TERA Online - General Information and Discussion (May 1, 2012)

[Meresgi]

Personally i'll be going back to WoW to try MoP but Cataclysm has me very pissed about WoW and what it is *shrug* TERA is to me a great game and a fun break from WoW, will I play both at the same time? No if they are both subscription based, but if TERA goes F2P I'll be playing it whenever im not doing anything on WoW. MoP has a new class I want to try out and see if I enjoy, but if it doesn't hold them i'll probably come right back to TERA.

I guess TERA hasnt gotten to that point of standing around in Orgrimmar doing nothing, because the RP on CH server is interesting in parts to watch, I don't have a full set of +9 T13 gear or even +9 T12 gear yet because i'm not grinding the shit outta those dungeons and never choose to buy items off the AH in these games. Soon i'll take a shot at some of the Hardmodes and such and see it is (I still havnt even done Ebon Tower or Kelsiaks Nest even regular version since I missed them leveling up).

Update to this post:

Saw a reddit Q&A with one of the EME guys, talking about boosting the crafting leveling experience (aka not just 2 points per craft), reducing Nexus lag and fixing some of the CPU issues. At least the devs seem to be very in touch with what is going on and always talking to us in this game which I enjoy.

[Bombur]

More info from Korea

K-Tera will be merging the 13 servers into just 4.

Shara, Paw Paw, and Ellion will be merged into 1 server.

Kayidun, Tamureu, and Calas will be merged into 1 server.

Serena, Serion, and Serabi will be merged into 1 server.

Archaea, Juraseu, Yurian, and Graham will be merged into 1 server.

So starting on July 4th there will be 4 P2P servers and 1 F2P test server.

Just wanted to let people know in case they still played K-tera.

http://tera.hangame.com/news/notice....&docid=4652758

[Scythiroth]

More info from Korea

K-Tera will be merging the 13 servers into just 4.

Shara, Paw Paw, and Ellion will be merged into 1 server.

Kayidun, Tamureu, and Calas will be merged into 1 server.

Serena, Serion, and Serabi will be merged into 1 server.

Archaea, Juraseu, Yurian, and Graham will be merged into 1 server.

So starting on July 4th there will be 4 P2P servers and 1 F2P test server.

Just wanted to let people know in case they still played K-tera.

http://tera.hangame.com/news/notice....&docid=4652758

Ouch, that is scary. x.x

[Ambrosia]

@Bombur:

Wow that is very sad news. So we have now:

South Korea: 37 > 35 > 15 > 13 > 4

Japan: 10 > 3 > 1 (Note they still have 3 servers but they are currently operating with the capacity of 1 heavily populated server)

Bombur are you Kumapon on MMORPG.com? I left you a reply over there in regards to EME "potentially" taking over Frogster. This was noted with the recent Reddit interview.

http://tera-forums.enmasse.com/forum...-on-Now?page=1

It seems comments have been surfacing the last couple of days of how unhappy BHS is with Frogster at this point, and rightfully so. There are so many problems over there, so much that even folks have started posting in the NA forums (on behalf of the EU players or those that experienced both services) and noted the utter frustration most customers currently have with Frogster.

One question that stood out:

"Q: F2P?

Knox: "Tough one to start out? The game started development in 2007 when subscription based games were going strong. If we had to go back and do it over again I think we would have tried to find a way to be more 'free to play' than subscription. One baby step we have taken is opening up 7 days trials to get people to try TERA out without an upfront cost.

The complete switch from sub to F2P is something we have been looking at for a while but it takes a good amount of development time to make this change and right now we are focused on getting fun content out."

Honestly I don't see them going F2P till the one year subscriptions are up, but I can see them doing it right after that.



@Meresgi



Subscriptions numbers didn't die off because folks thought that the game was going to be a WOW killer. Far from it. I've discussed this several times before, but I'll just make it as short and sweet as possible. We know some of the critical factors as to why the game took a nosedive in both South Korea and Japan. Those are not the same reasons for the NA/EU market.


For EU I would say the #1 reason was partnering with Frogster. For the NA side, it is something I have said so many times, and something that Knox finally brought up (and admitted) with the interview with Reddit. He is correct. During development, even prior as well as some time after.... subscription based theme park MMORPGs were pretty strong.


I would say between 2005-2009 was at its highest point, note that the development was well underway in 2007. From 2010 till now there have been only 6 games to adopt the P2P business model. There are currently over 600 MMOPRGs out there. That constitutes 1% of the total market out there. P2P business models have been declining at a rapid pace post 2009. Why? Because of a couple of main reasons.


Either you release a product like FFXIV that doesn't follow any template but falls flat in everything else, and in some cases like The Secret World which fails in so many areas (combat being a glaring issue) as well as bugs... Or... you release a game that follows those "Ingredients" I have posted before way too closely. In the case for Western developers it is following the EQ1/EQ2/WOW clones and for Eastern developers it is following the Lineage1/Lineage2/Aion clones.


You don't separate yourself enough from the pack to justify a P2P model for the masses. P2P business models need a substantial amount of subscribers. It doesn't need to be 12 million or 6 million or 3 million, but it has to be in the hundreds of thousands and the most important part is keeping the population consistent like in EVE.


This article puts it best:

http://news.mmosite.com/content/k/20...led_me_1.shtml


"It's not that TERA is a bad game-TERA is an excellent game. If you like traditional MMOs, you will probably like TERA. The game environment is spectacular, the monsters are enormous and mean and the community is pretty robust and supportive. There's a lot to love about TERA; this article isn't meant to be insulting or imply that the game isn't a highly polished work with a lot to offer new players.


However, every moment of my TERA experience was marred by one lurking thought: I have played this game before. Sure, I had never killed that specific BAM (Big-Ass Monster) or completed that specific dungeon, but I couldn't shake the feeling that the meal TERA was attempting to serve me was a meal I had previously eaten, just mixed in different proportions."


One of the key factors that is necessary in an MMO is a stable community, like the games released from 1997-2004. They could easily spend almost a decade and have a consistent community and population. Does that mean that is necessary to have fun a game? Well no in the sense that a game doesn't need to last 10 years to be fun. We all want to have fun now. But on the other hand you don't want the majority of players to leave in under 3 months.


The question always comes up as to whether I should invest (or waste) my time in an MMO that will have a mass exodus (or be at high risk). If you look at the MMOs from 2005 till now you will see that the "Trend" is that games become F2P at a much faster rate (now the turn rate is under 2 years versus 10 years) and you have the majority of the folks leaving these subscription based games in under 3 months versus years back in the day.

[Senji]

Reddit interview

[notorious bum]

Hmm, so would it be a good idea to buy Tera with only the minimal 30day renewal? lol I'm having fun with the trial, but once I hit the magical 23 they basically locked me out after. I'm messing with another character for now, but was considering buying full last night. All this reading up on the forums makes me depressed now lol

[Katlan]

I have np w/ monthly subs and I don't see why ppl bitch so much about them also. I always think its those teenagers who are living at home and don't have a CC or a way to make money for themselves. I would love to hear a valid argument from somebody not in said situation who prefers a F2P model.

monthly subs entail a higher quality game imo and no pay2win features. I'd never play a MMO that had pay2win features and that's every game that is designed from a F2P perspective.

There are plenty of monthly sub games that are still very strong. To me the problem has nothing to do w/ monthly sub vs F2P, it's about the game, the promotion for said game, the publicity, ect... there are so many factors. I mean FFXI is still a very strong sub based game.. that should say a lot after all of these years. A lot of these games that are going F2P had serious launch issues and sucked in general. WAR and RIFT are still strong sub based games.

AoC was a terrible terrible fuckin game.

Aion was fun, but the super korean grind fest and the terrible drop rate killed a lot of ppl's enthusiam for the game and that was one of the major reasons why that game died because it started out very strong and declined when ppl started to realize what they were getting into. It's not fun running an end game instance 50x and not seeing a single gold weapon for any class.

TERA's problem was this game was in peak hype a year ago... then they pushed back the release a year and that killed a lot of hype. There is no way anybody can say otherwise. They have also failed to promote the game well. That, and after Aion I believe there is a strong hate towards korean games in general in the US. Regardless, if this game had a good story and a better starting island (give your character more abilities so it doesn't feel like the game should start at 20. Even if it means you don't get a few new abilities until lke 10+, start the character out stronger) I think the game would do better. that, and a lot of ppl see no raids and automatically don't give the game a shot.

Hmm, so would it be a good idea to buy Tera with only the minimal 30day renewal? lol I'm having fun with the trial, but once I hit the magical 23 they basically locked me out after. I'm messing with another character for now, but was considering buying full last night. All this reading up on the forums makes me depressed now lol

Considering its pretty easy to buy TERA for anywhere from 25-50% off the box price, if you enjoy the game there is really no reason not to. Shit's bargain bin cheap

[Lucavi]

I dunno if its a hype problem with TERA, because a lack of "hype" doesn't cause people to leave a game once they've already bought it, unless we're talking a competitive game like a fighting game that feeds off of tournament scenes. I think you need to actually ask people who have left why they have left. Most people I've talked to stated that they didn't like being lied to. We were basically lied to about PVP and we were lied to about the Vanarch system. You've also got to factor in the fact that the game is, just like with AION, at the beck and call of Korea, meaning that there's little that can be done to change something that may not sit well with the NA playerbase that Koreans have no problem with.

You talk about a strong hate towards Korean games in the U.S. Do you think that its just because Korea is Korea, or do you think that its the type of game that Korea produces? The grind-heavy, teeth-gnashing, random-roll-based gameplay that rewards tedium? I don't think its all about the starter zone and the story, because TOR has a good story and people rolled out of there in a heartbeat. I think people just like to feel rewarded for their work. Korean games have a tendency to reward people more for luck and grinding than for actual work. The people that love the system are still playing, and will still play. The people that don't like it, or may not like it as much as they thought they might, have left or will leave.

To each their own.

[Ambrosia]

@Katlan:


I have no problems either paying for a monthly subscription as well. Hell when it comes to RPGs and MMORPGs I would say 9 out of 10 times I try to get the Collector’s Edition (whichever is the higher priced one if there are different versions) just because. So money definitely isn’t an issue for me. And yeah most F2P games do use the P2W method or start off with vanity items but usually end up branching over to the P2W method.

There is one major problem though.

The majority of folks out there, in today’s market, wouldn’t agree with us. Or if they did pay for a monthly subscription it would be for a couple of months at best. Why? Because of the reasons I gave above as well as my post on the typical basic “Ingredients” I’ve posted a couple of times already. While we may break down the $15.00 a month as “Hey I spend more money at the movies” or “Hey it’s only a couple of quarters a day.” Guess what? That just won’t fly with the majority of the folks out there.

It just isn’t worth it to them for the long term and some just don’t even bother with it.

It would be like me saying to the entire BG community to sign up to SWTOR because $15.00 a month is pittance. The problem is like I said before, with the extreme saturation we have in the current market, just having one major new addition or “relatively” new addition to the MMO table just isn’t enough to separate yourself from the pack when the rest of the game is a near exact copy of previous games. This is something that has affected the majority of these theme park based MMORPGs post 2005; whether Western or Eastern developers.


One comment that really stood out was when you said that “there are plenty of monthly subscription games that are still very strong.” How so?


The P2P model comes in 2 brackets:

A. $4.00 - $10.99

This price bracket is practically dead. There are about 50 games that are, or used to be in this bracket range, but the last game to release using this price model was late 2010. I think Wakfu is the only game post 2011 that has a $6.00 monthly subscription fee, but that is optional I think.

B. $12.95 - $14.99

There are 30 games listed under this price range. However, 6 have shut down. So that brings the total down to 24. About half a dozen games before 2005 are still going strong such as EVE, FFXI, WOW to mention a few. Let us look at the games released from 2005 till now that still use the P2P business model.


A Tale in the Desert 2006

Warhammer Online 2008

DarkFall 2009

FFXIV 2010

Rift 2011

Xyson 2011

TERA 2011


I did not place Vanguard because it was stated they are going F2P this summer. DarkFall is going to cut its initial client cost as well as reduce its monthly subscription from $14.99 to an undetermined amount. Warhammer Online had at release (combined NA and EU servers) a total of a little over 80 servers. There are now 1 NA server and 1 EU server. I am not sure how this constitutes as "Going Strong Still" at all. Transitioning from a P2P model to F2P does cost money and I am not sure if E.A. wants to “waste" money in doing that, at least not yet. DarkFall also only has 1 NA and 1 EU server.


If you look at the last 3 years, there are only 5 games that still use the P2P model. With over 600 MMORPGs out there, that constitutes less than 1%... of the total market. There were many more games that used to use the P2P model, I think over 70 games (not all at the same time of course) which now have been cut by two-thirds.


The only game going strong using the P2P model that was released 2005 till present is RIFT. That’s it. There are over a dozen P2P games but the rest were released prior to 2005 and have been able to create a legacy behind them as well as several expansions (something that you rarely see happen to games post 2005). EVE Online is probably one of two games I can think of that was able to not only able to maintain a stable community, but they were able to grow as well throughout the years. There are reasons behind this which I won’t go into again.


So I do agree with you in that I would rather have a P2P MMORPG, but how? How is that even possible in today’s extremely saturated market when these developers refuse to take any risk at all and continue to churn out “near” copies of their ancestors with maybe adding one new or “relatively” new feature? How can they justify that and tack on the $15.00 price tag without most of us having that been-there-done-that feeling like that article I linked up there in my previous post from MMOSite? While the P2P business model doesn’t need 12 million or 6 million or even 3 million subscribers to make a profit, they do need a considerable amount of folks to stay for the long haul, not have a mass exodus in less than 3 months.


I see many folks (especially in other forums like MMORPG.com) that still believe that the P2P model is going strong. And every time I ask them… give me proof… show me evidence that this is true. I take not 3, but 30 steps back and look at the entire MMORPG landscape and I just don’t see that with everything I have said in these recent posts, as well as my some of lengthy posts in the past dealing with this topic.


Note: It doesn’t mean that we cannot enjoy these games, of course we can. I am not expecting these games to last like the games from the Golden Era. But at the same time, I get frustrated when these games continually have a mass exodus in less than 3 months and sometimes within a month. I’m usually lenient when it comes to MMORPGs, but not when it comes to the MMO part. When 90% of the time it feels like a single player game because everyone else has left (regardless of the reasons or pitiful excuses), that is usually when I get frustrated and just pack up and go. This is something that has plagued most P2P games post 2005.

[Meresgi]

Honestly to me it's $15 to $17 a month for a hobby that I spend a lot of time on. Paying that little cash for a month log hobby is pretty damn cheap to me, that's like going to see 1 movie nowadays and it keeps me preoccupied on my free time (which I have way too much of right now)

[Senji]

Hearing about 600 mmos and 1% as some sort of statistic is getting old. Akin to 1 MILLION Wii games; 10 games and a mountain of shovelware.

"A-list" is played out, but startup companies with an industry experienced core like Bluehole/EME, Trion, Runic are the bottom of who can realistically attain massive success beyond % percent returned to invested. Your pay2win-cyber real girls-sprite mmo advertized in the banner is a non factor. GTFO.

All these failures or exodus of the hardcore have nothing to do with the payment method. Its all due to broken promises, dev-mismanagement, unfinished release, etc. Yeah, BG has some hardcore that are playing FFXI and something else at the same time, but that's not the norm. Most people wouldn't commit to 2 even if they were both free with full features. More dead horse, but expectation levels not of 10 years ago. Finished and polished game on release day with a timeline to stick to or watch the flock leave. Board of investor pressure or w/e, but no one has managed to do it. (Except maybe Trion, but they fumbled that shit so hard its as if they layed off everyone except the forth string devs.) Obviously the higher the customer outlay, the higher the expectations.

[niwaar]

I dunno if its a hype problem with TERA, because a lack of "hype" doesn't cause people to leave a game once they've already bought it, unless we're talking a competitive game like a fighting game that feeds off of tournament scenes. I think you need to actually ask people who have left why they have left. Most people I've talked to stated that they didn't like being lied to. We were basically lied to about PVP and we were lied to about the Vanarch system. You've also got to factor in the fact that the game is, just like with AION, at the beck and call of Korea, meaning that there's little that can be done to change something that may not sit well with the NA playerbase that Koreans have no problem with.

I would actually say it was because of lack of hype. I would also agree that the "hype" we actually had was completely chock full of lies. We were given the MMO-FO advertisements, that were generally seen as bad in everyway. Yet we were basically promised a PvP game by these adverts and what we got was GankvP world pvp as well as Deathmatch PvP that required a lot of work on the players part to organize. (to date I have seen two deathmatches organized on PvE servers and one was during CBT).

I am not quite sure where you think we were lied to about the Vanarch system. I could go with you believing they said we would get specific "new" quests only available for the vanarch.

I will say that if WoW has done anything to the MMO industry, it has created an impatience. By having "access" to devs via the forums and quick turnaround on bug fixes and patches we have becomed spoiled. If you look at the last 10 years of "successful" MMOs in the west we can see that patches being released in both Asia/Europe/NA virtually simultaneously has been one of the key factors. FFXI, Eve, WoW, GW all had patch environments that gave us patches simultaneously (or within 48hours). The longevity of games like Aion, Tera, Lineage will always be shorter because their developers refuse to treat all of their customer base with similar respect.

You talk about a strong hate towards Korean games in the U.S. Do you think that its just because Korea is Korea, or do you think that its the type of game that Korea produces? The grind-heavy, teeth-gnashing, random-roll-based gameplay that rewards tedium? I don't think its all about the starter zone and the story, because TOR has a good story and people rolled out of there in a heartbeat. I think people just like to feel rewarded for their work. Korean games have a tendency to reward people more for luck and grinding than for actual work. The people that love the system are still playing, and will still play. The people that don't like it, or may not like it as much as they thought they might, have left or will leave.

I don't think its the type of games Korea produces. I think there will always be a significant numbers to sustain such niche game styles. The problem is the disconnect between the need for speed and directness in terms of communication and patch cycle that these "westernized" games come with.

As for TOR, I may be one of the minority that think that the look, feel and combat design of TOR was one of the largest reasons to not play the game. The story became tedious and the overuse of VO/Cutscene for virtually everything was the real thing that pushed people away from the game. Toss in an endgame that was poorly designed, poorly balanced, and uninterestingly incentivized and you have multiple reasons that game has gone the way of the dodo. Can you make similar statements in terms of Tera? I think you can to a degree. Story, while there, is uninteresting and poorly presented. You have an endgame system that while functional, the enchantment and crafting systems are designed so poorly that they take the wind out of the limited fun in the handful of instances offered.

[Katlan]

the fact that learning HM's = significant money sink is terrible lol. As a healer my money sink is minimal, but as dps its boss crystals for learning stuff and thats rough as hell

[Kipling]

We just almost did it again. Phase 3 on last one with 45 seconds left. Massive server lag plus the zergs all merging together = I can't move AT ALL.

[niwaar]

Honestly, we do 10-12ish and it is just a tedious torment of lag and afk. I hardly want to sit through what we do, it would suck trying to do 30 of them.

[niwaar]

Two things that they need to fix that really can not wait... Enchanting and Crystals. They were stupid as #%# for removing Eggs and Engines to begin with. What they got was only 2 ways to generate new crystals into the economy... monster drops and the Agnitor rep "box". Neither of which are pushing enough of the desired crystals into the economy at a rate that facilitates "low cost of death". An MMO has to have a reasonable death penalty. XI has a 5 minute weakness with diminishing returns (eventually) as well as XP loss and the ability to level down. WoW has a small financial cost for repairs. Aion had xp loss with the opportunity to buy a portion of it back for an ever increasing (too high) price. In Tera we have the real opportunity to lose a significant portion of the money you can earn from one set of 10 dailies. Die twice a day and you are losing money hand over fist. Try and enchant something 7-9 and you are likely to be broke and stay there. Something has to give.

[Meresgi]

Boxes and eggs should have never been taken out, it's silly that we still have repeatables and quests for level 60 dungeons that only reward exp. Why the fuck should I turn in Syndication Extermination for FoK when all it gives is 800k exp? You can't even get into the fucking dungeon till 60 so what is the point of the quest? Honestly all crystals should be bought from the vendor, or crafted through alchemy instead of just plain drop chance. I havnt ventured into T13 HMs yet since my guild isn't ready and probably won't grind the shit out of them but it's just silly the way the system is. Add that to the broken crafting system...which I think the only game that has ever gotten right has been FFXI/FXIV (At least crafting felt like something in those games instead of just tacked on filler that's "expected" in a MMO).

I like TERA, I enjoy leveling alts and right now i'm leveling a sorc up to end game level to see how I like it compared to warrior (alot of warriors in my guild and no sorcs) and the difference in combat between some of the classes (zerk/lancer/slayer+warrior/healers/sorc/etc etc) is actually pretty fun and interesting to me coming from WoW and other games where you just sat in front of a mob and beat on them till one of you died. The ability to actually dodge and negate some damage and death is pretty fun. EME better have something nice in store come next week's patch (they said there would be a reason for doing dailies patched in supposedly).

All that said I don't feel let down with how the game is. I wish the pet stores and eggs/boxes were still in, because there was no need to take them out and the enchanting system can be a bitch (add more fucking T12 drops in the fucking T12 instance for fodder) but the game is fun and worth the money I paid for it. I dont feel any buyers remorse like I did with FFXIV even though I bought the CE for this game as well. If it goes F2P i'll probably still continue to screw around with it, and when MoP comes out ill go back to WoW and try some new stuff and then probably hop back and forth between that and TERA, or maybe GW2 will somehow exceed my expectations and i'll play that instead.

[Scythiroth]

Jeez, on Dragonfall, most people just stick to doing Argonea, very rarely do we clear anything in any of the other 2 zones.

[Avarice]

Two things that they need to fix that really can not wait... Enchanting and Crystals. They were stupid as #%# for removing Eggs and Engines to begin with. What they got was only 2 ways to generate new crystals into the economy... monster drops and the Agnitor rep "box". Neither of which are pushing enough of the desired crystals into the economy at a rate that facilitates "low cost of death". An MMO has to have a reasonable death penalty. XI has a 5 minute weakness with diminishing returns (eventually) as well as XP loss and the ability to level down. WoW has a small financial cost for repairs. Aion had xp loss with the opportunity to buy a portion of it back for an ever increasing (too high) price. In Tera we have the real opportunity to lose a significant portion of the money you can earn from one set of 10 dailies. Die twice a day and you are losing money hand over fist. Try and enchant something 7-9 and you are likely to be broke and stay there. Something has to give.

Welcome to Korea.

[Meresgi]

Honestly the whole "you go broke enchanting something from +7 to +9" complaint is kind of meh to me, yeah you go broke...so what? After you get that shit to +9 assuming it's actually a piece of T13 it's the best you'll have for some time and now you can go farm, run dungeons and sell gear since you don't need fodder etc etc. The expense for crystals is bullshit, but the expense for enchanting I think is fine (I say that now, but wait till I fail 100 times in a row at +8 :D)