really like opening the chests. If you instead want specific goods or services, buy those on the TP or from the gem shop.

I to have described the sell prices on high priced, limited supply goods as the “not buying for this price” rate. But I rarely ever sell to high bidder. So lets look at it again with high bids.

7 ticket highest bid, 300g; 5 ticket highest bid, 210g; 1 ticket highest bid, 89g.

So that brings the total for skins to either 2699g, 2698g or 5518g. Even if you rotate among the 15 skins with bids over 85g, the market might not hold out for all 62, one ticket skins at that price. Still, potentially a lot better haul than getting Fused or Aetherized.

But laokoko you seen to keep missing my point that it’s not worth buying keys just to get skins. You are better off either keeping the gold or converting cash bought gems into gold and then buy your skin of the TP. This is only the 3rd time of me saying that in this thread.

But my other point is the chests always contain roughly the same value as a key. Useful or not is irrelevant. Players know going in that some of those items are of no value to them but ANet did put a value on them and that’s all that counts. Skin tickets and ultra rare contracts or tonics are bonuses over the normal contents.

It would be like some of Whitman’s Valentine’s Day 4 chocolate samplers actually only had 3 chocolates and a diamond ring. Would it be worth buying a tractor trailer truck of these samplers on the chance one would have the ring or would it be cheaper to just buy the ring? Irregardless of that, is the price of the Whitman’s Sampler reasonable for getting 4 chocolates?

he can easy make more then 6k gold, just buy weapon now with 1 ticket and sell 3 month later when the price is higher