Determining Chest Drop Type

Sorry for posting this because I know it has been discussed before, but the search tool is yet again not working.

Anyway, I was doing some skill capping from Ember Light Camp earlier and I took along a key for the heck of it and as we approached a chest a couple players reached it first, but announced that it was purple. I paid no attention to this because I didn't think you could tell what was in a chest until you opened it. So I used my one and only key on this chest and sure enough I received a crappy purple. They called me out as a stupid noob which I really don't care if that they did, but I did ask how they knew it was purple. They said that chests will always drop they same color of an item. So basically they've been through this part of the game enough to recall which chests are purple and which are golds.

I thought I remembered reading threads like this before and I seem to recall that the whole "chests drop same colors" thing being debunked and proven to be just a rumor. However, since this happened to me I am questioning it and wondering do certain chests only drop purples while others only drop golds??? I know this was only 1 time that I've come across this, but can anyone prove or disprove this theory? Thanks for helping clear this up.

yeah it's true.. first guy to open it is the guinee pig- rest will be the same color

Chests always drop the same color. If the first drop is purple, it will always drop purples.

What you should be careful of is the idiots that purposely carry an un-IDed crap item on them and drop it near the chest, shout "hey gold chest here" and then turn some other unfortunate party member into the guinea pig. Just make sure that when you see the drop it has an assignment underneath it.

Not so true any more. Ever since one of the earlier updates A-Net made the scam near impossible to pull off. A observant player can just look at the text box and see what colored item dropped. Gotta remember Greens, Purples and Golds will show up with their respective colors when they are dropped from a player, chest or enemy. Here is the page with the update info. Look at the text box next time.

http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Game_updates/20060502

There are two different questions and answers here.

First, as people have already said, on any "instance" (i.e. where you leave a town in a group) a chest will always drop the same colour item that it drops for the first person to open it. First drop = gold then all drops from that chest will be gold.

Secondly, if you go back into the town again, leave, re-enter the area, and a chest happens to spawn in the same place as the previous instance, then its gold/purpleness is reset, and you will not know what colour items it contains until the first person has opened it again.

I hope this clarifies it for you.

So if I'm understanding you all correctly then when I enter a new instance of the game then no matter where the chest is in that instance the first one that is opened determines the color of all the remaining chests that exist in that instance?

When I opened that purple chest last night and it was announced it was a purple before I opened it then someone must have already opened a chest before me. I thought that was the first chest our group came across so that is the thing that is confusing me, but apparently someone had to have opened one before that and I just missed it in the chat window or something.

Also, I have one other question. Let's say I'm in a new instance of the game and I am the first to open a chest and its purple. Then the group zones to another area so are chests in that new area still purple or does the chest color thing reset when you zone? Thanks for all your help.

generally some chests do drop more purple then golds..this isnt to say they wont drop golds at some point (at the begining of forest in FoW a chest spawns and in my experiance its 9 in 10 times purple)

ember camp chests mainly drops purples and aint worth the cost of the keys

Everytime you zone, theres a new spawn, because the area is re-loaded.
If you zone and go back to the same chest and its purple again, it just means it spawned purple again and your unlucky.

Still not quite right. An instance can contain both gold and purple chests. The first opening of each chest determines the colour of that chest only. The next chest you move to, be it in that area or on another part of the map can be either gold or purple, and again its colour will be determined by the first person to open it. Once you leave an area and return to it though, all the chests are reset to random, and you will not know what colour a chest will be until it is opened by the first person even if it spawns in exactly the same location as it did on the previous occasion.

You are right in saying that someone else must have opened the chest before you did though and that you did not notice. The rest of the group had already seen that it was a purple drop which is why they told you not to open it. As far as I know (and I am 99.9% sure about this) there is no way of knowing what colour a chest will drop before the first person opens it.

If there was a way of knowing before it was opened, it would make chest farming somewhat easy! I have been in a group though, were someone guessed rightly what each chest would be in advance and he managed to get five or six right in a row LOL.. Some of the group were convinced he knew some secret method, but when he finally guessed wrong, he admitted that he had just been making lucky guesses LOL

Hope this helps :-)

I was doing a chest run in FoW and 6 of us got golds while the other 1 got a purple He swore more than a trooper afterwards So its not a dead cert your get a gold if everyone else does

MY point was that unwitty players can still be tricked. But yes, this does make it easier.

This is either 1 of 3 things:

1) An outright lie to confuse the thread for your own enjoyment

2) A mistake by your team, like him lying about what he got and nonoe of ya'll watched chat to check him

3) A weird, rare glitch happened to yall.

I have the Adept Hunter title, and opened far too many chests to count before the titled started counting them, and this glitch has never happened for anyone in my parties.

Ok, I think there is one fact that the OP does not know yet.

Each chest does not contain just one item. It contains an item for each member in the party. The first to open a particular chest finds out the color of all of the items in that chest. When the first person opens the chest, if the item received is purple, generally nobody else bothers. If the item is gold, then everybody goes over and uses their key. The color of the drop is for that chest only, and as stated earlier, if you rezone and a chest appears in the same spot, someone has to open it to determine if it drops gold, purple, or whatever. The drops of the same color rule only applies to each individual chest.

So, OP, everyone can use their key on the same chest. I think that is the fact that you were missing for this thread to make sense for you.

Again, thanks for everyone's input. This has really helped to clear this up and especially this statement really seals the deal for me and know I think I fully understand.

Before this I thought that only one person could open a chest. I guess the one thing that doesn't make sense now is that I recall quite a while back playing a mission/quest and another player and I ran to open a chest and the other player got to it first. When I tried to open it there was a message stating that the chest had already been opened. I think this was in the desert somewhere, but I'm not sure. Anyway, that's neither here nor there now so at least I pretty much know how chests work now.

Thanks all.

That message probably said that the chest was being opened by another player. You cannot open a chest while it is being used by someone else. Once the item has dropped for them, you can then open it. And the color that dropped for them will be the same for you. When you get to the next chest in the same zone, its color will not necessarily match the first chest already opened.

There are a few chests (like at the quest rewards in FoW) that can only be opened once, but you don't need a key for these.