Black Lion Chests: Artificial Scarcity?

Black Lion Chests: Artificial Scarcity?

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Posted by: Kor.5983

Kor.5983

An unprecedented price increase has occurred to Black Lion Chests in the last three days.

Discuss.

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Posted by: Behellagh.1468

Behellagh.1468

Someone siphoned another 333K chests off the market in 2 hours Wednesday morning (my time). Since you start buying from the cheapest and work your way up in price …

It makes no sense. Chests drop frequently enough. I chalk it up to more FP2 speculation.

We are heroes. This is what we do!

RIP City of Heroes

(edited by Behellagh.1468)

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Posted by: Southern.8973

Southern.8973

Over 3,000,000 (yes, 3 MILLION) chests have been sold or otherwise removed from the TP this month alone.

July 30th – 3,928,706 chests on the TP.
August 30th – 843,395 chests on the TP.

That’s a reduction of 3,085,311 chests in 1 month.

That seems a bit more than mere “speculation”.

(edited by Southern.8973)

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Posted by: Astral Projections.7320

Astral Projections.7320

If it turns out key running gets that nerf, that means there will be that much less demand for chests. Unless these people are planning to sell to the people doing as many key runs as they can before the next update, they might find themselves holding a lot of black lion chests.

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Posted by: Ohoni.6057

Ohoni.6057

Could be ANet price manipulation because they don’t like chests being super cheap. I can’t imagine anyone imagining 3m keys being actually used by anyone.

“If you spent as much time working on [some task] as
you spend complaining about it on the forums, you’d be
done by now.”

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Posted by: Gudy.3607

Gudy.3607

Could be ANet price manipulation because they don’t like chests being super cheap. I can’t imagine anyone imagining 3m keys being actually used by anyone.

I find that unlikely. They are making money by selling keys, and they’re apparently going to nerf key farming with the feature patch, making keys even more the controlling ingredient. Cheap chests are a complete non-issue, from what I can see.

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Posted by: Bellizare.5816

Bellizare.5816

Oddly enough, I’ve had an unusually large quantity of BL chests drop over the last couple of days.

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Posted by: Firebaall.5127

Firebaall.5127

Black Lion Keys are being removed, after the patch each BLC will open without a key.

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Posted by: Julie Yann.5379

Julie Yann.5379

Black Lion Keys are being removed, after the patch each BLC will open without a key.

I highly doubt that, it would be like voluntarily removing a major source of income from the game.

Be careful what you wish for, Anet might just give it to you “HoT”
“…let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die;.”

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Posted by: azurrei.5691

azurrei.5691

Black Lion Keys are being removed, after the patch each BLC will open without a key.

I highly doubt that, it would be like voluntarily removing a major source of income from the game.

Always a possibility… no not really :p If that did happen for one reason or another, you can be 100% guaranteed the old chests would be vendor fodder and they would create new chests that dropped.

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Posted by: Goatjugsoup.8637

Goatjugsoup.8637

isnt the trading post the same for eu and us, probably also the same for china which is a whole mess more of people playing the game and possibly buying or farming keys and needing chests.

plus there could be a lot of speculation going on.

Drop wise I can say it doesnt seem like anything has been changed, got several yesterday so that can only mean something to do with the demand.

Most wanted in game additions: Beastiary, readable books

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Posted by: Behellagh.1468

Behellagh.1468

Over 3,000,000 (yes, 3 MILLION) chests have been sold or otherwise removed from the TP this month alone.

July 30th – 3,928,706 chests on the TP.
August 30th – 843,395 chests on the TP.

That’s a reduction of 3,085,311 chests in 1 month.

That seems a bit more than mere “speculation”.

Well the first 1 million took 17 days to remove. That didn’t bother me. However the removal of around 1.6 million in a period of 8 hours in four batches, that’s interesting.

We are heroes. This is what we do!

RIP City of Heroes

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Posted by: Behellagh.1468

Behellagh.1468

isnt the trading post the same for eu and us, probably also the same for china which is a whole mess more of people playing the game and possibly buying or farming keys and needing chests.

plus there could be a lot of speculation going on.

Drop wise I can say it doesnt seem like anything has been changed, got several yesterday so that can only mean something to do with the demand.

No, China is on their own TP. Only NA and EU are shared.

We are heroes. This is what we do!

RIP City of Heroes

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Posted by: Goatjugsoup.8637

Goatjugsoup.8637

isnt the trading post the same for eu and us, probably also the same for china which is a whole mess more of people playing the game and possibly buying or farming keys and needing chests.

plus there could be a lot of speculation going on.

Drop wise I can say it doesnt seem like anything has been changed, got several yesterday so that can only mean something to do with the demand.

No, China is on their own TP. Only NA and EU are shared.

huh why is that?

Most wanted in game additions: Beastiary, readable books

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Posted by: Southern.8973

Southern.8973

isnt the trading post the same for eu and us, probably also the same for china which is a whole mess more of people playing the game and possibly buying or farming keys and needing chests.

plus there could be a lot of speculation going on.

Drop wise I can say it doesnt seem like anything has been changed, got several yesterday so that can only mean something to do with the demand.

No, China is on their own TP. Only NA and EU are shared.

huh why is that?

Completely different economies. Not to mention they’re just starting out, so few people have any gold — there’s no way they could afford to pay US/EU prices for most items on our Trading Post.

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Posted by: Eric.6109

Eric.6109

On a similar thread, somebody did the math and it could be just a really good flipper. After the price rose to ~40C, they would have easily made back the coin they paid and after that it’s pure profit.

a.net: I will not be buying gems with cash until you fix traits.

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Posted by: laokoko.7403

laokoko.7403

is price going to crash soon? consider there is possibly a nerf to key farming.

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Posted by: Eric.6109

Eric.6109

Can only speculate. If keys will be harder to farm, demand for the chest will drop somewhat, depending on how hard will it be.

You could see the current situation as an opportunity to dump extra chests you have lying around.

a.net: I will not be buying gems with cash until you fix traits.

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Posted by: Behellagh.1468

Behellagh.1468

On a similar thread, somebody did the math and it could be just a really good flipper. After the price rose to ~40C, they would have easily made back the coin they paid and after that it’s pure profit.

Except the supply hadn’t returned. They would have to put chests back for sale at such a low rate to keep the supply numbers down it would take a really long time to profit. We’re talking 1.6 million in existing supply bought over the mater of a few hours four different times. That’s around 6400 stacks give or take. If they could sell a stack an hour that’ll be 9 months to get rid of them all. But we have no idea what the daily trade volume on BLC are like.

There was 8 million of them around last Chirstmas and prices were down to 2c/1c. There’s a reason there were that many, nobody wanted them. Key farming became more popular and I can see that taking some of them out of the market but this much this quickly? There is something else motivating them.

We are heroes. This is what we do!

RIP City of Heroes

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Posted by: Ohoni.6057

Ohoni.6057

Always a possibility… no not really :p If that did happen for one reason or another, you can be 100% guaranteed the old chests would be vendor fodder and they would create new chests that dropped.

Yeah, I can’t see them going “you know those several million chests in the wild? Well now you can open them all without keys, resulting in millions of claim tickets!”

If they did want to remove keys from the model, they would likely just say “no more regular keys or chests will drop. What chests do exist, you can open them with existing keys, or vendor them for [like whatever the going TP rate was a month ago].”

On a similar thread, somebody did the math and it could be just a really good flipper. After the price rose to ~40C, they would have easily made back the coin they paid and after that it’s pure profit.

That’s only if they can sell them. Who would buy back millions of chests at anywhere near that price?

“If you spent as much time working on [some task] as
you spend complaining about it on the forums, you’d be
done by now.”

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Posted by: LadyRhonwyn.2501

LadyRhonwyn.2501

That’s only if they can sell them. Who would buy back millions of chests at anywhere near that price?

My question would be: who in his right mind would buy them anyway? They drop so often, it’s simply not fun anymore…. (them and those key parts…)

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Posted by: Ohoni.6057

Ohoni.6057

My question would be: who in his right mind would buy them anyway? They drop so often, it’s simply not fun anymore…. (them and those key parts…)

Right, I think I have a stack and a half of them, maybe more distributed between my characters, and I’ve only ever had a total of maybe thirty keys over my lifetime in the game (not even at once, just, adding up every key that’s ever passed through my hands in any way). You should never have more keys than you do chests if you play the game in any meaningful way.

“If you spent as much time working on [some task] as
you spend complaining about it on the forums, you’d be
done by now.”

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Posted by: Romek.4201

Romek.4201

this guyz can destroy more than 2 million from buyd chests and still make a lot profit with the other 1 million^^

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Posted by: Behellagh.1468

Behellagh.1468

this guyz can destroy more than 2 million from buyd chests and still make a lot profit with the other 1 million^^

No.

First he has to sell them at a price that’s higher then he bought them at. The price did not go from 6c to 48c instantly. So the average cost is a lot higher than most people here think. It cost roughly 3000g to buy the 1.6 million units during those 4 quick buy ups on the 17th, 19th, 20th and the 27th. That’s roughly 18c each so counting in the TP tax they would need to sell 45% just to break even. This last buy of 333K units had an average cost of 36c and they would need to sell 87% of it at 49c just to break even.

No the only people who are cleaning up are those that bought nearly 5 million between Chirstmas and the mid August when the price was between 2c and 7c each and held onto some of that until now.

We are heroes. This is what we do!

RIP City of Heroes

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Posted by: Pandaman.4758

Pandaman.4758

Maybe it’s just a case of someone getting really drunk and blowing a mountain of gold on BLCs?

It’s not unheard of, like the oil futures drunk-trading incident back in 2009: one guy got completely wasted and managed to spike crude oil futures all by himself. Maybe we have a BLC drunk-trading incident on our hands

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Posted by: Erich.1783

Erich.1783

Could someone with a large amount of gold also have converted a large amount of it to gems, thinking that keys will go on sale and skins will spike high if keys can no longer be farmed?

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Posted by: Romek.4201

Romek.4201

this guyz can destroy more than 2 million from buyd chests and still make a lot profit with the other 1 million^^

No.

First he has to sell them at a price that’s higher then he bought them at. The price did not go from 6c to 48c instantly. So the average cost is a lot higher than most people here think. It cost roughly 3000g to buy the 1.6 million units during those 4 quick buy ups on the 17th, 19th, 20th and the 27th. That’s roughly 18c each so counting in the TP tax they would need to sell 45% just to break even. This last buy of 333K units had an average cost of 36c and they would need to sell 87% of it at 49c just to break even.

No the only people who are cleaning up are those that bought nearly 5 million between Chirstmas and the mid August when the price was between 2c and 7c each and held onto some of that until now.

and you think this guy did not buy millions before? when price was on 2c?

they made profit allraedy

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Posted by: Eric.6109

Eric.6109

could be a group working together.

also, inb4 conspiracy: anet bought tons of chests and destroyed them, before making them super rare to match the rare key drops.
have you bought your tinfoil hat from the gem store yet? :P

a.net: I will not be buying gems with cash until you fix traits.

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Posted by: Southern.8973

Southern.8973

Keep in mind too, who would possibly have room to store 12,000 stacks of chests?

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Posted by: Julie Yann.5379

Julie Yann.5379

this guyz can destroy more than 2 million from buyd chests and still make a lot profit with the other 1 million^^

No.

First he has to sell them at a price that’s higher then he bought them at. The price did not go from 6c to 48c instantly. So the average cost is a lot higher than most people here think. It cost roughly 3000g to buy the 1.6 million units during those 4 quick buy ups on the 17th, 19th, 20th and the 27th. That’s roughly 18c each so counting in the TP tax they would need to sell 45% just to break even. This last buy of 333K units had an average cost of 36c and they would need to sell 87% of it at 49c just to break even.

No the only people who are cleaning up are those that bought nearly 5 million between Chirstmas and the mid August when the price was between 2c and 7c each and held onto some of that until now.

and you think this guy did not buy millions before? when price was on 2c?

they made profit allraedy

If one guy bought all those millions where would he store all those stacks? As far as I know we don’t have thousands of bank slots.

Be careful what you wish for, Anet might just give it to you “HoT”
“…let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die;.”

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Posted by: Buttercup.5871

Buttercup.5871

In the pickup queue of an account made only for that purpose.

Apparently, someone knows something we don’t. Because it’s entirely illogical with the current info available to all: namely, that keys will become scarcer, hence chests should start flooding the market. I bet it has to do this move is related to info from China.

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Posted by: Eggman.1405

Eggman.1405

I bet it has to do this move is related to info from China.

Right, but the problem is that if China has its own TP, how can people in our market speculate based on anything rumored in China? Same goes for the Potatoes.

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Posted by: Minato.5294

Minato.5294

Could be that they’re speculating anet removing chests completely from the game
and streamlining the process where we will just receive an unlocked chest or something. They might provide a vendor to remove excess chests from the market like the vote tokens during the election.

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Posted by: Charming Rogue.8071

Charming Rogue.8071

I can’t remember exactly what caused it, but 2 years ago black lion chests rose up to like 1s each in price because of speculators. When they realized that you still needed keys to open them, and that the chests themselves are useless, the price started dropping to their original 3c.

My guess is on speculators. But black lion keys will always be useless without keys. People are too easily influenced by hype.

Desolation – EU – [KING] – Immortal Kingdom

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Posted by: Cormac.3871

Cormac.3871

I can’t remember exactly what caused it, but 2 years ago black lion chests rose up to like 1s each in price because of speculators. When they realized that you still needed keys to open them, and that the chests themselves are useless, the price started dropping to their original 3c.

My guess is on speculators. But black lion keys will always be useless without keys. People are too easily influenced by hype.

I think that rise was associated with Captain’s Commendations, which allowed you to buy keys.

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Posted by: Buttercup.5871

Buttercup.5871

I can’t remember exactly what caused it, but 2 years ago black lion chests rose up to like 1s each in price because of speculators. When they realized that you still needed keys to open them, and that the chests themselves are useless, the price started dropping to their original 3c.

My guess is on speculators. But black lion keys will always be useless without keys. People are too easily influenced by hype.

I think you’re referring to the effects of that_shaman’s data-mining on reddit last year:

“Rusty Black Lion Chest
109854_0768 Your unlock is being processed… Please wait.
109854_0769 Rusty Black Lion Chest
109854_0771 This chest has seen better days… It needs some work before you can even attempt to unlock it.
109854_0786 It appears you have some jammed chests. I can fix that for you.”

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Posted by: ilr.9675

ilr.9675

I wish their drop rate was massively nerfed…. lost count of how many I’ve deleted and I know I’m not the only one who deletes them

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Posted by: Fenar.4025

Fenar.4025

Maybe someone has insider information about changes to Black Lion Chests. For instance, they might be increasing the drop rate of tickets and ticket scraps substantially and removing useless junk from the chests to help stimulate more black lion key sales. I know that I personally would consider using real money to buy keys only if I had a 100% chance for at least a ticket scrap.