Guild Wars 2

Vael Victus.2654:

To make this thread useful:

This sounds fun! Does anyone have a good build or race for this? I’d love to get my weapon master achievements while getting a silly key every now and then.

this thread was not MEANT to be useful….the title of the thread, Black Lion Key “Farmers” is directed at a particular group of players and then goes on to say “…‘you guys’ have reached a new low”. this is a flagrant inflammatory thread and the title/op leaves no room for constructive feedback/debate and I dont even see how/why it’s still up. “I don’t mean for this to be a complaint” and then making deragotory comments about "Black Lion Key "Farmers"" “reach(ing) a new low” and being “poor”.

To add something constructive to this thread, I would like to point out that MANY people don’t gamble or don’t want to spend gems/gold on BLKs and, therefor, key farmers are, most likely, 50%+ responsible for the price of BL weapon skins not being 300%+ the cost of what they currently sell for on the TP. Key farmers spend their time taking a gamble and when/if that gamble pays off pretty good. This, in turn, allows people to get Weapon Skins and ‘perma’ items for a somewhat reasonable price. W/o key farmers I bet fresh weapon skin sets would start at no less than 150g+. So let’s thank them for their time instead of publicly harassing them.

Thank you Key Farmers for ~50g Tormented Weapons.

I’ve found that farming black lion keys is tedious enough for me not to want to continue doing it for the sake of my bad rng (I always get junk anyway). Not only that, but the 25-30 minutes it takes me to do each run feels like the longest 25-30 minutes of my life.

It doesn’t affect my gameplay if someone else farms them, so I don’t see any problems with it.

someone mentioned minimum wage, and said that people should just spend money instead of farming the BL key.

i can only say not everyone live in a country with minimum wage. so for them farming gold/BL key is the viable way.

mtpelion.4562:

Black Lion Keys are 125 gems, or $1.56.

If you can farm 3 keys in an hour, that means you are paying yourself $4.68 per hour. Had you instead worked an hour of overtime at a minimum wage job you would have earned $10.88 for your hour and could have purchased those 3 keys with the same amount of time spent (1 hour) and had $6.20 left over to do anything you wanted with.

If people want to farm the keys, it’s really their loss.

It’s actually not a loss. People can work and do the key farm and play the game. Essentially, if they budget their time right, they can have their cake and eat it too.

Lets say that you have 3 hours to play the game after work.

You could spend those 3 hours farming dungeons, doing dailies, WvW, fractals, w.e, or you could cut one of those hours into key farming time, do dailies, and do a couple dungeon runs or WvW or w.e it is you want.

But the free keys you are farming have a chance at claim tickets and ticket scraps. That right there is probably 90% of the reason, if not the entire reason, for key farmer’s to farm. Especially when there’s a new skin worth 1 claim ticket(like now with tormented). Once those skins get a higher price ticket-wise, they will be worth more than your one hour of work.

Go look at the Aether weapons. The shortbow is worth 350 gold. I’m not sure how many tickets are required to get one, but at one point it was worth 1 ticket. That means that one ticket that could of dropped from a chest could of been worth 350 gold, or roughly $70 dollars(current gems to gold is roughly 50.4 for 800 gems).

Which is roughly 7 hours of your job, or almost a full day of work.

The chance for a ticket to drop almost a full days worth of work in gold is the reason people farm ticket’s and ticket scraps, but its not the only reason.

We also have chances at both versions of transmute stones..
Mini packs..
Dye packs that contain 7 random dyes(which if you don’t know, all the blue rarity dyes went up 20 silver)..
And various boosters.

This is why we farm. I’m 8 our of 10 scraps away from getting a tormented weapon skin. The minute I do, its going in my bank and waiting for the prices to jump so that I can, hopefully, make well over your one hour wage pay. In the mean time, I’ll enjoy the boosters, mini’s and everything else that comes out of there for free too. 1 hour of farming a day is worth it, plus you still have time to play the game. You could do one single run a day really and it would still be worth the time imo.

I tried BLK farming for 2 hours and it was the most boring thing ever. It was so tedious that I would say more power to the BLK farmers. You probably kill brain cells just by running it twice.

How about I play the way I want, you play how you want, and stop making wild assumptions?

I keyfarm, and so does one of the guilds I help lead, and we often go together. The thing is, I also buy gems, with real money, and I buy more each month than WoW charges for a subscription. My guildies also buy gems – every one of them that keyfarms with me does. Some of them buy considerably more than I do. We just don’t spend the gems on keys. Most of us buy cosmetic items or upgrades. Recently, I bought a transfer back to Tarnished Coast, my original server. Transfers to a server like TC aren’t cheap, at all.

I also keyfarm because I enjoy it. I actually, genuinely like doing it. I find it relaxing. It paid off big time today, and I was able to buy a tormented GS skin without losing who knows how much money to RNG if I had tried to buy the keys I needed, plus I got all kinds of other neat stuff from the chests.

So. I am supporting the game, and I’m having a good time and getting items I want in the process. What’s the problem?

Some of you are running on the assumption that everyone HAS the money to actually buy keys or that there is ability to do so. Farming key doesn’t hurt IG economy, almost all items are account bound with exception of some back items and dyes (unsure if that changed since recent update). What they do is give those who do not have money to spend on keys for chests, which most of the time don’t have magnificent drop, in order to get something they want. Most of them are going for scraps which are… not that often dropped so they need HUGE amount of time to get a ticket in order to exchange for a weapon and few will sell it.

In personal experience, there is no harm in BL key farming since it has no negative effect on IG economy nor does it “rob” Anet of any profit since they already created ability to buy gems via IG gold. Why is this an issue?

shrug

Nothing wrong with key farming.

I mean really, is it any different than the people the repeatedly reroll a character and speed clear the cities for trans charges? Nope.

If that’s how they choose to spend their game time, that’s their choice. As long as Anet is ok with them playing that way (and they have said that it’s fine), then it’s nobody’s business except the player that’s doing it.

Onisuo.8607:

Does not affect me at all(maybe I should have mentioned that in my post) but I would imagine it affects Anet’s bottom line. If more players use this method I’m sure some adjustments will be made. If not, somewhere down the line it will affect me because Anet will make less money. That’s not something I want to happen.

So, you think that someone who is willing to spend 25-30 minutes doing something incredibly boring and repetitive for a single Black Lion key (and zero other progression/rewards), something so astonishing boring and repetitive that neither you nor anyone you actually, really know, can stomach doing, would simply buy the key if Anet put a stop to this?

LOL.

Seriously. LOL.

So no. No they would not buy a key. They would simply not have a key. They are getting what, $1.50’s worth per 30 minutes or so (there are some who can do it faster, but not much), and the only thing they can do, is then use the key to open a chest and get likely next-to-nothing. They’re effectively working for $3/hr.

This is a non-issue – and indeed the people who do it likely keep the game going in other ways (and I know some of them do buy gems – they just don’t spend them on keys!).

Azreell.1568:

Onisuo.8607:

So yeah, this is not a complaint or anything but this community has reached a new low by making low level characters and speed running the first personal story to completion to get black lion keys. Delete character and rinse repeat.

Either these players are extremely bored or they are so poor that they can’t spend a few bucks to buy the gems from the cash shop.

How is this effecting you enough to make a forum post about it?

You play the way you want – let others play the way they want.

I think it’s something along lines of:
“You get something I want by doing something I don’t feel like doing and yet you get rewarded for it. I don’t want you to get rewarded by doing something I don’t feel like doing myself.”

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

shrug

Nothing wrong with key farming.

I mean really, is it any different than the people the repeatedly reroll a character and speed clear the cities for trans charges? Nope.

If that’s how they choose to spend their game time, that’s their choice. As long as Anet is ok with them playing that way (and they have said that it’s fine), then it’s nobody’s business except the player that’s doing it.

Its also not different than people who run CoF P1 or any other dungeons 10000 times, or people who run in a train or do world events or harvest whatever.

I really don’t understand why some people always think that what THEY do is sooo much better than what others do.

Its maybe simply the training people got over year with all those progressive raid stuff that they simply think they are sooo much better because they get better stuff.

So maybe if your weapon gets +1 damage after every Key Run people would suddenly start to think that Key Runs are the only reak content, because they give the best reward .. lol

Beldin.5498:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

shrug

Nothing wrong with key farming.

I mean really, is it any different than the people the repeatedly reroll a character and speed clear the cities for trans charges? Nope.

If that’s how they choose to spend their game time, that’s their choice. As long as Anet is ok with them playing that way (and they have said that it’s fine), then it’s nobody’s business except the player that’s doing it.

Its also not different than people who run CoF P1 or any other dungeons 10000 times, or people who run in a train or do world events or harvest whatever.

I really don’t understand why some people always think that what THEY do is sooo much better than what others do.

Its maybe simply the training people got over year with all those progressive raid stuff that they simply think they are sooo much better because they get better stuff.

So maybe if your weapon gets +1 damage after every Key Run people would suddenly start to think that Key Runs are the only reak content, because they give the best reward .. lol

Oh I know. Someone else had already used the dungeon comparison though, so I figured I’d just go with another gem store item farm (and those are hot commodities right now).

I don’t understand people in general, and I think I’ve simply given up trying. Too many seem to be under the delusion that everyone else must do it their way, or they are (somehow) wrong. shrug

What I find interesting about this thread : If I was to make a similar thread about people who buy keys with real money and start complaining about it, I’d be immediately infracted and the thread would be deleted.

Onisuo.8607:

So yeah, this is not a complaint or anything but this community has reached a new low by making low level characters and speed running the first personal story to completion to get black lion keys. Delete character and rinse repeat.

Either these players are extremely bored or they are so poor that they can’t spend a few bucks to buy the gems from the cash shop.

Let me guess, you’re American?

Corpus Christi.2057:

Onisuo.8607:

So yeah, this is not a complaint or anything but this community has reached a new low by making low level characters and speed running the first personal story to completion to get black lion keys. Delete character and rinse repeat.

Either these players are extremely bored or they are so poor that they can’t spend a few bucks to buy the gems from the cash shop.

Let me guess, you’re American?

Don’t perpetuate the troll nature of this thread. Seriously. I see where this is going, and just don’t.

Why hasn’t this thread been closed? It’s obvious that the OP only wanted to complain and stir up trouble. Mission accomplished. So why is this still here?

Where do I start, first off I will just say…really idiotic post, what’s next “Anet too many people use greatswords”!

Now as far as farming keys, first off I do it in spurts because it’s helping me achieve a long term goal, how do you ask? Well I am working towards 7 tickets (have 3.5) to buy a particular skin that sells for hundreds of gold which I will use to put towards a precursor as this is the only sure way of ever getting one in this horribly designed rng system. Secondly, I already have an 80 of each type fully geared and I have done every piece of content I enjoy multiple times so I get bored. This leads me to the third reason, lack of new major content due to my support being thrown towards the China release which is why I will not buy any more gems or keys or anything else that will support this game until they produce more content.

So it isn’t as simple as you’ve tried to make it out and not everyone is doing so for the reasons you claim and I have to say that I know I’ve complained on several fronts but this topic reeks of troll.

Why does this thread only have three pages? An issue like this deserves at least 17,000 pages. A pox on those BL key farmers! A pox!

Hi everyone,

Since this thread doesn’t offer a constructive debate and has turned into an inflammatory discussion, we’ll now close it.

Thank you for your understanding.