I’ve been spending about 30-40g on gems every week for more than a month now and just dumped another 100g into gems today. All of it I spent on keys to open BLC’s in hopes of getting the permanent version of the Black Lion Trader, which I happen to want more than any vanity item in this game.
The results have been discouraging so far to say the least. I have not yet gotten a perma-trader, merchant, banker or anything of the sort. The only non-common items I’ve gotten so far are a few Halloween skins (only 2 of which are weapon skins, and that’s after converting everything into Mad King chests) and an everlasting tonic that transforms me into a random tree, which is a lot of fun, but not exactly what I dumped hundreds of gold trying to get.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t upset, but I’m not here to vent out my frustration. Having opened over 500 chests, I’ve noticed a number of serious issues with the BLC mechanic in practice, and would like to discuss some of them here:
1. Rare items need a cap on effective Gem price
Before I went into this BLC opening business, I knew the terms, that this was all based on chance, and that I could very possibly not get what I want. I decided to take that risk and in fact did not get what I wanted. This, I can accept.
What bothers me is just how very little I DID get from it, and the spine-chilling thought that the results would have been the same if I used real money instead of gold to buy these keys.
Let’s do a little bit of math here: 500 chests requires about 500 keys to open. There is a chance of getting a key from a chest, so let’s peg that chance at a generous 20%. This means I used about 400 keys to open all of these chests. 5 keys cost 450 gems, so 400 would cost 80 times that amount, which is 36000. 4000 gems cost $50 of cold, hard cash, so 36000 would cost $450.
I hope you can see the problem now. The fact that Gems have a real world price associated with it means that there really does need to be a reasonable cap on the amount Gems you are expected to spend to get something you want. “Better luck next time” really doesn’t cut it from a MORAL perspective when the player has paid $400 and received nothing but boosters, tonics, and inferior tools (I’ll get to this in a bit).
I can’t help but feeling that the current drop rates of rare items from BLCs are simply not fair when put into perspective the “average” amount of real world money players need to spend on keys to be able to get one. Many players probably share this perception, and as long as this perception continues, players will be discouraged to spend money on gems, which is both bad for business on ANet’s side, and bad for players due to the inflating Gold to Gem prices.
By rare item, I mean any time-limited skin or anything permanent, because let’s be honest, those are the only real desirable items from BLC’s. Other games with successful models of key purchasing have desirable items with EVERY key purchase, as in the case of TF2 with unique weapons and hats.
However, this problem takes more than just increasing drop rates to solve. As long as the rare drops are RNG based, there will exist people with bad luck like myself who end up spending hundreds of dollars in real money with practically nothing to show for it.
To put an effective cap on the price of these rare drops, we can introduce a new guaranteed drop in the BLC, let’s call it the Black Lion token for now (we could also just use the Mystery Tonic). Each BLC would drop 1-5 of these tokens, and once you have accumulated enough tokens, you can exchange for the exact item you want from an NPC, where all the rare drops are available for exchange.
This system would retain the luck element (some at ANet would call it “fun”) of the original system, in that there is still a chance to get a rare item from the chests themselves, but ensure players are adequately rewarded for each BLC they open, and progress toward getting the exact item that they want instead of opening chests aimlessly hoping to hit the jackpot, which, as anyone who has opened more than a few hundred BLCs can attest to, is an extremely demoralizing process, and does very little to encourage Key purchasing.
*Apparently there is a 5000 character limit. Continued on next post…
(edited by Kaon.7192)