Ars Technica Writes About TERA IP Block

[madpersian]

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2...ra-servers.ars

MO operators are faced with a constant battle with hackers, gold farmers, and other exploiters, working tirelessly to identify and ban them before they can ruin the experience for honest players. But En Masse, the North American publisher of upcoming MMO TERA has announced a much simpler plan for stopping ne'er-do-wells from getting into its North American servers—simply block large swathes of the world from playing on its servers.

In an announcement this weekend on the En Masse support database, En Masse said it will block IP addresses from Asia, Africa, Russia and the Middle East from connecting to its North American TERA servers, contradicting a number of earlier statements that it would not put such IP blocks in place.

While En Masse acknowledges that there are likely some legitimate players among the more than 5.3 billion people in those IP blocked regions (nearly 80 percent of the world's population), the company says, "It's unfortunate that the vast majority of Internet traffic we see from these regions are from cyber-criminals relating to account theft, gold-farming, and other hacking behavior." And while those foreigners could conceivably get around these blocks by using proxy servers, En Masse promises to block a proxy "if it becomes a popular tool for criminal behavior."

Players in non-Russian Europe, Oceania, and South America will be able to log into the game's North American servers, or European servers operated by Frogster. En Masse encouraged those in other regions to "participate on servers specifically designated for their area" in order to "keep the quality of service high for players within North America." Left unsaid is how the game experience in those regions will be impacted by what is apparently an audience comprised almost entirely of hackers, thieves, and cheats.

While other MMOs have instituted similar blanket IP blocks on regions in the past, such moves are usually made to satisfy international publishing deals and licensing restrictions, not because the publisher sees foreign players as untrustworthy per se. And while En Masse did cite unspecified licensing issues in a follow-up statement given to Massively, it doubled down on the security-through-continent-sized-walls explanation as well.

"Although these restrictions are not a panacea for preventing hacking, they are highly effective, and produce more positive results than might be expected," the company said, noting that it is already under "continuous, sustained assault as hackers anticipate the launch of TERA," planned for May 1.

While we can appreciate these concerns, it seems a little unfair to lump honest players in with the criminals they happen to live near. The company did say it "hope[s] to extend the regions in which TERA is accessible in the future," so hopefully a more targeted, less absolutist approach to international server security will be implemented soon.

[Sonomaa]

sounds like they are taking the BG route to stopping gold/gil spam on the forums

[madpersian]

You guys ban regional IPs? I don't mind this if booting gold farmers are as bad as I heard they are in asia.

[Maaglin]

Does Asia include Japan?

[Foxer]

Yar.

[Maaglin]

Well that sucks. Really want to play this game, but don't really feel like jumping through a lot of hoops to do so.

And since I can't read moonspeak, fuck the JP version.

[MaachaQ]

If you want to go the VPN route, WiTopia is a pretty solid service. I pay $50 a year for it, at first only for FFXI but now I use it to also watch streaming stuff like Hulu. Simple to use, and lots of choices for gateways. If I decide to pick up the NA game (I'm currently playing K-TERA since I live in Korea ^^; ) then I'll most likely have to switch on the VPN in order to use it... ping will suck, but it'd be nice to be able to play in my native language.

[Bombur]

Looks like Frogster is gonna start banning IP's as well. The just mentioned that they will block all Russian states. Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Byelorussia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan and Ukraine, with asia and the middle east still up in the air.

Persoanlly I think it's a bad move on Frogsters part as I think that 10% of the euro Tera community is from Russia.

You can read about it here

https://forum.tera-europe.com/showthread.php?t=26842

[Shassira]

The frogster PRs make it sound like it was a last minute thing and it's done mostly for legal reasons.

I believe the second part, but the first one not so much.

If there's legal problems with licensing then it's either related to the NCSoft attacks (no idea how, I can't link it really) or, most likely, to recent licensing of TERA on the Russian area. Many other MMOs have delimited their borders like this, so it's quite possible a rus version is on the way.

I cannot say I enjoyed the russian community in Aion, but then again I really didn't enjoy the Aion community at all. In general, the EU regions suffer from really poor community quality and decohesion.

[Trocian]

Sure won't miss the russians, no tears shed over here.

[Maaglin]

If you want to go the VPN route, WiTopia is a pretty solid service. I pay $50 a year for it, at first only for FFXI but now I use it to also watch streaming stuff like Hulu. Simple to use, and lots of choices for gateways. If I decide to pick up the NA game (I'm currently playing K-TERA since I live in Korea ^^; ) then I'll most likely have to switch on the VPN in order to use it... ping will suck, but it'd be nice to be able to play in my native language.

Thanks for the recommendation. Really would like to play this game in English. I can sort of get what's going on with my limited Japanese, but it's not enough.

[Maaglin]

Tried some different things today, so far this is the best I could get from a VPN:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1752730936.png

Not sure why this says London, it's a San Francisco address, but whatever I'm an idiot when it comes to networking and shit.

This is my normal connection:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1752477555.png

I'll see how this goes, might find a few other services and use their trial period to see if I can find anything significantly better, but I doubt it.

[madpersian]

Damn. Your normal connection is pretty sick.

[Lonely]

2.98 download and .98 upload normal speed here, I hate you so much. 1up on not missing the Russians. Less butchered English, less 1337 haxxors, and less XAXAXAXAXA.

[Maaglin]

Huh, so for what it's worth, I only needed to turn on my VPN to get past the initial log in screen after you run the launcher. I tired to log in without VPN, but was unsuccessful. However, I was then able to turn it off and play the game with my JP connection.

Don't know if it will be like this for retail, but here's to hoping.

Had to use the VPN to download the client as well, which sucked since it took about two days between horrible speeds and disconnects.

[Foxer]

Wow that's great news. I have a few friends from K-TERA who live in Asia and want to play NA. I'll let em know.

[MaachaQ]

Huh, so for what it's worth, I only needed to turn on my VPN to get past the initial log in screen after you run the launcher. I tired to log in without VPN, but was unsuccessful. However, I was then able to turn it off and play the game with my JP connection.

Don't know if it will be like this for retail, but here's to hoping.

Had to use the VPN to download the client as well, which sucked since it took about two days between horrible speeds and disconnects.

Hmm, this makes me tempted to try the NA game, at least during the beta tests. I'm still waiting on my junk to sell before I jump my K-TERA character to the server where most of the english speakers are ^^; It's so much more enjoyable to play a game like this when you can interact with people in your native language... My korean is getting better, but I still have trouble when things go by so quickly in this game.

[Foxer]

Hmm, this makes me tempted to try the NA game, at least during the beta tests. I'm still waiting on my junk to sell before I jump my K-TERA character to the server where most of the english speakers are ^^; It's so much more enjoyable to play a game like this when you can interact with people in your native language... My korean is getting better, but I still have trouble when things go by so quickly in this game.

I say go for it. Once TERA gets closer to launch here, or once people's subscription ends in K-TERA and they know NA-TERA is right around the corner, there will be no NA players in K-TERA, no matter what server you're on. Depending on your play style, it might be worth the lag. GL.

[sear]

Huh, so for what it's worth, I only needed to turn on my VPN to get past the initial log in screen after you run the launcher. I tired to log in without VPN, but was unsuccessful. However, I was then able to turn it off and play the game with my JP connection.

Don't know if it will be like this for retail, but here's to hoping.

Had to use the VPN to download the client as well, which sucked since it took about two days between horrible speeds and disconnects.

Which vpn are you using? WiToia? I tried using Hotspot shield and I still couldn't even enter my beta code on the enmasse site.

[Maaglin]

Which vpn are you using? WiToia? I tried using Hotspot shield and I still couldn't even enter my beta code on the enmasse site.

Yeah using Witopia since it was cheaper than others I looked at. I was going to try some different speed tests with other ones, but I got lazy. I'll revisit this if they block my Japanese IP after connecting and latency becomes an issue.

I used to use hotspot shield for stuff like netflix and pandora, but it doesn't work anymore since they decided to block anonymous proxies. Based on that, I didn't bother to try TERA with hotspot, just assumed it wouldn't work without using a VPN.