How long will Tera survive?

Pamcake

Looking how many new MMO's been released. Some are disappointing some are good. In Tera with all the gender-locked classes and boring quests from 1-60 lvl. The performance of the game is very badly optimized. Even small things makes me eye roll sometimes. Though, it's fun to play st times. But the end game grinding, just to get +15 gear and be accepted in the top dungeons... I seen over couple of months many people joining and quitting after reaching endgame. And I see why. It's my personal opinion. But what you think? Seeing as China and Korea are releasing more and more MMO's, will Tera stand a chance in a long run?

ILikeTeddyBears

I'd say another 2-3 years honestly.

LessThanNone

Tera indeed does have a lot of problems that have never really been addressed by the devs and that would be unacceptable in most other modern MMORPGs. However, until another MMORPG is created with an equivalent or better form of an action combat system I don't see Tera dying.

Fulzoid

If you realised, most MMOs that get in NA dies within a month. Tera is very popular compared to them. Assuming that NA ditching MMOs in general, and the MMO community getting remplaced with less skilled players, I'd give global MMOs about 4-5 years. WoW is the exception though, Blizzard managed to get enough people to follow them in WoW in order to actually survive even 10 years of releasing terrible game (since 2005, they haven't done a single good move, but Overwatch recently). I don't understand how people can be this blind, but that's another debate :P

Varg707

Games rarely die. Look at it like a country. There are good standing countries like Germany, with a healthy population and a generally good infrastructure, and bad standing countries like most south east europe countries with so much debt they are on the verge of bankrupt.

BDO is Germany. Tera is Montenegro.

They artificially buy time by taking loans and investing into their economy in some way, the same way BHS takes your money and invests it into new classes, dungeons and other. If the investment is not profitable, the country will no longer invest into that part of the economy and try something else, until the day they bankrupt.

I think there are some fine parallels there. I'll leave the rest of mind boggling to you :pleased:

counterpoint

Nachshon wrote: »

Lag of server? Probably won't ever upgrade because "marketing" has other plans.

Gender locked? Probably don't care because they probably owe thousand of dollars to designers who made those in-game design for female characters in Tera.

Optimization? Probably won't ever happen because again, "marketing." They don't want to spend anymore money they have too. It isn't about players anymore. It's about how they can squeeze out much money they can while keeping everything at a low cost budget. If they have a chance to get away with borderline lag, they will. If server capacity is 2,000... and there's roughly 2,001 players online, they probably wouldn't care about upgrade.

For whatever it's worth, the lag issues we have are not because of capacity; it's not like they can just buy faster servers and it will go away. They're related to two things: network infrastructure (backbone) issues, and server-side software bugs. The former issue can only be solved at the ISP level, and the latter issue can only really be solved by BHS (though EME can try things).

Of course, I get what you're saying on the whole, and the live services team are certainly trying to keep the game going on a shoestring budget as the game enters its later stages of life, but some of the issues are more complicated than just throwing money at the problem.

Zoknahal

My honest answer? 3 more years. Even after that, TERA may still be running, but with a considerably smaller player base than now.

What TERA needs is side content, like housing and other activities (like Fishing) in order to catch the attention of more players. You would be amazed at what decorating your very own virtual house can do to attract new players.

allofspaceandtime

Zoknahal wrote: »

My honest answer? 3 more years. Even after that, TERA may still be running, but with a considerably smaller player base than now.

What TERA needs is side content, like housing and other activities (like Fishing) in order to catch the attention of more players. You would be amazed at what decorating your very own virtual house can do to attract new players.

tera does need stuff like you said to keep it alive, but I doubt they will. it would be nice to have other things to do that running endgame dungeons grinding for the next sets of gear to come out.

dreamcast87

TERA will never die.

LancerJiva

At this rate with the lag and everything and players leaving.... not so sure on TERA tbh.

vkobe

at least 6 months, after is hard to say, i would be very surprise if tera close before 2020

allofspaceandtime

when you have people spending hundreds of dollars a month just to play dress up in velika and highwatch, I doubt tera will close down anytime soon. same reason wow is still going on. people don't want to quit a game that they have spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars in, not to mention hours , days, months, and years in. they may take a break from a game, but they always come back. they don't want to feel like they wasted all that money or time for nothing. as much as you have the try hards that have to have the latest and greatest gear, you also have the ones that have to have every mount , weapon skin , dress, and whatever else new that comes out for their dress up toon.

SaphirKanzaki

I've read an interesting article about the death-life cycle of F2P MMOs. The gist is that the normal user can see a game declining when the personnel is leaving and not being replaced and the game gets massively turned into P2W to squeeze out the last drop of $ until collapse. Ironically, turning into massively P2W is what speeds up the decay.

The perhaps biggest disadvantage of Tera is the old engine it's built on. My guess is that this will one day break Tera. But looking at the other side, we have a flourishing MMO. We have constantly new content and new classes (yes, even being genderlocked) rolled in. Tera made this huge step into Steam some years ago. The turnover apparently is big enough to constantly develop new costumes.

In my opinion, Tera will still survive some more "Tera killers" like BDO or BnS. However, Tera is not immortal.

Fulzoid

SaphirKanzaki wrote: »

I've read an interesting article about the death-life cycle of F2P MMOs. The gist is that the normal user can see a game declining when the personnel is leaving and not being replaced and the game gets massively turned into P2W to squeeze out the last drop of $ until collapse. Ironically, turning into massively P2W is what speeds up the decay.

The perhaps biggest disadvantage of Tera is the old engine it's built on. My guess is that this will one day break Tera. But looking at the other side, we have a flourishing MMO. We have constantly new content and new classes (yes, even being genderlocked) rolled in. Tera made this huge step into Steam some years ago. The turnover apparently is big enough to constantly develop new costumes.

In my opinion, Tera will still survive some more "Tera killers" like BDO or BnS. However, Tera is not immortal.

Next big step: Console, guess Steam client wasn't enough after all

counterpoint

SaphirKanzaki wrote: »

I've read an interesting article about the death-life cycle of F2P MMOs. The gist is that the normal user can see a game declining when the personnel is leaving and not being replaced and the game gets massively turned into P2W to squeeze out the last drop of $ until collapse. Ironically, turning into massively P2W is what speeds up the decay.

The perhaps biggest disadvantage of Tera is the old engine it's built on. My guess is that this will one day break Tera. But looking at the other side, we have a flourishing MMO. We have constantly new content and new classes (yes, even being genderlocked) rolled in. Tera made this huge step into Steam some years ago. The turnover apparently is big enough to constantly develop new costumes.

In my opinion, Tera will still survive some more "Tera killers" like BDO or BnS. However, Tera is not immortal.

Yes, I agree with your analysis. It seems to me that TERA is transitioning into its "later-life" phase, and although they'll keep doing stuff for it for a while yet (and this phase can in fact last many years), the game really can't survive forever on this somewhat-broken engine. TERA's main selling points have always been the art/world and the combat system. While the art/world are still beautiful, they're hobbled by the engine, and surely it's a matter of time before someone comes out with a game that's more eye-popping in terms of the world, characters, and art style. (Heck, it could even be BHS themselves in one of their new projects; if graphics are part of your selling point, you've got to keep evolving with the times.) So you're really left with the combat system, and despite the fact that no one has really successfully done it yet, it seems like something someone could do. Not that everyone would just immediately jump over to the new thing even if it did replicate the main benefits, but nothing lasts forever. If TERA can last on the market for 7-8 years, I'd honestly say that's a pretty good run for a game with graphics as a major selling point.

Bonbonnie

NA TERA will probably last another 6-8 months with how poorly the game is being managed here, but that's if it's lucky. EU TERA is looking pretty good right now. Can't say much on RU, JP, or KTERA.