Guild Wars Lore : The Vision Crystal Shards
Part of Wooden Potatoes’ ([link]) Guild Wars Lore summary videos ([link]).

The Elona Reach mission. Turai Ossa, otherwise known as Batman - I mean the Ghostly Hero - tells you where to find Vision Crystal shards, but doesn’t actually help you get them. What a friend.

The whole crystal thing was basically just a fetch quest deal to give you something to do while ANet taught the player about game concepts you’d use in PvP. Their importance in lore is pretty precarious to start with. Prophecies had this problem a lot, as most of the story was just there to gate players to areas so that they’d go on a world tour of Tyria, and learn various game concepts that they could use in PvP, or in general.

The crystal was just a gating device to make you do a mission, so you could get the gods to notice you (which does nothing, actually), so you could then be sent off on another quest to do something of zero importance to your mission (which is poorly defined for your character’s motivations, but has something to do with saving the Ascalonian Settlement), which would lead to the Mursaat stronghold on the Fire Island Chain. You go there to get allies to help kill the Mursaat, but in the process of killing them all, they’re all dead, so you never needed those allies to begin with.

Oh, Guild Wars lore.