Nevermind.
This started from the idea of trying to remove the grind of these titles, but without any good ideas on what the replace that with. The actual suggestions presented would just have made these titles more easily purchasble without adding any other substance to them and so would wreck the existing "value" that people have associated with them. That just trivializes the titles and isn't really an improvement. The responses are overwhelmingly against that, and I understand why.
While there might once have been some merit in suggesting to replace the grind with some other form of gameplay, that time is probably long past given how well established these titles are now. Even if anyone had any actual good ideas for such changes, those would probably be drastic and very unlikely to happen at this point anyway.
I retract these suggestions and I don't have any better alternatives to suggest here. I would be fine if this thread gets closed or otherwise left to be ignored since I don't think there's anything else useful to be discussed.
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With the recent changes to the LDoA and Drunkard titles, ArenaNet seems to indicate that they want players to be able to achieve titles through normal reasonable gameplay (instead of excessive things like death-leveling enemies or keeping a character drunk for 166 hours).
Should they now take a look at the Treasure Hunter title?
In normal gameplay (vanquishes, dungeons, etc) my best estimate is that a player might encounter 5 chests per hour on average. That means it would take 2000 hours of such normal PvE gameplay to max Treasure Hunter. Now I'm sure there are many people who have put that much time into the game over its entire lifetime, and I know there are some who have put two or three times as much in. But 2000 hours is still rather huge. Furthermore, some players would have invested significant amounts of time into this game before Treasure Hunter was ever a title worth pursuing, or even before the title existed at all.
So to achieve max Treasure Hunter in a shorter amount of time, the only real option is chest running. With the rates noted on the wiki and elsewhere, one can expect to get 1 chest per minute at best. That means 10000 minutes of only chest running. If a player spends 1 hour of nothing except running chests every single day, it would take around 5 and a half months to max the title. I think that would be incredibly tedious and an absurd timesink.
Since ArenaNet has indicated that they don't want players spending 10000 minutes drunk to achieve Drunkard, would it also be reasonable that players shouldn't need to spend 10000 minutes running chests to achieve Treasure Hunter?
And of course this affects three other titles as well: Wisdom, Lucky, and Unlucky. About the only reasonable way to acquire enough points for these other titles is along with Treasure Hunter.
Suggestions
A) Create a small instance with either typical PvE gameplay or perhaps a new minigame/challenge. It would be short enough to take only around 3 to 6 minutes of time and would have a guaranteed reward of something like 20 to 40 chests to open. I don't have ideas on what the exact details of this gameplay would be. But the point is to provide something with a much larger chests per minute rate than we currently have.
B) Forget trying to tie it to gameplay. Just make a small explorable instance with 20 or 30 chests that players can enter at will. This would make it tremendously faster to get points, as long as one can afford keys/lockpicks.
Note: If it seems reasonable, either of these ideas could be modified to have certain restrictions such as requiring a player to have first reached level 20, completed EotN, achieved rank 1 Treasure Hunter, etc.
Objections
Wouldn't this kill the market for upgrades/tomes/whatever?
Most upgrades and normal tomes are already extremely cheap. The only real concern would be with elite tomes, rare materials, rare skins, and a few runes. If those are really worth worrying about, then these ideas could be modified so that the chests only drop common skins or at least drop anything interesting much less often than other chests in the game.
Wouldn't this allow more people to get the titles than would have otherwise?
I'm not suggesting any changes to the monetary cost of the title. It would still require purchasing all those keys or lockpicks. And chest loot could still be just as low valued as today. This would only affect how much time it requires people to invest. So yes, some additional people who wouldn't have tried otherwise would now probably go for these titles. But they still have to be able to afford the total cost of it.
But what about the people who achieved these titles the hard way?
Well, they can still have the personal satisfaction of knowing they did it the hard way, just like anyone who achieved max Survivor or Drunkard before the changes to those titles.
Haven't they changed enough titles? Can't you be happy?
No
I think chest running is a poor form of "gameplay". And while it might be fine in moderation, 166 hours of it is far too much.TL;DR
Treasure Hunter and related titles are just as much of a timesink as Drunkard was previously. Make a faster way somehow.
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EDIT:
Fair enough if you don't like the original two suggestions. On second thought they do go a bit far towards just being able to buy the titles outright.
In that case, my question is: do you think these titles should at least be changed in some way that remove/reduce the need for straight grind and replace it with some other kind of more "reasonable" gameplay? I'm fine with players having to put in effort for a title (examples like Guardian, Vanquisher, Skill Hunter, and even Cartographer). I'm just not so keen on the idea that the way to achieve Treasure Hunter and such in anything less than several years of normal gameplay would be excessive grinding at chest running.
Given the responses, some people would say no to this too because apparently the "value" of this title is the "prestige" of having sunk so much time to get it. If that's the case then fine, it's a disagreement with the very premise this started from.
