Guild Wars 2

Looking at people upset who opened dozens of chests to get nothing of use, might I suggest a chest token system such as used in Allods Online

Allods used a similar chest system for gambling for rare goodies during special events. What they did eventually was to instate a token system alongside it, so every time you opened a chest you got a “token” as well. These tokens could be traded in to a special NPC in exchange for the same items that drop at random out of a chest.

In this way if someone wants item X, and open 40 chests, and gets item Y, or worse, no items at all, he’ll eventually get enough tokens that he can hand them in for the item he wanted so badly anyway.

While it might be less profitable (Less desperate gamblers squandering their savings) it leaves a better taste in people’s mouths as they can eventually get the item they wanted via tokens.

In the light of real world money gambling already being a core component of the game – for shame, BTW – I expect the primary reason your otherwise excellent idea would fail is contained within the opening component of your closing sentence.

All it needs is a stacking buff, so for each chest you open you get an extra bit of chance for a rare/skin item.

So chest 1 has a 5% chance, 2 has a 10% change, 3 has a 15% chance and so on – as soon as you get a rare/skin item it resets back to 1.

defektive.3540:

In the light of real world money gambling already being a core component of the game – for shame, BTW – I expect the primary reason your otherwise excellent idea would fail is contained within the opening component of your closing sentence.

You’d think so, but in practice a lot of people who refused to buy them in the first place, started buying them. I for one did, because I knew that it’d only take a maximum of X many attempts to get the item anyway and I might even get some stuff I didn’t want that I could flog for gold.

To clarify we’re talking about relatively common items, the rarest goodies just wern’t obtainable in this fashion or required hundreds of dollars worth of tokens. But stuff like weapon skins? – That’d be realistically obtainable without breaking the bank.