Guild Wars 2

Kal Spiro.9745:

You missed the point entirely. The way to get Precursers is not designed to be BLTC at all. The fact that they are available there is completely beside the point.

Sorry what? If they were not designed to be bought and sold on the BLTC, why have they not corrected that error in the last 6 months?

That being the case, I sort of see waht you’re saying, they wanted us to get a precursor ourselves, not neccesarily buy one…

I can’t imagine a game being based around saving up money then spending it, and I also can’t imagine any game being based around chucking hundreds of items into the Mystic Forge either, so Are you saying the devs want us to drop one from mobs?

If they want us to do that, why is the drop rate so ridiculously low, and why is there literally zero information about where you should get one either in the game or outside it?

No, there does not seem to be any master plan, supporting lore or any kind of encouragement to get a Precursor in the game, just a bizzare ritual where we destroy level 78 rares over and over until we’re either bankrupt and quit the game, or get our precursor.

I don’t think they really thought about how people “should” get a Precursor at all, they were in a bit of a rush and made some really poor decisions.

That’s fine for a little while, but we’re heading towards 6 months now, and still no better way to craft a Legendary than pure luck.

krippler.9826:

RNG for such an expensive item is definitely no fun. Throwing months of work away and coming away with nothing almost makes you want to just quit the game for good.

For many people, they go right past “almost” and simply uninstall the game. I know if I’d saved up 500G or even just bought 500G worth of gems. tried for a Precursor with it and came away empty handed, the bitterness I’d have toward the game would mean I was unable to even look at it again.

This is why I will not even consider trying for a Precursor in its current form, I like the game too much to be soured against it like that.

I’ve lost count of all the dedicated, long-term players that were on my friends list and guild roster that I knew were working toward a Legendary and have just disappeared. I can only assume they got fed up with the odds being stacked against them and quit.

ZilentNight.5089:

u dont want everyone to run around with a legendary, there will be no sense of acomplishment if everyone has one.

I see this argument being asserted again and again, and it really makes me angry. It’s just not correct. I wish so many people did not hold this ridiculous viewpoint.

Did you feel a sense of accomplishment when you passed your driving test? How about when you got your high school diploma? Sure you did. Guess what, “everyone” has a driving license and graduated high school. Does that make these achievements any less worthwhile? No.

It simply just not the case that something has to be made artificially “rare” by putting it on a low drop rate for it to be “special” or give players a sense of satisfaction when they attain it. This is not logical, it is a fallacy, and I’d thank everyone to stop saying it and spreading this misinformation.

Essence Snow.3194:

Atm the jp’s are by far the most effective way of obtaining badges. I cringe at the thought of obtaining any significant amount of badges w/o the jp’s.

You cringe at the thought of actually playing WvW, the best feature of this game?

Sorry, would not work. Most botters do keep an eye on their bots when they’re running. If anything unusual happens on the screen, they just switch to monitoring that bot.

They would just answer the question, then put the bot back on to auto mode.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Which is the point. If it were easy it would negate the value of the Legendary.

No not really. I don’t think they ever intended Precursors to be the most expensive thing in the game. You have the “Gift of Fortune” which is supposed to represent earning a lot of gold, the precursor is what… Gift of SUPER fortune?

There is still the other 3 gifts you need to craft, they’re not exactly a walk in the park, even if the Precursor was taken out it would still take a long time and need a lot of effort to get the Legendary.

What you have now is the Legendary going up in price every single day, faster than anyone can earn gold, so people who crafted one early on get it for a handful of gold, but people who want to craft one now are basically priced out of the market.

If anything, it cheapens the value of a Legendary, since you know anyone who crafts one now basically had to spend a few hundred $ to get their precursor, they didn’t get it through playing the game.

I think it’s possible to make a precursor expensive without leaving it up to the Trade Post to decide how much you pay. What if they just cost 100G from a vendor?

FKwrong.9104:

why don’t you guys think about how all the other people got them? not everyone exploited MF or Southsun Cove event. Many people actually gambled for them, got them as regular drops, etc. The reason prices grow so fast is 1) last update, that makes it easier to farm T6 materials. 2) The fact itself that most of those exploited precursors have been sold and turned into actual legendaries, so the supply decreased significantly.

There was a cool exploit you could do with the godskull sword, which was a really cheap item to craft.

I think it was something like 1x level 78 + 3x lvl 65 godskull would give you a chance at a lvl 80 rare / exo.

People made hundreds and hundreds of combines using that and got quite a few precursors.

Then there was the time that Anet priced some rare weapons from the norn karma vendor at 21 karma instead of 21000, you could chuck that in the forge for more chances at precursor…

Yeah… a lot of people got them early on, now the major loopholes and exploits are fixed it’s harder, much harder. For those of us that didn’t cheat in the beginning to get rich it’s basically impossible.

Ascended backpacks from sources other than Fractals are coming in a later update apparently.

Ascended amulet, probably ’zerkers.

Going forward, we definitely have plans on the table for discussion in the near future, to at some point address the issue of starting to plan for beginning to conceptualise a mobile API.

You want compensation for missing your daily?

Wow.

One handed sword.

Lightsaber.

Looks exactly like the light saber from star wars
makes the sound
RNG chance to get a red, green or blue one.

make this happen.

Patch finished downloading for me at 23:00, leaving me with 1 hour to get my daily.

Got it in 15 minutes.

Coolface.

I’m buying one ring from fractals and one from Laurels.

I do 1 fractals run a week, it’s as much as I can stomach. I used to like Fractals but I’ve done them all now and find running them again very boring, it’s just exactly the same gameplay each time. I can force myself do one every week just for my ring without getting too bored.

I was stuck on level 7 before the new grouping thing, as nobody ever wanted to run 7, so I ended up just doing 2, 4 or 6 each week

Now I can get to 10 easily by joining people on their level 10 daily. Once I’m at 10 I’ll do 1 run of 10 every week. after 10 weeks I’ll have enough tokens to buy a ring (my luck is terrible so I will not be dropping a ring with the stats I want, of that I can assure you), and I’ll have 10 weeks worth of Laurels, so enough for my ammy and another ring.

So yeah, without Laurels there’s no way I’d be getting 2 ascended rings.

There’s a very good chance that they’ll add more ways to get laurels in the next 10 weeks as well, so more ways to earn Ascended.

Right, lets stop dancing around the elephant in the room.

Pecursors.

The best ones cost over 700 gold right now, and the price just keeps going up and up every day. Not because players are outbidding each other, but because there is only ever 1 or 2 for sale, and when one gets bought, the next one goes for sale at an even higher price.

I can’t earn gold fast enough to keep up with the price increases. By the time I’ve earned 100 gold, the price of my precursor has gone up by 110. It just gets further and further away each day. Can you stop this?

Surely this is not what was intended? To allow a small number of players to buy up every precursor on the TP and then re-list them at a much higher price, hoard them, and artificially increase the price every day? Isn’t this a form of exploit? Unfairly taking advantage of other players for personal gain?

Can we get some information on how many players are doing this? What amount of gold do these players have, how many precursors have they bought and sold total? What kind of profit margins are they making? Where is the gold they’re making going?

What is Anet going to do about this? We’ve heard some rumours about a “Scavenger Hunt”, which may or may not come out in 2013, but is “not being worked on”… OK, sounds great, but what about in the meantime? How do we get our Precursors this year? What is being worked on? Anything? Should we just give up this year?

It seems that the drop rate is lower than it ever was, nobody is getting them from the Forge any more, and very rarely we hear about someone dropping one in the “wild” from a chest. Can we have some information about what the drop rates are, what they were, what’s the best way to get a Precursor apart from buying one?

My Suggestion

Add a crafting recipe for each Precursor.

This is a simple solution, which requires no code changes or anything, just a recipe. Add it as a rare drop to a certain dungeon or chest if you like, make the mats whatever you want, 250 stacks of each T6 Mat, 9001 ectos, whatever, at least if there’s a base material cost to craft one, there will be a ceiling to how high the price can rise. Right now, we’re at the mercy of secret RNG tables which we can’t see, or a secret consortium of players with seemingly infinite gold setting the price.

This isn’t fun, I can’t win against RNG or against people with infinite money. What do you suggest?

Blueshield.6291:

ChipSet.8435:

Catisa.6507:

contrary to PvE opinion the current offering is NOT a PvE monthly, no where does it claim to be a PvE monthly.

Oh really?
Monthly (4) — repeatable PvE achievements that reset every month (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Achievement)

And for the record, the ANet team does maintain the wiki, and information on it is to be considered official.

I would take that with a large pinch of salt. For one thing, it was probably not Anet that added that particular bit of text.

Even if it were, it was not neccessarily anyone with the necessary seniority or clout to be able to say “yes, all monthlies are exclusively PvE content”

Finally, stop categorising yourself into “PvE Player” and “PvP Player”. We can all be both, what is the point of denying ourselves any part of the game out of some weird principle? It’s fine to prefer one over the other, but must you then EXCLUSIVELY play ONLY that mode? Come on man, open your horizons a little.

Harvesting is very boring though. You’re getting better “rewards” because people are prepared to pay someone else (you) to do the boring gathering part for them.

If you don’t have the time or interest to do your dailies, don’t do them? Pretty simple IMO.

Why? You want the game to be less interesting? I like using boosters to max my Karma intake.

Yeah I still can’t understand why JP chests give badges of Honor.

I mean you don’t even have to do the JP, just get a mesmer to port you up.

Dear Anet, please remove badges from JP chests.

Ouch, looks like they’ve reduced the chances of getting a precursor even more then. Used to be that 500g+ on rares would pretty much assure you of one.

Thank you for sharing your pain with us.

Anet. Please fix precursors. There is no reason for anything to cost 500G on the trade post.

What was intended as a small step on the road to a Legendary has become the whole journey. Compared with getting a Precursor, all the other stuff you need to craft one is insignificant.

RNG is a terrible way to hand out the best rewards in the game, please reconsider this as a strategy.

Erasculio.2914:

It would be nice if ArenaNet told us about how they plan to address precursors:

• 1
• 2
• 3

They have told us, the answer is none of the above. Not doing anything. Might add some more chests somewhere with a tiny chance to get one if you’re lucky, but other than that, nah.

Precursors are fine anyway, what are you complaining about? They only cost $400 in gems. It’s absolutely fine that a small number of people are controlling the market by buying them all up to relist for a higher price, as that simply makes them cost more in gems. Some would call that exploiting, but I see it as free market economics

This is pretty cut and dried by the looks of things, and quite sad.

Precursors are still going to be on a 0.0001% drop rate, they sent Lyndsey off to come up with a Powerpoint presentation on how a Scavenger Hunt might work and might go with it, but don’t expect it in the game any time in the next 2 years.

They’ll “try” to find other places to add them on a 0.0001% drop rate, but hey, looking for places to add more RNG to a game already saturated with RNG is hard, okay? Give them a kitten break, it’s not like they can just “insert” precursors into “loot tables” or “adjust” the “drop rates”. These things have to be thought about.

If analysis shows that most gems are being converted to gold, and most of that gold is being spent on the Trade Post on Precursors, why would the company self-nerf one of it’s main sources of income by making precursors more abundant and therefore cheaper? Come on now. They’ll “try”, but they won’t try that hard.

Precursors will remain at or above current prices, and gold will become harder to get than ever. You will never get one. Might as well give up or go buy some gold from the Chinese.

Skapocalypse.5236:

Also with Arrowcarts if it’s hitting more then 5 players aren’t seeing it. We see only handful of damage numbers on a few targets even when they are in big turtle balls.

I’m pretty sure it only hits one target if they are stacked on top of one another. For it to hit 50 targets they would need to be evenly spread. If they’re all stacked up on top of one another only the tallest player gets hit?

TIL that when they were designing WvW they thought battles would be at most 50 vs 50.

Cute.

BaconCatTheGreasy.9542:

Taking away keys without advance warning would be a major dick move.

Dick Move confirmed.

Other Dick Moves confirmed as part of dealing with the terrible, inexcusable tragedy of players finding a cheaper way to get an item which is for sale in the gem store:

- Disabling Lyns but NOT disabling the wrapping paper from Myani.
- Disabling Lyns but NOT disabling the Mystic forge recipe to convert your loot into now worthless commendations.
- Disabling Lyns WITHOUT disabling her shouting every 5 minutes to go get commendations.

This catastrophe has John Smith’s fingerprints all over it, it’s another of his precious junk sinks that do absolutely nothing to take out the over-supply of junk items, but annoy everyone in the process.

In actuality all that happens is people find the most efficient recipe to get the most reward from the junk sink and set out to deliberately farm it, thus increasing the junk over-supply, not reducing.

Silly billies.

It’s good that they’re being a bit more up-front with communication, but does anyone else feel the communication is a little one-way at this point?

It used to be: “This is what we’re thinking about doing, what do the players think? Give us feedback please”.

Now it’s: “This is what we’re doing, get used to it.”

He won’t ever say a date, because if he gave you an ETA and then missed it, you would never shut up about it. “Soon” is about as good as it gets.

It’s good they have priorities, if you work on everything at the same time what happens is nothing gets done.

I do agree though that sPvP is at best a beta of a game that might be finished one day. Adding a decent matchmaking and ladder system is a good start to finishing it, but they need to do a heck of a lot more than that.

At this point all of the interest from e-sport is gone, and you will never get that back. IMO they should just can sPvP altogether and focus on the far more entertaining and successful PvE and WvW game modes.

Zogyark.4597:

Get ready for the Flower king of LOVE, who will be spreading love ALL over tyria visiting a map every day, with special skins and minis available, also some store minis, a chocolate mini, flower mini, and the epic one of all a heart shaped mini! that will drop randomly at a very low chance from a chest that you can only get with gems! Coming this february from february 9-18!

I almost thought I was reading the press release there

Very well done.

Chrissle.8690:

Sorry but I have never encountered a buggy fractal. So I have no problem with new fractals.

How many have you played, 2? The two most buggy ones are the Collossus and the underwater one, but all of them have multiple bugs which can totally block progress under certain conditions.

As an easy-to-replicate example, try pressing the “Tome of Wrath” elite skill as a Guardian on the Colossus Fractal while holding the hammer. It disappears. Just striaght up disappears. You need that hammer to complete the fractal. The only option is to quit and restart.

There are many, many more.

And I have never exploited a dungeon. Why would I? That would just take away the fun of doing it.

Well you are indeed a rare and precious thing in an MMO, someone that plays for fun, not to grind out pointless “rewards” in the shortest time possible. Most people sadly aren’t like you and I.

The point is, even though you don’t want to exploit every new bit of content that comes along, they do. They will find the fastest path through any new dungeon, find the cheats and get the shiny 10 times faster than you ever could by playing “properly”. They will break the economy by amassing gold far too quickly and leave you for dust, scrabbling around for 10 gold while everyone else has hundreds because they know all the cheats.

I dont know about you but I cant be arsed logging in and doing the same stuff for half a year. I had enough of that in WoW.

This is exactly what I hoped to avoid by buying GW2. So far it’s been a mixed bag. I’ve done a lot of cool stuff and had a lot of fun, but I’m expected to do a lot of really boring stuff as well.

For example, the best weapons in the game are the Legendaries. You don’t even want to KNOW how many years you’ll be “doing the same stuff” to get one of those if you dislike cheating like I do.

Just because you dont want this doesn´t mean that everyone else thinks the same way.

True. I’m not sure how to respond to this? Should I not state my opinion because there are other people in the world who don’t have that opinion?

As it happens I would like to see new dungeons added. But not now. Anet used to be famous for “When it’s ready”. Now it seems that no longer applies. I’d much rather have fixes for the old stuff now, and working, relatively bug-free new stuff later. MUCH later.

Personally, I’d like Fractals to be removed and deleted from my memory using a Men in Black device. It’s a vile, vile meat grinder where fun goes to die. But that’s unlikely to happen so I can deal with it. Add new Fractals, don’t add them. I don’t care as I won’t be going in there.

Tulisin.6945:

Chamone.6890:

Go stealth, sneak up on zerg, launch daggerstorm, run away before you are un-culled.

Not to make this thread about thieves as well, but this is a terrible tactic and a bad example of exploiting culling.

And you don’t need two thieves to permastealth.

There are much worse examples of exploiting culling which I won’t go into here. I was responding to him saying thieves were nerfed due to culling, when in fact the opposite is true.

Sure, you don’t need two thieves, but it makes it a heck of a lot easier. Me and my buddy can run around permastealth, do kitten-hot damage and res one another if we do happen to get downed. We would not be able to do this if there was not a big delay between stealth running out and actually being visible to the enemy.

Perma-stealthing alone requires you to sacrifice far too much damage.

DanH.5879:

i want to protest, because thieves are nerfed to the ground because of your culling problems !

Theives are OP in WvW due to culling.

Go stealth, sneak up on zerg, launch daggerstorm, run away before you are un-culled.

2 theives working as a pair never become visible, the delay between them being un-stealth and un-culled is enough to let them be pretty much permanently invisible.

Chrissle.8690:

Hmm he said no new region. Not no new dungeon and no new fractals. Here´s to hoping we will at least see new content in those areas.

Why, so you can have more bugged fractals that you can’t finish and more dungeons that get exploited and run in 10 minutes?

Bear in mind this is a game with no test server or public beta, so every new bit of content added to the game is basically still in beta, riddled with game-breaking or economy-breaking bugs.

We need a little time to recover from all the other new crap they’ve shoehorned in without a public test phase.

Straylight.7408:

One one hand I’m a bit sad that there will be no new zones, on the other hand it’s probably for the better. I’m glad they’re trying to focus on improving the foundation of the game instead of adding new floors.

I’m not in the least bit sad there’s no new zones, I’ve been level 80 for a couple of months and I’ve still not seen a couple of the old zones!

Southsun Cove is essentially an empty husk with no content in it, if they just fleshed out that a little it would be the equivalent of a new zone.

You’re absolutely right that they need to improve the foundation in Jan / Feb rather than add new floors. Our foundations are really crumbling away beneath us right now with broken promises, broken events & broken economy.

I would be more than happy not getting an “expansion’s worth” of content, all they need to do to make me happy is do these 3 things:

- Ascended Gear in WvW
- Scavenger hunt for Precursor
- Fix culling

And fix about 1000 of the 10’000 bugs in the game (need to leave some bugs for future updates!)

Elochai.1280:

enji.7459:

Habib Loew.6239:

3) Client performance issues related to rendering (potentially) all the players on a map at once. (Note that we base our performance requirements in this case on min-spec clients. We don’t want to stop anybody being able to play the game after all.)

I appreciate the post but this is dumb. Many people who own a decent computer aren’t playing the game now because it is unplayable. Let them turn down the rendering or something. I came back during the holidays to try the game out and it’s still invisi-wvw.

Agreed it is a stupid concept. This is not catering to all specs. You have essentially added a horribly executed mechanic to cater to low specs machines while punishing higher end players.

What, something crazy like releasing the game in DX9 only so that Windows XP users could still play? You woudn’t see a AAA PC game doing that in this day and age, surely??

;)

Good post.

However, since #1 is not a problem and #2 and #3 are entirely down to individual users’ connections and machines being up to scratch, then why not add an option in the game to disable culling while you work on making the rendering and netcode efficient?

You already have many, many performance related options that people can turn on and off, shadows, reflections, FSAA, etc etc. “WvW Player Culling” would simply be another option that people with powerful PCs could use?

There have been a number of big, well-known exploits since the game went live, and a number of smaller lesser known ones. Since there is no test server or public beta, this is to be expected. What was not expected is the completely random way that exploiters are dealt with.

I get the need to be firm and hard-line about certain things, and to be honest I do applaud it. But it’s the sheer inconsistency of who gets a ban and who doesn’t that is making us angry.

Karma Food Vendor Exploit – Some people got 3 day ban, some people got a warning, nobody got permabanned AFAIK apart from that one guy that posted a video of how to do it on Youtube. Nobody got their exploited gold taken away.

Mispriced Karma Weapon Vendor Exploit – Some people got a perma ban, some got a 3 day, some got a warning. Some people that did it a lot received no punishment at all. Nobody got their exploited gold taken away

Godskull Mystic Forge Exploit Some people got a perma ban and were unbanned later for reasons that remain unclear. A lot of people did it and received no punishment at all. Nobody got their exploited gold or precursors taken away.

Snowflake Ecto Exploit Some people getting perma-ban, nobody seemingly getting a 3-day. Some arbitrary cut-off decided for the “worst” offenders. Some people that did it a lot receiving apparently no punishment at all. Nobody has had their exploited gold taken away.

Now, the real issue is that the economy is running away. Inflation is crazy and there’s no way to stop it. Everything worth having is going up in price every single day and exploited gold is a huge cause of this.

Given that the precursors made with the GodSkull exploit can sell for 300G+, I would say that they were a MASSIVE “threat to the economy”, much bigger than a few thousand ectos getting listed on the TP for normal prices.

Please go back and ban everyone who has ever exploited in the game and remove the exploited gold from the game.

Ignoring the character name issue, which is lols, I think you’re absolutely right that playing this game without gettnig banned is very confusing.

Not allowed to send too much gold, not allowed to do anything profitable, not allowed to buy gold from any website except Arenanet, drop rates are so insanely terrible it’s impossible to make any high end gear without either exploiting, buying gold or botting.

Weird game tbh. They want you to “have fun”, but ONLY IN A CERTAIN WAY. Yet there’s not really a tutorial or instruction manual for the game so you have to discover what that certain way is… somehow…

Just after Dye-Gate in BWE3 Her Dark Majesty, Crystin Cox, posted saying not to worry, and that there would be a cooking recipe in the game for every specific colour.

It never happened.

Just sayin.

I agree with your agreement. The forum mods are ridiculous on here. About half my posts get deleted.

No wonder people don’t know what’s going on.

They don’t have a test server or any public beta testing for anything. This is going to happen again and again.

Stay away from crafting altogether if you don’t want to be banned.

Pretty worthless and petty reasoning for banning tbqh.

Sounds like he bought gold to get mats for his legendary.

Seen so many good ones that made me lol, can’t remember the best ones

Recently:

Charr Grills
Charrlie Brown

Those are actually pretty lame… kitten my memory.

BUTTERBLUME.3217:

If you play dungeons often enough, you do not die, no matter the gear. It is all about learning the encounters.

Hmm, that’s a whole other discussion for a whole other thread.

The fact that the Dungeons can be solved and people find and use all the exploits, cheats and shortcuts takes all the fun out of them for me.

The fact the AI is so useless, predictable and controllable that dungeons can be run without taking a single hit in many cases is something they need to look at really.

2 All-DPS Glass Cannons, 2 Damage mitigating support healers and 1 control character works wonders actually.

You obviously joined a PUG and wondered why your party was unbalanced. Good job.

TWMagimay.9057:

Oh, almost forgot. Did it ever occur to you:
1. to check the meaning of “legendary”? Cause I’m fairly sure it doesn’t mean what you think.
2. that legendary weapons are the carrot on the stick? Without them, your casual pve player would stick around this game for 2-3 weeks
3. that legendaries should be obtainable for everybody, but actually obtained by the most dedicated?

1: Pretty sure that “Legendary” has turned out to be not what anyone expected. It’s an extreme grind which can be bypassed with money, luck or exploits. There’s no way of getting one that will make me respect you as a person.

Extreme grind: You have no life.
Money: You’re just a rich kitten.
Luck: Wee-hoo, good for you you dropped 3 precursors from the karka chest
Exploits: You’re a cheater.

2: I’d prefer it if those players left after 2-3 weeks personally.

3: Being “dedicated” to a video game is nothing to be proud of.

kiba.2768:

i am a casual.

kiba.2768:

i spent 2 months earning the 125g i needed for the chosen.

No. No you are not a casual.

Time for some tough love.

This is a video game, nothing you do here or in any other video game means anything. They are just entertainment. If you had fun and forgot your troubles for a while, then you did it right.

If you looked at it as a task to be completed in the most efficient way possible, then you did it wrong.

You will never get that feeling of achievement you are looking for from a video game. If you think that you did, then it was an illusion and you were tricked.

AmagicalFishy.6935:

Chamone.6890:

Good. This is a western MMO, not a Korean Grind-Fest.

We don’t want or need “super-rare items”, whatever those are.

Do you, in a massive multiplayer game, need to consider the fact that there are thousands upon thousands of players when you’re creating itemization mechanics? Yes. Yes, you do.

Sure, make lots of items, make it so that everyone can have a unique look, make tonnes of colours, tonnes of armour skins, tonnes of weapon skins. I don’t disagree.

How many legendaries are there? like 8, 9 ? You can’t even change their colours.

Getting a legendary in fact makes you look LESS unique, not more unique…

Wanting a rare item just because it’s rare is just dumb.

I understand wanting a Legendary, some of them look pretty cool. I don’t understand wanting it less because lots of people have one. Everyone has the same opportunity to have one, as time goes on thousands and thousands of people will get them.

You’re not special because you got one before everyone else, you just grinded faster and exploited the gold early enough to avoid getting banned.

Sir Morgan Malory.2069:

I don’t really care about the legendary items. But I am kitten off about Zap, or the crystalline sword skin being unvailable. Who is going to pay 190g for a skin on the TP thats an exotic. It was near unobtainable in GW1, maybe it will be availble in GW3.

None of the precursors have unique skins, they all share a skin with another normal exotic.

I beleive the sword you are looking for is this one:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Crystalline_Blade

about 4G on the trade post?