Farmable BLC keys

Can we please get a more reasonable method of acquiring the keys other than purchasing them? I’ve got like 80 of the chest and hardly ever see keys and don’t want to spend money just to pen them.

@Psycoprophet.8107 said:Can we please get a more reasonable method of acquiring the keys other than purchasing them? I’ve got like 80 of the chest and hardly ever see keys and don’t want to spend money just to pen them.

Sell the chests on the TP. They're mean't to be much more common than keys.

@Psycoprophet.8107 said:Can we please get a more reasonable method of acquiring the keys other than purchasing them? I’ve got like 80 of the chest and hardly ever see keys and don’t want to spend money just to pen them.

Well, you have a guaranteed chance of getting at least 1 key per week by just leveling a new character and completing the LV 10 personal story. Some players keep an empty character slot just for this purpose. You get an additional key by completing the LV 40 and LV 60 person story missions as well, and some players use tomes of knowledge to make that happen each week.

Alternatively each time you complete a map, with the exception of capitol cities (Lions Arch, Rata Sum, etc), you get a reward which has a 20% chance of being a BL key, with an 80% chance of getting a transmutation charge.

And of course you can get them as a random drop whenever.

I think I've opened around 120-130 BL chests in the past year, and I've never purchased a key from the Gem store.

You can earn keys from the Lvl 10, 40, and 60 Personal Story steps, as well as a 20% chance per map for doing map completion.

Note: The lvl 10 reward is limited to once a week.

@Psycoprophet.8107 said:Can we please get a more reasonable method of acquiring the keys other than purchasing them? I’ve got like 80 of the chest and hardly ever see keys and don’t want to spend money just to pen them.

Keys are rare because Anet wants a majority of them to come from gems; it is one of the solid sources of income they have. If keys were farmable in volume, they'd need to find other sources of income to fun the game. For you the best option would probably be to sell the chests on the trading post, for 6-8s a piece, unless you wish to farm loads of gold and get gems from that.

@Turkeyspit.3965 said:I've never purchased a key from the Gem store.

Same. I probably open closer to 80 chests/year at best though.

BL Keys are a cash cow for ANet; they aren't likely to undermine their own income by making more of them free (especially since they went to some trouble to make them less available outside the gem shop).

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@Turkeyspit.3965 said:I've never purchased a key from the Gem store.

Makes sense. My account is only 13months old, so a lot of those keys came from map completions. I doubt I'll open as many this year.

I would also like to say that of the 120-130, I received barely a handful of uncommon drops, the most valuable / worthwhile ones being the Scarab backpack, Exalted Shoulders, a gathering glyph (cheap one) and just yesterday I got a Cavaliers Staff Skin. Had I paid actual gold/currency for those 120-130 keys, based on those results, I'd be pretty salty.

The cynical side of me suspects that keys received for free roll on different loot tables than those you purchase from the gem store, but that might be too Alex Jones even for an international online gaming company :sunglasses:

@"Turkeyspit.3965" said:The cynical side of me suspects that keys received for free roll on different loot tables than those you purchase from the gem store,It's not necessary to theorize that, because the drop rates are already super low.

Based on reviewing about 1k drops (posted by about a dozen people over the last year or so), the rate seems to be 9 uncommon and 1 rare for every 100 keys. (With no super rare drops at all in the samples.) That's little enough that it doesn't have to be different for purchased versus not: the average for someone opening only 50 chests is 5, but it also means over 3% chance of getting 0 or 1 "better than common" drops, i.e. it isn't at all surprising for some people to feel as if they aren't getting any 'good' drops from even four dozen keys or more.

@Turkeyspit.3965 said:Well, you have a guaranteed chance of getting at least 1 key per week by just leveling a new character and completing the LV 10 personal story. Some players keep an empty character slot just for this purpose.People just can't stop amazing me.. To be bothered with something like that weekly, spend a hour of their personal invaluable time for expendable character they'll delete, to get a 1.5$ item.. What mysterious beings people are :)

@MoriMoriMori.5349 said:

@Turkeyspit.3965 said:Well, you have a guaranteed chance of getting at least 1 key per week by just leveling a new character and completing the LV 10 personal story. Some players keep an empty character slot just for this purpose.People just can't stop amazing me.. To be bothered with something like that weekly, spend a hour ща their personal time for expendable character they'll delete, to get a 1.5$ item.. What are mysterious beings people are :)

People are amazing, I agree, especially with their tendency to judge other people's motives based on assumptions and theories.

I currently have 650 Tomes of Knowledge in my bank, and with roughly 5000 spirit shards in my wallet, they have no other use.It takes me about 15 minutes to get my weekly key.I'll keep my $1.50 a week, thank you very much.

Black Lion Keys did used to be more easily farmable - there was no limit on how many you could get from the level 10 story, so people would just make and delete characters over and over to get them. Also originally the story wasn't level locked - it still showed a recommended level but you could do it whenever so people would make a special set of equipment to enable them to complete it on a level 2 character, making it even faster to farm.

Restricting it to 1 key per week was a deliberate change to reduce the availability of free keys, forcing you to be level 10 was part of restructuring the personal story as a whole and not deliberately aimed at key farmers, but either way I think it's unlikely they'll make them easier to get now, even though a lot of us (me included) will never buy keys.

@Turkeyspit.3965 said:The cynical side of me suspects that keys received for free roll on different loot tables than those you purchase from the gem store, but that might be too Alex Jones even for an international online gaming company :sunglasses:

That seems unlikely, because keys purchased from the gem store stack with keys which drop in-game or from story rewards, which I think is only possible if the items are absolutely identical (and then only if stacking is enabled for those items). If they had different drop tables I think the game would consider them different items and they wouldn't stack.

Also if I was making a system like that I'd make the free keys have a slightly higher chance at the less desirable items from the rarer tables - like the returning weapon skins - so people using free keys get the impression that they've got a reasonable chance of getting something really good and narrowly missed out. That seems like it would be more effective at getting people to buy keys than only giving you the common drops.

But that's largely based on my own experience - I tend to consider opening chests with free keys a great reminder of why I'll never buy them, because if I'd paid for those drops it would be even more of a disappointment - maybe for some people getting only junk items you then need to clear out of your inventory actually acts as an incentive to try again?

@Diak Atoli.2085 said:You can earn keys from the Lvl 10, 40, and 60 Personal Story steps, as well as a 20% chance per map for doing map completion.

Note: The lvl 10 reward is limited to once a week.

do i have to play it at the level or can i play with a level 80 character when the characer has not played his personal story yet?

@Turkeyspit.3965 , even in a case like that, spending 15 minutes of your time on doing some boring repetitive task like that, for 1.5$ item, when you probably already have thousands of gold stashed as well.. Still can't stop amaze me. I wouldn't find enough motivation to do something that deprived of any fun.

@MoriMoriMori.5349 said:

@Turkeyspit.3965 said:Well, you have a guaranteed chance of getting at least 1 key per week by just leveling a new character and completing the LV 10 personal story. Some players keep an empty character slot just for this purpose.People just can't stop amazing me.. To be bothered with something like that weekly, spend a hour of their personal invaluable time for expendable character they'll delete, to get a 1.5$ item.. What mysterious beings people are :)

Or maybe some people have more time than cash.

Personally, if I have US$1.5 to spend on a lotto ticket, I'm plunking it down on PowerBall. Infinitesimal chance to be a semi-billionaire versus geometrically low chance to get 40 gold worth of value -- that's an easy choice for me.

On the other hand, if I have 15 minutes to putter around, sure, why not do a key run?(FYI even for a beginner, it takes nowhere near an hour. Even Wooden Potatoes video guide clocks in at ~22 minutes for a 16 minute farm.)

@Stalkingwolf.6035 said:

@"Diak Atoli.2085" said:You can earn keys from the Lvl 10, 40, and 60 Personal Story steps, as well as a 20% chance per map for doing map completion.

Note: The lvl 10 reward is limited to once a week.

You can still do the story even if you've leveled past the point.

[Edit] Also, I believe it's the "Tangled Paths" part of Living Story 2 that rewards one Black Lion key when you first complete it with a character. So if you have that and have any level 80 characters that haven't done it yet, there's more keys there.

@Stalkingwolf.6035 said:

@Diak Atoli.2085 said:You can earn keys from the Lvl 10, 40, and 60 Personal Story steps, as well as a 20% chance per map for doing map completion.

Note: The lvl 10 reward is limited to once a week.

You can play the personal story at level 80 if you haven't done it before. Things to be aware of if you want to do that to get Black Lion Keys are that you can only get 1 key per week from the level 10 story (it resets on Monday), so if you have multiple characters who haven't done it you'll need to space them out, and you have to play the story in order - so if you want to get the level 60 key you'll need to do the level 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 storylines in order.

@MoriMoriMori.5349 said:@Turkeyspit.3965 , even in a case like that, spending 15 minutes of your time on doing some boring repetitive task like that, for 1.5$ item, when you probably already have thousands of gold stashed as well.. Still can't stop amaze me. I wouldn't find enough motivation to do something that deprived of any fun.

For me it's a fairly simple choice. I don't ever spend real money on any type of gambling so that's not an option and I don't have thousands of gold (never have, probably never will because I can't stand farming gold). At the moment a key costs about 50g and it would take me about the same amount of time to get that as to get a key from the story (if not longer). (Plus I'm not really comfortable buying keys with gold because I assume Anet don't distinguish between the two when looking at how many they've sold.)

But most importantly I like doing the story. The vast majority of my 'key farmers' aren't true key farmers, they're characters I create to replay specific parts of the personal story, or for other reasons and then I run them through the level 10 story because I may as well. So the time required is irrelevant to me because it's not time spend farming, it's time spend playing the game in a way I enjoy and the key is pretty much a bonus.

@Palador.2170 said:

@Stalkingwolf.6035 said:

@"Diak Atoli.2085" said:You can earn keys from the Lvl 10, 40, and 60 Personal Story steps, as well as a 20% chance per map for doing map completion.

Note: The lvl 10 reward is limited to once a week.

thanks i will try this.

Ok thanks for all the tips guys,I never thought about the once a week level 10 method,not that kill be doing it much but it’s a option atleast :)

@MoriMoriMori.5349 said:

@Turkeyspit.3965 said:Well, you have a guaranteed chance of getting at least 1 key per week by just leveling a new character and completing the LV 10 personal story. Some players keep an empty character slot just for this purpose.People just can't stop amazing me.. To be bothered with something like that weekly, spend a hour of their personal invaluable time for expendable character they'll delete, to get a 1.5$ item.. What mysterious beings people are :)

I’m not counting ingame time as “personal invaluable time’ as I’m generally just messing around doing whatever. I prefer to farm keys because it doesn’t take very long and almost every time I open a chest my first thought when I see what I got is, “I’m glad I didn’t buy that key.” Even if it’s only $1.5 I’d rather farm than spend for what I usually get.

@Psycoprophet.8107 said:Can we please get a more reasonable method of acquiring the keys other than purchasing them? I’ve got like 80 of the chest and hardly ever see keys and don’t want to spend money just to pen them.

Isn't there one? Gold-->gems.What else do you want, exactly?

@Just a flesh wound.3589 said:almost every time I open a chest my first thought when I see what I got is, “I’m glad I didn’t buy that key.”I'm glad you didn't, too ;)

I like opening chests, but not enough to pay any amount of dollars for them.

@MoriMoriMori.5349 said:@Turkeyspit.3965 , even in a case like that, spending 15 minutes of your time on doing some boring repetitive task like that, for 1.5$ item, when you probably already have thousands of gold stashed as well.. Still can't stop amaze me. I wouldn't find enough motivation to do something that deprived of any fun.

I look at it differently. I have all the max level characters I want (for now), and so I have 2.5 stacks of Tomes of Knowledge sitting my bank doing nothing, having no value. Each week I take 10, sometimes 20 if I feel whimsical, and use them to create a keytoon to earn 1 BL key, in about the same amount of time as running the AB Meta.

I get a chest opened each week, get 1 statuette, as well as other garbage. I also get a bunch of T1 mats, including BUTTER, just from doing those early quests each week.

If I didn't do this, I'd have an extra 15minutes of free game time per week, and several stacks of valueless ToK. IMO my way makes much more sense.

I get maybe 2 hrs a week to play around in gw so ima prob just sell all the chest lol

@Psycoprophet.8107 said:I get maybe 2 hrs a week to play around in gw so ima prob just sell all the chest lol

In that case best to wait until they release a new chest, as the price on the TP jumps up as people mass buy to try for the new goodies.

@"Turkeyspit.3965" said:The cynical side of me suspects that keys received for free roll on different loot tables than those you purchase from the gem store, but that might be too Alex Jones even for an international online gaming company :sunglasses:

They have the same item ID and are stackable. That doesn't mean it isn't possible to implement different loot tables like that but it would take a lot more effort. More importantly it is entirely pointless to do so since it provides no benefit to ANet. In order for that sort of setup to be beneficial to ANet the potential buyer of keys have to be made aware of their differences. In fact you would want to flaunt the differences to make people aware that those are subpar/inferior/etc. keys and so they would feel like they should be buying the "real" keys instead.