Guild Wars 2

I have noticed with interest all the adverts around the purchase of Black Lion Keys, which currently cost 82 Gold for 450 gems to buy 5. The adverts indicate Black Lion Claim Tickets for new skins, new mail delivery items and other wonderful gifts. Firstly, I have to purchase these keys, so its not a freebee, and I would expect something decent once in a while. If you look at my records, I have probably purchased over 100 in the last few months, and to say I’m disappointed would be an understatement. Let me list a few of the items I have: 14 Black Lion Salvage Kits (now almost useless due to the low drops of exotics). 14 celebration boosters, 81 boost enchantment powder (you have to sacrifice a boost to use one anyway). 23 Teleport to friend (never used 1 yet). Today I got 3 blue dyes and one miniature which I have received at least 10 times already. Please Devs, I understand the object is to make money (and I do spend from time to time) but is contents are really terrible for vets that spend hours farming for little reward. It might be an idea to reward people for their purchases according to your exciting headers and prospects of actually getting something decent.

Unfortunately this will not change. The people who buy keys and finally learn not to will always be replaced by new players who have no idea how dismal the outcomes are.

This is how the gambling item works in every game. Its unfortunate…

I have always been a fan of rng lockboxes. The TSW ones for example are excellent. I have never not had anything useful from them.

The GW2 ones are very much stacked against you however. There is no reason for a weapon to cost 5 tickets and have such an low drop rate for scraps/tickets. Even when they improved the drop rate, it’s still not high enough imo.

What’s worse is when you have a BL chest, open it, get a specific dye pack, then get a common dye out of it… RNG stacked behind RNG is poor standards imo.

I’m surprised it’s been so long since the last sale on keys. I guess they’re waiting for HoT when they can add items exclusive to the chests.

Hannelore.8153:

This is how the gambling item works in every game. Its unfortunate…

Not every game. CoH did it right. Yes, people complained about the idea at first, but when it when live a lot of people quickly discovered that the “minor” items we got were still good and useful.

Part of the problem is that GW2 is designed to have next to nothing that’s actually useful in the gem store that they could put into the chests. So, most of it is just “fluff” that nobody would actually pay for directly.

They need to seriously rethink the chests and come up with some new stuff to put into them. They also need to rethink the weapon skin tickets, because that’s a sick joke to expect people to pay for.

If you buy the right exotics from the tp, you can easily make 25g profit per black lion salvage kit, 50g if you know the market, 75g if you use the globs of dark matter you will get to craft ascended insignias/inscriptions.

If people could resist the gambling, maybe ArenaNet would break down and just start selling the stuff. But, alas, the lure is too strong.

If you think the boxes here are bad, you should see how Champions Online does them. Not that the ones here aren’t horrible.

It is still better than what you use to get out of them.
1. A salvage kit, a merchant of some kind or a boost (a crafting one usually),
2. stupid tonic,
3. and a heavy bag of coins which never gave more than a few silve (got one that gave me 8 copper once).

Julie Yann.5379:

3. and a heavy bag of coins which never gave more than a few silve (got one that gave me 8 copper once).

Should have kept that bag of coins. It got quite heavy.

Wanze.8410:

Julie Yann.5379:

3. and a heavy bag of coins which never gave more than a few silve (got one that gave me 8 copper once).

Should have kept that bag of coins. It got quite heavy.

What is so special about them that people are willing to pay that much for them? The max they will ever give are 1.5 gold

Julie Yann.5379:

Wanze.8410:

Julie Yann.5379:

3. and a heavy bag of coins which never gave more than a few silve (got one that gave me 8 copper once).

Should have kept that bag of coins. It got quite heavy.

What is so special about them that people are willing to pay that much for them? The max they will ever give are 1.5 gold

Nothing special, you just wait until someone else comes around who is willing to pay more gold than you did for it.

/shrug

The chests are a sampler of odds and ends. They’ve always been a sampler. They added some extra stuff like scraps, minis, nodes, but you should base your willingness to buy on what you are likely to get, which is a booster, some gem store item, maybe the scrap every few chests. If that’s not worth your money/gold then it’s not worth buying unless you want to open them because you enjoy gambling.

Imo, the only real way to make them work is to do key runs. Get them for “free” and let the rare rewards arrive from opening large numbers of chests over time.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

/shrug

The chests are a sampler of odds and ends. They’ve always been a sampler. They added some extra stuff like scraps, minis, nodes, but you should base your willingness to buy on what you are likely to get, which is a booster, some gem store item, maybe the scrap every few chests. If that’s not worth your money/gold then it’s not worth buying unless you want to open them because you enjoy gambling.

Imo, the only real way to make them work is to do key runs. Get them for “free” and let the rare rewards arrive from opening large numbers of chests over time.

The problem is, the samples are samples of … well, junk. Or rather, too much of it is junk.

Hummm, what if they added in a button on each common/uncommon item that allowed you to accept karma instead of the item? Say, the cost in gems x 10? Karma’s always useful, right? It would keep people from getting only “useless” items in a chest, and might make people happier.

Black Lion Chests are there to exploit a segment of the population that likes to gamble. And I’m not necessarily using exploit in a negative term here, though certainly it can be construed that way.

There are people out there who love to “take a flutter” as we say downunder. There’s a guy in my guild who buys keys every single month. I don’t know how many. I mean he’s single and he’s working and he’s happy, so who am I to judge?

The thing I like about them is that there’s nothing in them I need to play the game. They can be easily ignored. After all, I already have enough weapon skins to choke a dinosaur.

If you work out the average costs for black lion tickets and how much weapons usually sell for, its usually cheaper to get keys and open chests to get the tickets provided you get the weapon sets when they’re at 1 ticket each. You’ll lose money if you get them after they go up to 5 tickets. For those of us going for full wardrobe, this ends up being a slightly more economical way of getting them. Gets a lot better when there’s a key sale but we haven’t had one in a while.

I used 3 keys the other day. I got 1 scrap, 1 full ticket, a parrot delivery consumable, 2 teleport to friend and 2 boosters and i don’t remember what else but not anything significant. Its the first time i’ve used keys in probably about 2 months. I got these keys from mapping too. For some reason those ones give me better loot than key farming ones.

BL Chests are like playing a lotto:

• The house always wins.
• The reward is the excitement from opening the chests, not the contents.
• The excitement is maximized by having a tiny chance of big prizes, a small chance of medium prizes.

Like any lottery, the vast majority of people get mere tokens and a tiny few get something to write home about. State-sponsored lottos typically return 50% of their costs as rewards, e.g. if a million people pay 1 gold, then maybe one person gets a grand prize of 400k and 20% get 0.5g, while the other ~80% get nothing. In contrast, the average value of the BL keys seems to be a bit better than 50% of their bulk-discount costs, depending on how the “winners” monetize their “earnings”.

NCSoft Aion has the “Black Cloud Marketplace” — sound familiar?
They also have a “Power Lockbox” – yes, it’s the same as the Black Lion Chest, exactly the same.
http://store.aiononline.com/store/item?goodsNo=6411042
The only difference is that this lockbox only gives you one selection instead of 3 but they function the same. It’s an expensive gambling ring that provides no perceivable benefit to the gambler but still takes his real money.
Also, the Black Cloud Marketplace is something Anet should be doing instead of this limited time kitty litter stuff that you can only buy through their limited interface capabilities – or just get a proper professional web team to handle the black lion storefront.

MarkBecks.6453:

It might be an idea to reward people for their purchases according to your exciting headers and prospects of actually getting something decent.

The Black Lion Chests are a scam-like lottery system that proves how ArenaNet is willing to make something they know is bad for their players as long as it leads to better profits.

The honest approach would be to sell things in the Gem Store directly, like they do with outfits and some other things. But the Black Lion Chests have been designed to be as inconvenient as possible, so people are easily fooled into buying a lot of them only to realize that the great majority of time it will only lead to frustration.

Your best bet is to never buy them again, tell everyone you know to not buy them, and not buy gems until ArenaNet removes this system from the game store. If they are willing to frustrate you to make a profit, do they really deserve your money?

I just want more tickets/scraps. The amount it costs to get a full ticket is ridonkulous.

Test.8734:

The Black Lion Chests are a scam-like lottery system that proves how ArenaNet is willing to make something they know is bad for their players as long as it leads to better profits.

The honest approach would be to sell things in the Gem Store directly, like they do with outfits and some other things. But the Black Lion Chests have been designed to be as inconvenient as possible, so people are easily fooled into buying a lot of them only to realize that the great majority of time it will only lead to frustration.

Your best bet is to never buy them again, tell everyone you know to not buy them, and not buy gems until ArenaNet removes this system from the game store. If they are willing to frustrate you to make a profit, do they really deserve your money?

The point of lotto is the anticipation, not the reward. By your definition, every lottery and every gambling house in the history of the universe is a ‘scam’ — none of them offer long-term rewards commensurate with your investment. The house always wins, and makes no secret of it.

It’s fine to not like the system. It’s fine even to ask others to stop buying keys (if they, too, don’t like the system). But it’s not a "scam’ — it’s a lottery.

Players need to realize that the Black Lion Chest is primarily sold as gem store sampler first with a “chance for a new car” tickets a distant second.

Also never ever attempt to justify altering the cost of gems simply because the gold to gem rate means it’ll cost X gold to get. 450 gems cost $5.63€/£4.79 and have cost that since launch.

Also it’s mostly true that it is cheaper to buy the skin for gold than spend the gold converted to gems on keys or if you are spending cash, converting cash bought gems into gold.

Only key farmers who are willing to spend the time can make skin mining profitable.

Hmmm I get all my keys for free so I don’t really care what comes out. The boosters would probably be more highly valued if the things they boosted actually mattered. I mean if GW2 was one of those games where it takes you a week to get 1% exp at high levels and dying once will erase that 1%(or more!) then the exp booster would certainly look a lot more appealing. Karma booster would be more appealing if there was actually a variety of things to spend it on. As it is right now the only use is getting some cheap berserker armor and putting in some upgrades you don’t care about losing. Combat boosters? Game is easy enough none of them really feels like they do anything.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Test.8734:

The Black Lion Chests are a scam-like lottery system that proves how ArenaNet is willing to make something they know is bad for their players as long as it leads to better profits.

The honest approach would be to sell things in the Gem Store directly, like they do with outfits and some other things. But the Black Lion Chests have been designed to be as inconvenient as possible, so people are easily fooled into buying a lot of them only to realize that the great majority of time it will only lead to frustration.

Your best bet is to never buy them again, tell everyone you know to not buy them, and not buy gems until ArenaNet removes this system from the game store. If they are willing to frustrate you to make a profit, do they really deserve your money?

The point of lotto is the anticipation, not the reward. By your definition, every lottery and every gambling house in the history of the universe is a ‘scam’ — none of them offer long-term rewards commensurate with your investment. The house always wins, and makes no secret of it.

It’s fine to not like the system. It’s fine even to ask others to stop buying keys (if they, too, don’t like the system). But it’s not a "scam’ — it’s a lottery.

Most lotteries, that I am aware of, list their odds. Telling people up front that they are going to lose goes a long way toward making lotteries not a scam (even if they are not a good expenditure).