Guild Wars 2

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-September-15-2015

You can only get a key from low level PS once a week now. Otoh keys drop more in the world (enough more to make up for it? We’ll see).

I wonder what it is, cause I only seen 1, maybe 2 key drops before, and i killed a ton of enemy, more so when farming in a couple area. I done some key farming too, and a little sad, but I can understand the limit. I wonder if Tuesday is the week start, and what item replaces the key, or you just get 3 then.

Good, I’d much rather have a chance at getting keys from doing content I enjoy than mindlessly grinding the same story instance.

Seems like an awesome change to me. Key farming was never intended, keys are supposed to be a major contribution to their gem store sales, but were being significantly undermined by key farming.

Hopefully with the restrictions in place they can increase the drop rates in the chests now so people will buy keys again.

Heh I had expected something like this to happen 3 years ago when I sent in a support ticket asking if key farming was seen as an exploit and warned it could become negative for their wallet in the long run. We will see I guess. I can’t even read the info yet as the forums/game are running slow right now…

Edit:

Hmm once per week account wide – watch those skin prices skyrocket guys and those chests to drop back down to 2 copper like the old days…

The funny thing is, chest drop seem like it was already high, as I get a lot of them, and sold a bunch too. Though during the sale due to bundles i bought at least 15 keys, but since i see key as a lottery ticket, i never buy them normally. Though I guess we wait and see the drop rate.

Now I’ll be able to keyfarm! Once a week is not too tedious.

I feel for the new players though, who will either have to space their stories one week apart or not get the keys.

I’m interested to see the change…I have had maybe 3-5 keys drop in open world content since head start…lol.

Never did key farming…but bought a few when they would go on sale…so I have a TON of chests(and I seem to get 1-4 more every time I do world-boss events)…so getting keys at least a little more often would be greatly welcomed.

But lets be real…I ain’t holding my breath…i’ll probably still get more keys if i started farming 1/week on PS…lol

I don’t keyfarm enough to affected by this but it’s still unpleasant. If Anet want people to buy Black Lions Keys instead of spending time on alternatives, make buying them worthwhile instead of packing the chests full of garbage like boosters or, worse, booster dust.

LOL.

“Increased the drop rate of Black Lion Chests and Black Lion Chest Keys throughout the world.”

You do realize that +0.00000000000001% is technically an increase right?

Garambola.2461:

Now I’ll be able to keyfarm! Once a week is not too tedious.

I feel for the new players though, who will either have to space their stories one week apart or not get the keys.

I can’t see it effect anyone, seeing how it removing key from the level 10 story completion rewards if you try ti do it more then one a week, or you mean on multi characters at the same time?

I gues the number of people protesting key prices and the number needed to get a skin by doing an end run around the gem store finally started biting into ANet’s finances. It will be interesting to see if there is an impact on the initial prices of black lion skins. Right now they start off at ~100 gold.

Paulytnz.7619:

Heh I had expected something like this to happen 3 years ago when I sent in a support ticket asking if key farming was seen as an exploit and warned it could become negative for their wallet in the long run.

This is why we can’t have nice things..:(

Just kidding…:)

Well i sure saw this one coming only surprise is that it didn’t happen sooner. I mean they could have do that from start instead of adding all those limits and requirements to story missions XD

Its even better this way at least now i can finally use that char slot for additional bank char instead of boring mindless farming of which i was slowly getting sick.

Neural.1824:

LOL.

“Increased the drop rate of Black Lion Chests and Black Lion Chest Keys throughout the world.”

You do realize that +0.00000000000001% is technically an increase right?

^^^ This

I have over 4k hours on my account and have been here since head start. Want to know how many keys I have got from actual drops? 2 Total. How many chests? Probably 5+ stacks.

I expect to get just as many keys as I have in the past from actual drops. Nothing will change here except we will get a TON more chests and it wont even be worth selling them again.

I think this game just became slightly more lottery to win perhaps? I agree with whoever it was who said if they want to sell keys more often to either lower their cost or make the rewards more worthwhile.

annoyed

Granted, I don’t key farm much (or even often), but I do make lots of legitimate characters. Now, if I want their lvl 10 key, I have to make sure I stagger doing their start stories to one a week? Feels like bigkitten What next, I can only do one lvl 30 story step per week?

I get that they want to reduce / limit key farming via rerolling characters, but this just feels a tad bit drastic.

When the game first launched, I was finding probably 1-3 keys per week just from killing things. Ever since around the first Halloween (when they really started adding more things to black lion chests) I stopped seeing key drops completely. I literally don’t think I had a single key drop since before the first Halloween. So making them drop at least a little bit more again sounds awesome, even if I don’t get 1-3 per week :P

Limiting personal story keys seems fine, to reduce farming, but one per week just seems overboard. I don’t key farm though, so it shouldn’t mess with me too much (if at all).

A new account could easily make a character a day and play them up through level 10. So you are going to short these players keys?

Wouldn’t it be better to flag accounts for a maximum of 66 (current max number of character slots) keys from the level 10 story?

Discounting deletions this seems like a less confusing solution as most people won’t hit the limit and could be warned when they do.

Thorfinnr Sleggja.1209:

Paulytnz.7619:

Heh I had expected something like this to happen 3 years ago when I sent in a support ticket asking if key farming was seen as an exploit and warned it could become negative for their wallet in the long run.

This is why we can’t have nice things..:(

Just kidding…:)

Well tbh I think I was one of the first people to actually discover Key farming. And as it stood it was about the time people were getting perm bans for other things so I was worried about it. Had to send in a ticket to find out. I still have their reply. I guess all I can say is we are lucky we have had it for so long until now. Always look at the bright side and all that huh? :P

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Seems like an awesome change to me. Key farming was never intended, keys are supposed to be a major contribution to their gem store sales, but were being significantly undermined by key farming.

Hopefully with the restrictions in place they can increase the drop rates in the chests now so people will buy keys again.

Not a chance I’m going to open up my wallet to buy keys and foolishly gamble for pixel items in a video game. The whales will continue to buy, and the rest of us will use gold>tp>skin.

A better idea would be to actually start producing items players want, great sales (not like the lackluster one we had), and bringing items back players have been throwing money at their screen for.

TJgalon.5012:

Garambola.2461:

I feel for the new players though, who will either have to space their stories one week apart or not get the keys.

I can’t see it effect anyone, seeing how it removing key from the level 10 story completion rewards if you try ti do it more then one a week, or you mean on multi characters at the same time?

I do mean those who have just bought the game, have five character slots and want to play more than one of them immediately.

I’ve never key-farmed deliberately, so have no problem with this, though I think there should be an exemption for the first character created in a given slot. Missing out on something you would have otherwise received when creating a new character would be a bummer.

Maybe this was needed to prevent new accounts that were just for key farming – although I dont see any way it will prevent people from having 15-20 new free accounts for nothing but farming keys to make up for the change.

I know they will lose money from me as I usually bought keys just to make up the one or 2 needed for a set of 10 after key farming 8 or 9.

So, frankly, kind of a dumb change

I hope that Arenanet has implemented some in-game warning system for people who do not read the forums, or simply don’t keep track of time that well. If someone does their first key mission on character 1 and is also playing character 2’s story at the same rate and gets to character 2’s key mission two days later, are they simply going to get no key in their mission loot?

I hope that they would be given a warning prompt when starting the mission- “You have already received your weekly Black Lion Key reward for the level 10 story. You must wait until 17:00PST on September 22 to complete this story instance if you wish to receive this reward upon completion.” Or even hold the key and mail it to them the next week.

if you’ve been hording chests, id sell them while they are still worth some silver

NOOOOOOOOOOOO. I do one key run per day and now i’m sad. Oh well, I’ll survive lol. I just wonder what is the reset time. I guess I’ll try to do the run at the same day every week, but knowing the reset day will make sure I don’t accidently do a run without any reward.

Keys drop in the world? I’m not sure I believe that.

honestly i dont get why they do this…
at release you could get that one key within 10 to 20 min.
then some time ago they got this crappy story level cap, which I never understood. Why should you unlock the main story of a game… and it’s even more boring to play due to you just get down to pve-wise do hearts and other mapping stuff. I thought it was to hit that key farmers…
But now after so much time they again adress it??? This makes absolutely no kitten sense!!! when they dont want ppl to farm keys just move the key reward to lvl 40.
This just again hits low lvl players more than those farmers…(can you even call someone a farmer who spent so much time on relativ low reward?!?))

And – goldsellers pls stop reading!- now the game is f2p, why not make 50 accounts and log trough them if you realy want chests?
This just may increase the payback time a bit. But i even heard about ppl doing this only for daily login rewards….

Can we get rid of the kitten level caps on the PS now? It serves 0 purpose now that key farming has been effectively killed.

Atlas.4509:

Good, I’d much rather have a chance at getting keys from doing content I enjoy than mindlessly grinding the same story instance.

Well lets hope they up-ed the key drops by at least 1000% (maybe more… honestly I think keys are almost as rare as precursors…).

Well the BLTC skins are about to jump in price.

I have a feeling people may just go that extra step further and “gamble” by trying to farm keys via doing map complete for that chance at getting one. Doing this even if you fail a few times before you get a key will still be more often than one per week.

It will just mean you are gambling for the chance to gamble lol…

Tip: if you don’t have world complete on all your alts yet – now might be the time to do this!

I have a bunch of characters, once a week really is too drastic. Don’t forget the keys come at chapters 1, 4 and 6. I don’t want to bump into that limit by mistake.

Well Key are mostly dropping in map completion. Right Now I think it’s 30% chance to get a key instead of transmutation charge from map completion (except cities). Maybe it will be a higher change to get them from map outside cities. This would make map completion more appealing.

barnabas j collins.2306:

Maybe this was needed to prevent new accounts that were just for key farming – although I dont see any way it will prevent people from having 15-20 new free accounts for nothing but farming keys to make up for the change.

I know they will lose money from me as I usually bought keys just to make up the one or 2 needed for a set of 10 after key farming 8 or 9.

So, frankly, kind of a dumb change

F2P accounts could farm keys, one week at a time, but they can’t mailout/transfer by guild storage to another account the weapons skins they get from them or the gold from selling the skins. Both will be locked to that account.

after 2k hours since head start I have had one key drop from loot tables. I took it to mean I got that key instead of a precursor. stupid rng.

I have gotten multiple keys from map exploration rewards, however. it does not seem like these meet the same limitation from the personal story rewards.

If they drop even half as often as the chests do, I will be very, very happy.

HidingCat.4037:

I have a bunch of characters, once a week really is too drastic. Don’t forget the keys come at chapters 1, 4 and 6. I don’t want to bump into that limit by mistake.

They specifically said the level 10 story only. So you should be fine at the other levels. Just don’t do more than 1 char per week for the lvl 10 story. Doing 1 char at lvl 10 should NOT effect doing any of the other levels for PS. Unless they bugged it some how.

Seriously, "Quo vadis", arena.net?

First, you gave us few days a go THE WORST "FARM"(<put here as much irony as you can>) EVENT since game launch, now You remove key drops in again THE WORST way. And don’t try to whiten it with "we just add "more"(<copy previous irony here>) % drop in open world content". Yeaaaaaah, like it change something. I had 1 key per two years, now I get one per year?

Are you kidding me?

Fine, then I’ll vote for changes with my wallet. Better in-game content = money. More crap like recently = no broken cent.

cadmiumgreen.8712:

Keys drop in the world? I’m not sure I believe that.

They do. I think I’ve gotten 2 in my 3 years being here… so, they are on par with precursor drop rates. lol

Seriously !?

Comme on, I have about 600 tomes , i only play pvp and i can’t buy skins because we don’t get much money in pvp … but i still could make keys to get black lion chests and get some skins like that.

NOPE NERF !

Can we at least exange 30 tomes for one key ? Because leveling up in pvp just makes no sense, i start lvl 80 anyway . It was the only pve junk i could make use of spending once a weak one or 2 hours to make some keys. (Tomes now = Bloodstone dust —→ Trashbin ! )

Maybe my luck will increase then….

Since i only seem to get keys and not precursors. Had around 4 keys drop from the Aether Retreat fractal alone.

Really?!?…after the worst event in the history of GW1 & 2, then follow by the worst anniversay sale and now you go do this? I have spent a lot of money after introducing my son to this game and buying everything he needed. I feel like you have just slapped every veterans in the game. I personally can’t wait till another game is release and both of us can abandon this sinking ship. I’m so disappointed in Anet.

Paulytnz.7619:

I have a feeling people may just go that extra step further and “gamble” by trying to farm keys via doing map complete for that chance at getting one. Doing this even if you fail a few times before you get a key will still be more often than one per week.

It will just mean you are gambling for the chance to gamble lol…

Tip: if you don’t have world complete on all your alts yet – now might be the time to do this!

I have bought a lot of keys. At least bought a set of 25 eight times. After seeing the results, I’d rather get a transmutation charge than a black lion chest key from maps. They are really pushing those boosters and account bound minis- I won’t buy another key until they take the bird minis out.

They can simply move the keys to higher level story rewards, instead of punishing those who legit want to level multiple new characters in a week.

Okay, apart from the obvious, why is key farming such an issue?? Even when I have participated in such a tedious, boring task as this, the drop rate of ticket scraps, or indeed ANYTHING remotely good from the chest I open makes it completely not worth it. But for those who enjoyed doing this, I just don’t understand the harm?

Secondly, this impacts me more, because my enjoyable thing to do in GW2 is make alternate characters, and yes, I want my key please for completing chapter 1 of personal story, I don’t want to just not get a reward! I know, I know, you do it a week later, or stop complaining about it, but there are 3 questions here from me:

1) Why, honestly (aside from Anet wallet issues) is this such a big issue they have to restrict honest players’ enjoyment?
2) What WILL the reward be, if you did do more than one personal story in a week
3) WHAT IS THE DROP RATE INCREASE OF BLACK LION KEYS?

… and please make the rewards in the chests more rewarding. Maybe then, people will buy keys.

Ok, I have been playing since beta, I’ve had twice as many precursors drop (2) as I’ve had keys drop (1). The only key I’ve ever had drop was during the first week of the game coming out.

I couldn’t really care less about keys. The chests only contain junk anyway. But anyone who thinks that replacing something guaranteed for a chance at that thing is somehow better, it isn’t.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Seems like an awesome change to me. Key farming was never intended, keys are supposed to be a major contribution to their gem store sales, but were being significantly undermined by key farming.

Hopefully with the restrictions in place they can increase the drop rates in the chests now so people will buy keys again.

Every time they discount the price of keys, the gold:gem exchange rate jumps — I think that’s evidence that plenty of people buy keys already.

I can see why this might benefit ANet a little; I have trouble seeing it as an “awesome” change for the community as a whole (I say this as someone who only farms key when otherwise killing time in GW2 and usually while watching a movie, i.e. I won’t miss the it.)

Tapioca.9062:

I don’t keyfarm enough to affected by this but it’s still unpleasant. If Anet want people to buy Black Lions Keys instead of spending time on alternatives, make buying them worthwhile instead of packing the chests full of garbage like boosters or, worse, booster dust.

I can agree to this in some ways.
When I was leveling my characters, back in the old days, I rarely looked towards a booster for any leveling help. So key and chest purchases were slim to none.

The game itself already provides quite a bit with the foods and other buffs given.
However as I started getting more of my characters to 80, there wasn’t a need for boosts that much anyways. Now due to the rewards system we have in place, I have too many of these blasted things.

So how does having boosters in the BLC help anything, aside from padding the rewards roll with stuff I don’t want nor need as I open the chest?

If they gated it to once a day, like they do with ascended item crafts, quartz creation, etc I’d be okay with it. However a week? That’s a bit overkill really.

This nerf is most likely because of F2P, and in lesser extent the free HOT character slot. Before, players were forced to have one vacant slot and with F2P accounts anyone can do it if they want which the metrics probably showed.

If the last Modrem event is any indication how ANet values Gems vs. played time the keys were too profitable even by going the slow way through hearting to level 10. Really a shame though since keyfarming was the only way to exchange the Tomes of knowledge to something useful and now they are just another worthless “currency” ANet for some reason like to stack on us as rewards.

It will be interesting to see what this does to BLTC skins that are already a rare sight to see. Doubt the sells for keys will change much since the previous keyfarmers now feel cheated on something that’s been in the game for 3 years and also all too well knows the odds of getting something worthwhile from the chests.

Sigh…another change i dont like. I feel the focus in the game is totally off. If the keys are so badly sold you have to adress the issue why. I can come up with one good reason why keys get sold so badly and this is the reason why i dont personally wanna buy them. Too much junk from the chests. The droprate on the goodies are too low. Why would anyone want to buy a key which will result in boring boosters and boring common minipets? Have you even looked at the droprate of these items from the chests? If a person gets a choice of buying an item which grants 100% that item or an item that has 0.0001% of granting the item you want, which item do you think people will choose to buy? The keys never had a chance on tp in its shape it has now…And you dont realise it…Instead we get these changes which WONT increase the buying of keys. Only the first weeks you will see an increase and when people see how low droprate it has of the goodies no one will buy them eventually. Its a shame it will affect the skins in game now tho. The prices will skyrocket on tp and personally, the upcoming skins need to be superspecial and superamazing for me to even consider buying from tp. Only superamzing skins up to this date, imo, would be the chaos skins. So you have alot of work to do now to make people buy the keys from tp, as in, you have to spend alot more hard work into creating superduper weapon skins.