Recent DMCA Takedowns of Third-Party Programs - Discussion [Updated: November 8th]

TJukuren

Shaido wrote: »

What does it mean to love a game? What does it mean to have a healthy game?

The first part is easy enough to answer. If you love a game, it means you want to see it flourish and support the game by spending money on it so it can continue to flourish with new content and new players.

Measuring the health of a game however, is a little more complicated. The game economy, quality content released in a timely manner, events to engage the community in between patches, discourse and positive engagement between the community and the game's management team (dev or publisher), the playerbase activity level. All these things and more can be used as objective indicators of the health of a game.

The term "game is dying" is tossed around freely whenever a game suffers a player decline, but this is a normal part of any game cycle. People get bored, move on to other things, real life gets in the way, etc. But I think that a game doesn't really die until the time comes that any new players joining a game quit because progression becomes impossible due to the lack of a community.

Yes, proxy was against the TOS, but EME/BHS are getting paid and supported by us, the playerbase, to provide a good gaming experience. Is it of any surprise to anyone then, that players flocked to programs like skill prediction to improve their experience? I have no doubts that in finding that improved experience, most of these players were open to the idea of spending money on a game that, through no effort of EME/BHS, finally became enjoyable to them.

Can you run proxy and love TERA? Absolutely. Can you rejoice at EME shutting down these third party programs and love TERA? Of course!
But if you would rather see this game die than demand accountability from EME/BHS in supporting this game for the thousands of players that found an enjoyable experience because of these programs, then you cannot claim to love this game and its world.

There are a lot of comments in this thread from people claiming that those who used proxy have no right to complain because it was against the TOS, but I challenge you to give me a situation where you would be ok paying for a service that is barely usable. Never mind the F2P semantics, because if no one bought a single cent of EMP, they would undoubtedly shut down the servers. The argument shouldn't be proxy vs no proxy because its against the TOS. The discussion should be about why proxy became such a popular tool in the first place. No other MMO that I know of has such a large community around a third party program like TERA does. Ask yourself why before white-knighting a company that has shown itself to be at best a bumbling buffoon when it comes to managing TERA. Unless of course, you would rather see it burn and die.

And if that's the case, you don't love this game at all.

/Signed: Player since CBT 1

Here's the thing, I like many players here I'm sure, love Tera. I've been playing the game for nearly as long as you have. Maybe not since CBT but around the time when MC was introduced. It's hard however to show love to a game when it's been clearly shown the team that is publishing the game and is trying to make a better experience for its customers doesn't love you back.

As time has gone on, many of us have come to the conclusion that EME or BHS will never do anything about the state of NA Tera, and we've come to accept that as fact. Do we still love the game? Absolutely, there isn't a better F2P MMO out there with combat as good as Tera's. Sure a lot of us seem really bitter about EME and BHS' decisions over the past couple of years, but it's because we want to see the game shine like it used to. I'm sure I speak for many other people when I say it's absolutely heartbreaking to see a game we love fall as far as this one has when there are things that could've definitely been done to save it.

Many of the things mentioned such as better servers, ping compensation, and optimization changes are all things we've been crying out for for the longest time only to be met by deaf ears.

As a Business, you want to do whatever you possibly can to make your customers happy. Happy customers = more profit, more profit = more ways to make your customers happy. It makes me sad to see this company not embrace the very basics of business. They've shunned the very people who are paying for their servers to be free in the first place. To many people, including myself, this is nothing but a spit in the face.

To conclude, many people are whining, angry, upset, dis-trout yes, but only because we love the game to death and don't want to see it become an abandoned wasteland like it'll soon surely become if something isn't done soon.

CornishRex

MatrixOfLeaders wrote: »

It is called a NORTH AMERICAN server for a reason.

This means the server is located in NORTH AMERICA....

It seems people have forgotten the location of a NORTH AMERICAN server...

So did eme put the portugese and spanish translations of the forums because it's only meant for north americans? Please.

ElinUsagi

CornishRex wrote: »

MatrixOfLeaders wrote: »

It is called a NORTH AMERICAN server for a reason.

This means the server is located in NORTH AMERICA....

It seems people have forgotten the location of a NORTH AMERICAN server...

So did eme put the portugese and spanish translations of the forums because it's only meant for north americans? Please.

That is for console version, one where proxy is not allowed either and players are doing top tier dungeons without it and without dps meter either.

CornishRex

ElinUsagi wrote: »

CornishRex wrote: »

MatrixOfLeaders wrote: »

It is called a NORTH AMERICAN server for a reason.

This means the server is located in NORTH AMERICA....

It seems people have forgotten the location of a NORTH AMERICAN server...

So did eme put the portugese and spanish translations of the forums because it's only meant for north americans? Please.

That is for console version, one where proxy is not allowed either and players are doing top tier dungeons without it and without dps meter either.

Español (México) and Português (Brasil) were available is site translations waaaay before console was a thing.

buffons

caali's open letter thread got deleted lol. Eme doubling and even tripling down on their own stubborness. This is so much more entertaining than the game

emphysema

buffons wrote: »

caali's open letter thread got deleted lol. Eme doubling and even tripling down on their own stubborness. This is so much more entertaining than the game

yeh. I was about to reply lol, when I saw a message that i cant reply anymore due to thread not existing anymore. luckily still got it

Watcheriso wrote: »

This whole proxy discussion/drama just shows how uninformed or ignorant a lot of people are. Let me emphasize this: We're *not* the black hat people exploiting the game. Neither do we have the intention to be. Those people who misquoted obvious jokes I made about using exploits to harm NA as threats from my side are just trying to spin things around so that they match their perspective.


Let me clarify this a bit:

We, the third-party developers, have time and time again spoken out against exploits, cheats, and other unethical modules. In our Discord servers, we have warned or banned on sight everyone who asked for or shared exploits. We keep reminding people to turn off SP in PvP situations because we're aware of the fact that it's not perfect and, due to Tera's badly implemented synchronization mechanisms, can lead to desyncs and other behavior that could give you an unfair advantage. SaltyMonkey, the main developer of SP for my proxy, has spent countless hours every day working on improving SP, adding support for stuns/fears/etc to reduce the impact it has even if someone decides to abuse it in PvP. We trust that a majority of proxy users just want to play the game as it is meant to be played: with Korean-level infrastructure, that is high bandwidths and extremely low latencies. Popular tools like SP and FPSUtils help in doing so.

Every single patch day when EME's faulty updater broke a lot of players' game client, we gave our best and kept providing unofficial tech support for hundreds of players on some patch days. In doing so we were, in fact, oftentimes quicker to respond and could provide better proposals for solving the issues due to our superior knowledge of the game's internals (not wanting to brag, but we know a lot more about the internals than most EME employees, or those of any other publisher, for obvious reasons).

We tried again and again to contact EME and certain other publishers in order to report game-breaking exploits. Most of these attempts (in fact, all attempts at contacting EME) were futile and we were ignored. Take the infamous chat exploit, for example. I had personally reported it anonymously to EME and BHS about half a year prior to it becoming public. I'm not sure where exactly the report got lost or was ignored, but it obviously never got fixed. Even to this day, there are multiple S-tier exploits still in the game which could be used to cause *severe* damage to players, the economy, and the publishers. All of those that I personally know were anonymously reported a long time ago and I have not heard feedback regarding a single one of them. Even though some people on the forum accused me of this, I didn't share them with anyone, ever.

Furthermore, personally I haven't made a penny from any of my work - it's all free of charge and open source. I even refused to accept donations despite being asked for it over and over again. There are other developers who charge for proxy modules that they developed, but their stuff did *not* get taken down in any way. They were not impacted by EME's move in any way.

Which leads me to the next point: the actual black hat hackers, botters, exploiters, and gold sellers. Trust me on this one, but I know about quite a few that are lurking completely in the shadows, in fact it's not unlikely that none of you have never heard about them before. Waging war against proxy will *not* stop them in their endeavours. They are perfectly capable of maintaining their private tools themselves, they have been before proxy as you know it was even developed, and they will be for all days to come.

And yet, some people accuse me and the other developers of being greedy [filtered] who sell proxy and exploits to people, with the mere goal of destroying the game or profiting off it. They must either be uninformed, blatantly ignorant of the truth, or trolling.


In my personal opinion, EME's decision to DMCA the Discord and the GitHub repositories was totally over the top and I took it as a personal attack. Most of the third-party developers, including me, have always been open for communication with the publishers and kept emphasizing that.

As an example, within the timespan of her being on my proxy Discord server, I think I've pinged KitTeaCup at least 2 or 3 times when EME's updater/launcher broke, so that she could get their tech team to fix it asap. To this day I've not once declined an attempt of any publisher at contacting me. If any EME official, for example her, would just have contacted me about proxy in an effort to talk about limiting it to a handful of select allowed modules, or even just requesting it to be taken down entirely for NA servers, I would have happily complied to their requests - I would also have voiced my concerns about the large impact that this would have on their playerbase *before* it would actually happen - the consequences we are witnessing right now.

Instead, without a word, they DMCA'd everything, pissing off not only the third-party developers but also a large portion of their playerbase. We, the third-party developers, have without hesitation complied to full extent and have made all third-party software unavailable for EME's services. The players have reacted, voicing their criticism which was just a compilation of all the issues that piled up over the past years. A massive number of people have either quit or migrated to to other publishers, according to the factual data that we as third-party developers were able to collect and observe, and the long queue times that remaining players have talked about. The competitive and dedicated high-end content players are probably affected more drastically by this than the casual community.


In conclusion, allow me to emphasize this again: Should any other region's publisher wish to shut down my proxy's compatibility with their services, feel free to contact me (on Discord, for example). There's no need to take legal action. My intentions are not malicious or evil in any way, in case the publishers and the fanatic anti-proxy people still haven't realized that.

However, based on all that's happened, I (and a lot of other developers) are done with EME. If you guys were to reach out to me personally *now* about a potential solution (perhaps reintroduced proxy or a custom solution similar to SP) to mitigate the impact this has had on the playerbase, I would no longer be open to communication and decline the request. Same goes for reporting of game-breaking exploits, I'll try my luck with other publishers in that regard. After all, the fixes will reach NA as well if my reports get through.


I hope I could clarify my standpoint on the matter so that maybe some of will understand the third-party scene's perspective, and realize that things could have been approached in a better way.

Sincerely and see you over at EU servers,
Caali and other unnamed developers

TomRipley

buffons wrote: »

caali's open letter thread got deleted lol. Eme doubling and even tripling down on their own stubborness. This is so much more entertaining than the game

Just wanted to write the same.

So someone's in the office after all. They just decide to not answer to anyone, but keep deleting. I'm baffled. Same tactic as for the xigncode disaster. And we all know how this worked out. They just keep going like that.

Tera N/A soon indeed, I fear...

zenpiax

For those waiting for an EME response, give up on it. If they decide to respond it will be a meaningless and vague response that will have no effect on this shitstorm. EME plans are to give us a false hope that they will investigate the issues raised by the community this weekend and look for possible solutions. Those fixes will never come and EME is just trying to prolong the inevitable. They said they loves but that is a bunch of lies, they only love us for the strongbox keys and starter packs we can buy. The best part is that we have salty AF @circuits banning people from the discord channel for stating non-offensive opinions and constructive criticism in the discord channel instead of replying and addressing the issues that are being brought up throughout the weekend. Those actions clearly show that EME has no intent of fixing anything. With the addition that the 3rd party developers will not support the NA side of the game even if an amicable resolution is agreed upon. This basically means there’s no saving this game anymore. If you still want to play Tera just move to EU Tera, they are having a leveling event starting tomorrow so it would be a nice way to start anew. The game will start dying at a rapid peace, just let it die. Our EME overlords will not back down from their atrocious decisions, they will not improve the quality/ performance of the game, they will not fix absolutely anything, but you know what we can always expect from EME more greedy business tactics, loot box scams and store deals nobody cares about. Take this opportunity to be free from EME shackles!

ElinUsagi

emphysema wrote: »

yeh. I was about to reply lol, when I saw a message that i cant reply anymore due to thread not existing anymore. luckily still got it


"Let me clarify this a bit:

We, the third-party developers keep reminding people to turn off SP in PvP situations because we're aware of the fact that it's not perfect and can lead to desyncs and other behavior that could give you an unfair advantage. SaltyMonkey, the main developer of SP for my proxy, has spent countless hours every day working on improving SP, adding support for stuns/fears/etc to reduce the impact it has even if someone decides to abuse it in PvP.

Caali and other unnamed developers"

There you have it, they admit they brought a broken tool to the game that can be abused and they want us to believe him that his words "pls proxy users dont make exploits from our mods" are true. They are not and they admit that they havent fixed the issues it brought.

So I will quote the same shet people defending proxy spam "first fix your shet before spreading a broken tool into the game".

Nekooxchan

An actual suggestion and some constructive criticism: make TERA NA a MMO dress-up game.
Odd suggestion, but at this point this is your best route IMO. It can attract new players while also being interesting old ones who want to wander through the game, do a dungeon or two but focus mostly on fashion. The casuals would probably enjoy this.

Seriously. If you guys want some income from this game just hire some 3D modelers and fashion designers or whatever(I honestly do not know how it works, but since BHS can add costumes I assume you can too).

Getting the rights from BHS to add costumes to the game shouldn't be as difficult as changing your ToS. (Not an attack by the way, it's just been years and nothing changed in that regard, might as well try something different)

If the game isn't labelled as "action combat MMORPG" but "MMORPG focused on fashion with bonus action combat", people will care less about the combat and the whole drama with Third-Party Programs becomes meaningless.

P5RLRJYGGE

https://board.tera.gameforge.com/index.php/Thread/73930-EVENT-League-of-Levelers-02-10-18-10/?postID=910285#post910285

refugees welcome

ElinUsagi

Nekooxchan wrote: »

An actual suggestion and some constructive criticism: make TERA NA a MMO dress-up game.
Odd suggestion, but at this point this is your best route IMO. It can attract new players while also being interesting old ones who want to wander through the game, do a dungeon or two but focus mostly on fashion. The casuals would probably enjoy this.

Seriously. If you guys want some income from this game just hire some 3D modelers and fashion designers or whatever(I honestly do not know how it works, but since BHS can add costumes I assume you can too).

Getting the rights from BHS to add costumes to the game shouldn't be as difficult as changing your ToS. (Not an attack by the way, it's just been years and nothing changed in that regard, might as well try something different)

If the game isn't labelled as "action combat MMORPG" but "MMORPG focused on fashion with bonus action combat", people will care less about the combat and the whole drama with Third-Party Programs becomes meaningless.

It is what has been since 2012/2013.

Everyone knows TERA failed heavily at launch because most people didnt like that game and in Korea collapsed in 1 year, at NA it collapsed in 4 months and something similar world wide.

TERA was saved because of Elins and cash shop costumes. The game has been since then a dress-up game but some people can't remember that.

TankyHealer

You would think after all this time they would at least learn something but EME continues to surprise me everyday.

After every problem, every mass outrage, they decide to do absolutely nothing, reply absolutely no one, answer absolutely no question, provides absolutely no transparency.

And then silently deletes thread.

I am beyond speechless right now, I legit have never seen a company that wanted to close itself down so fast.

dragonmu12

P5RLRJYGGE wrote: »

https://board.tera.gameforge.com/index.php/Thread/73930-EVENT-League-of-Levelers-02-10-18-10/?postID=910285#post910285

refugees welcome

haha Gj on gameforge part. they know all Na tera ppl coming to them and they really did a league of levelers event hahaha,its like Gameforge laughing at eme face.

P2W

P5RLRJYGGE wrote: »

https://board.tera.gameforge.com/index.php/Thread/73930-EVENT-League-of-Levelers-02-10-18-10/?postID=910285#post910285

refugees welcome

LMAO! NA TERA is done. RIP