[TERA PC & Console] En Masse is closing, but TERA lives on! We will continue to support TERA PC (NA) and TERA Console until service is transferred. Stay tuned for more information.
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[TERA PC] The 64-bit update (v97) is now live. Check out all the changes delivered on August 11 here: https://bit.ly/tera64_patchnotes
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Thoughts and Suggestions to improve TERA
Hi everyone, I want to open a discussion concerning the current state of the game. I believe this is needed as a lot of players I've known for a long time feel very discouraged to play right now and I'm sure many more share my concerns. I did not want to say this but it has become VERY CLEAR to me that EME DOES NOT know how playing TERA feels at the moment and here's why...
1. Endgame Content Feels Unrewarding
There is very little incentive for fully geared players (I assume by now that this is a big part of the active playerbase atm) to run dungeons or do battlegrounds. Making PvP gear is almost completely useless as all battlegrounds use equalized gear and it is a known fact that open world PvP and duels are quite extinct. Dungeons don't even have to be fun to encourage people to run them, they just have to feel it's worth the time and quite frankly they aren't right now. Rewarding content = Fun content.
[Suggestions]
Increase the amount of loot in dungeons. Feedstock is a great idea, perhaps add some new valuable rare drop as well (This used to be VM8 designs but now they're worthless) as that would be great incentive for people to run the dungeon multiple times over.
2. Server Lag Issues and Harrowhold
Lag in general is extremely annoying to play with in any game and most of the time a small spike is no big deal, but in Harrowhold a couple seconds spike WILL cause an unavoidable wipe at a bad time. Any experienced group has surely experienced this at some point and it's extremely frustrating when 30 people waste a massive amount of time and consumables only to fail while playing perfectly well. Put yourselves in the player's shoes, this is the amount of hurdles we have to go through for Harrowhold at the moment:
a. Obtain a group of 30 skilled players
b. Of those 30 players, they must all sync schedules
c. (Phase 4 only) Passing 2 post-50% bomb phases without it "rng bugging" and spawning 3-4 on a side. This bug in itself honestly deserves it's own section as it causes an almost guaranteed wipe whenever it happens and it seems to happen completely by chance. If there is a way to control this to only 2 per side as I believe is intended PLEASE let me know.
Wiping due to server lag of all things after passing those 3 main points is very frustrating and disheartening and I imagine it is multiplied tenfold for newer learning groups.
[Suggestions]
Please fix the server lag. I know there's nothing EME can do about the bomb mechanic so I won't touch further on that.
3. Vanguards, Reward Points, and Dragon Eggs
Why are reward points not added to the newer dungeon vanguards? I do not want to waste 6/8 of my vanguards everyday doing IoD for them as that would leave me with only 2 left and further discourage doing dungeons and battlegrounds.
On dragon eggs, it was a huge letdown when these were massively delayed until way after the loot box royal dragons came out (Basically saying "You want a dragon? Pay up!" which in itself it not wrong in the slightest but the fact that EME did not release dragon eggs on time makes this look very bad as it looks like it was on purpose.) To further add salt to the wound the rates to obtain a dragon from these eggs is virtually nonexistent. It is quite tedious to gather 50 dragon scales especially for the players who cannot clear Harrowhold, let alone 8 dragon claws. I've seen hundreds of scale eggs opened and tens of claw eggs and not one person I've known got a dragon from either.
[Suggestions]
Add reward points to the vanguard for the new dungeons, increase or announce the rate of obtaining a dragon from the eggs.
4. Awakening
Very few people can relate to this but those who can are heavily affected, especially newer players. Sometimes items can go through 200+ enchant attempts and not reach +15 and that is extremely unfair. I believe some sort of enchantment advantage for this system is long overdue.
[Suggestions]
Add enchantment advantage for 12-15.
Even after all these issues, the future of TERA does not look very nice either. The 1/12 KTERA patch notes have shown that the next patch will have TSNM(HM?) and DFHM as the top tier dungeons while cycling out almost all the current dungeons. Why is RM/LK being swept away so quickly? There also does not seem to be any added incentive for PvPers to continue doing what they love most. Perhaps I'm just being cynical but I would very much like to hear the opinion of the community on these points.
tl;dr - Rewarding content = Fun content, increase loot in hard mode dungeons. Lag, dragon eggs, and awakening sucks.
1. Endgame Content Feels Unrewarding
There is very little incentive for fully geared players (I assume by now that this is a big part of the active playerbase atm) to run dungeons or do battlegrounds. Making PvP gear is almost completely useless as all battlegrounds use equalized gear and it is a known fact that open world PvP and duels are quite extinct. Dungeons don't even have to be fun to encourage people to run them, they just have to feel it's worth the time and quite frankly they aren't right now. Rewarding content = Fun content.
[Suggestions]
Increase the amount of loot in dungeons. Feedstock is a great idea, perhaps add some new valuable rare drop as well (This used to be VM8 designs but now they're worthless) as that would be great incentive for people to run the dungeon multiple times over.
2. Server Lag Issues and Harrowhold
Lag in general is extremely annoying to play with in any game and most of the time a small spike is no big deal, but in Harrowhold a couple seconds spike WILL cause an unavoidable wipe at a bad time. Any experienced group has surely experienced this at some point and it's extremely frustrating when 30 people waste a massive amount of time and consumables only to fail while playing perfectly well. Put yourselves in the player's shoes, this is the amount of hurdles we have to go through for Harrowhold at the moment:
a. Obtain a group of 30 skilled players
b. Of those 30 players, they must all sync schedules
c. (Phase 4 only) Passing 2 post-50% bomb phases without it "rng bugging" and spawning 3-4 on a side. This bug in itself honestly deserves it's own section as it causes an almost guaranteed wipe whenever it happens and it seems to happen completely by chance. If there is a way to control this to only 2 per side as I believe is intended PLEASE let me know.
Wiping due to server lag of all things after passing those 3 main points is very frustrating and disheartening and I imagine it is multiplied tenfold for newer learning groups.
[Suggestions]
Please fix the server lag. I know there's nothing EME can do about the bomb mechanic so I won't touch further on that.
3. Vanguards, Reward Points, and Dragon Eggs
Why are reward points not added to the newer dungeon vanguards? I do not want to waste 6/8 of my vanguards everyday doing IoD for them as that would leave me with only 2 left and further discourage doing dungeons and battlegrounds.
On dragon eggs, it was a huge letdown when these were massively delayed until way after the loot box royal dragons came out (Basically saying "You want a dragon? Pay up!" which in itself it not wrong in the slightest but the fact that EME did not release dragon eggs on time makes this look very bad as it looks like it was on purpose.) To further add salt to the wound the rates to obtain a dragon from these eggs is virtually nonexistent. It is quite tedious to gather 50 dragon scales especially for the players who cannot clear Harrowhold, let alone 8 dragon claws. I've seen hundreds of scale eggs opened and tens of claw eggs and not one person I've known got a dragon from either.
[Suggestions]
Add reward points to the vanguard for the new dungeons, increase or announce the rate of obtaining a dragon from the eggs.
4. Awakening
Very few people can relate to this but those who can are heavily affected, especially newer players. Sometimes items can go through 200+ enchant attempts and not reach +15 and that is extremely unfair. I believe some sort of enchantment advantage for this system is long overdue.
[Suggestions]
Add enchantment advantage for 12-15.
Even after all these issues, the future of TERA does not look very nice either. The 1/12 KTERA patch notes have shown that the next patch will have TSNM(HM?) and DFHM as the top tier dungeons while cycling out almost all the current dungeons. Why is RM/LK being swept away so quickly? There also does not seem to be any added incentive for PvPers to continue doing what they love most. Perhaps I'm just being cynical but I would very much like to hear the opinion of the community on these points.
tl;dr - Rewarding content = Fun content, increase loot in hard mode dungeons. Lag, dragon eggs, and awakening sucks.
9
Comments
I have a better suggestion: Remove it.
It's too much for me. A MMORPG to me is about the exploration, the rare items, the achievements and collectibles. The lore, unique places and even the quests. BHS has forgotten this and TERA isn't TERA anymore. It's a different game I wouldn't put my money or time into..
The thing is EME doesn't have to power to change most of the issues you mentioned above, the most they can do it pitch a suggestion to BHS. But there are definitely steps they can take to largely improve the game right now and it bothers me that they don't seem to see any issues.
I have no idea why reward points weren't added to newer dungeons, it seems like an extremely obvious thing to do and I can only guess that they wanted to slow the rate people were advancing through the tiers without spending real money. VG rewards in general have some very odd things about them. Why is the daily bonus reward only for low-mid tier dungeons? Applying those to high tier dungeons, especially rmh with T11 stuff would be an extremely simple way to help the endgame content feel more rewarding at some points.
Ultimately I understand MMO devs have to stall and pad content to stop the user base from "finishing" the game before new content comes out but seeing the dungeons be so incredibly unrewarding makes me feel the rate of new content is dangerously low.
I have someone in my guild that recently quit (well 2 people actually but I only got to talk to one of them) and their main complaint was that things were too repetitive and I can't help but agree. Theres quite a few classes in the game but very few abilities that actually force you to approach a situation differently. For the most part dps stay at the back and use their rotations with only occasional involvement with the boss, usually only stopping to deal with mechanics. Tanks stand in front blocking everything until the occasional attack that must be dodged instead of blocked. Healers just kinda chill and heal until their important mechanics come up. Dealing with mechanics is pretty much the same for every class, if you know how to handle soul spheres on a ninja you also know how to handle it on an archer, or slayer, or reaper.
The only real diversity comes from roles. Occasionally healers or tanks will need to respond differently but usually only in a small way. I just feel its a big waste of the action combat system. Stuff like the gunner being able to warp back to the turret or the ninja being able to teleport behind the boss with decoy strike or pre placing motes to deal cleanse after pusback mechanics are good things that actually might cause you to play the class differently. Of course, mixing up just the direction a dps works from could change things greatly. Imagine a class that needs to hit the boss the front, back, and both sides to trigger their biggest damage skill, or a ranged dps that dpses from the front. Even those are only shallow solutions to the problem.
As someone that primarily plays tanks running into reskins of the same bosses that use the same basic attacks is extremely disheartening. Only needing to actually learn 1-2 bosses per patch is a big problem. You can only recycle the same content so much. It all pretty much comes back to the same thing, not enough new quality content per patch. Broken prison was so disappointing. A whole new dungeon...with 3 reskinned bosses that have 1-2 new attacks and 1 key mechanic. Spend 30 ish minutes learning the new mechanics (and like 5 seconds learning the new attacks) and then done. As teamwork oriented as the mechs are, they don't fundamentally change how you approach the bosses so even though its "new" it feels old very quickly.
If there was a better action MMO out there, I'd be gone and wouldn't look back. Fortunately for tera there is pretty much no competition. Also please stop trying to incentivize me to PvP. i do not like PvP and shouldn't feel like I'm screwing myself out of PvE progress by not doing PvP. Stuff like ambush dropping from CU is ridiculous.
New stuff fin the cash shop looks as though they've put zero thought or effort into it, despite it usually being more expensive than previous stuff.
The dragons...lol the dragons.
One event was so poorly thought out it absolutely killed the economy, even months later.
Class changes are good but they come much to slowly.
The content depends on how fast you can clear and farm. Obviously if you are a hardcore player, you will run out of content rather quickly compared to a player who only plays for a few hours every week.
Disagree with the new cash shop items. The new party costumes are super sexy. All my guild mates think the same. I bought all three. For the cycle mount, well some people like it and other don't. I liked it so I acquired one. My only complain is that perhaps they can reskin some of the older land mounts quicker to be sold on cash shop such a flying cats, unicorns, and so forth.
The dragon mounts. The situation could a have been handle more clean. It's not like you need the dragon mount unless you are a min maxer, in which case you shouldn't have a problem buying one from the trade broker if you don't want to spend emp. I acquired my diamond dragon through emp and my ghost normal version by buying dragon token through the trade broker. I don't play as often
I agree with the event. The event depreciated the value of many enchanting mats. An easy solution is to have only personalized enchanting mats with max limit per account per server. For example a maximum of some number agree by enmass, ex 1000, 2000, ect, of a given type of personalized enchanting mat, premium extensive, mwa, or even feedstock. That way people are limited to acquiring a fix amount per event. In addition, a limited global total amount per server. This way a player can acquire mats that are useful, but at same time can't acquire large quantities without having to farm them in game such as vg and mwa, dungeons, or through cash loot boxes. My main concern is the depreciation of enchanting mats that is acquired by cash shop loot boxes. There is less incentive for people to buy cash shop loot boxes if the enchanting mats aren't worth as much.
I think most people agree on the class changes.
I totally agree, but Koreans love grinding and RNG, like there's nothing better to do.
Awakening is very punishing for casual players who play max 2-4h a day and who aren't that op playing the game.
What really made me quit Tera:
*AV is a ghost town, completely dead. I'll not pay real money to transfer to MT cuz: 1 - It's no my fault that everyone quit the game (when i started, AV was bigger than TR now!), 2 - No way i'll spend money on a game in such a poor state.
*What BHS is doing with end-game gear is very disrespectful with their players: They're raising the gap between old BIS and new BIS (10.5% rn vs 4.5% on VM5/VM6 patch!), the time since there was real value on vm gear (i.e: we could skip the next VM) is long gone. They also made everything more expensive (separate desing for each piece, more RNG on accessories) and they made the actual BIS gear (VM8.5, soon VM9.5) untradeable so we waste everything on the next patch. The gap between mid-tier and BIS (guile vs VM8.5) is an insanely high 21%+, this gap coupled with huge class imbalances means real problems for newer players on some classes running end-game content.
*There was never ever a serious and honest effort from BHS to balance anything on this game: Almost every fkn class balance change they made was with the sole reason to force us to reroll! After 3 or 4 revamps and so much balance promises, they just released another broken af female class that's is dealing 50~100% more than everyone else. So, stupid BHS, you guys gonna revamp again sorc/archer/war/etc till Lunar Dancer DPS or are we idiots? What about the unbalanced casting animations that always favours elins?
*Too much recycled content and bosses: Next patch they'll bring back Kalivan Dreadnaught(!), Abscess(!), Timescape(!), BRNM and also, they'll keep old and boring DFHM and CW lol. First and second bosses on "new" HM dungeon is always reskinned BAMs. For anyone that is playing this game for more than 2x consecutive patch, it feels VERY repetitive.
And so many more things: BHS is completely ignorant about NA markert, they killed PVP, EME server lags, etc...
Tbh, at this point, i think BHS is only milking this game...
Yes ¬.¬