[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.
[TERA Console] The Grotto of Lost Souls update (v85) is now live! Read the patch notes here: https://bit.ly/TERACon_v85
[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
[TERA PC & CONSOLE] Summerfest Part 2: The Beach Bash is on from August 11 until September 1! Participate in event activities to earn tokens redeemable for costumes, consumables, mounts, and more! Details: https://bit.ly/tera_sf20
Comments
Its just that certain people fail to see such fruit and it rottens for years.
The newest ktera patch brings a new enchanting system... and then removes every dungeon, replaces them with more stuff people have done before, and expects that to be fine for several months. At this rate, there's no way the game will last "five years" like that other dude was saying. Not in the west at least. Not with games like BDO and FFXIV -- which aren't even that good -- sapping players every day. So many people who've been with this game since the start have finally cut their losses and left, because they see no reason to continue. The content has been stripped to the bone, and even when you try to run something the game is too laggy for it to be enjoyable. It doesn't matter how many new people join for a week or two and then quit; you always get that in free to play games since it's easy to check them out. What matters is keeping people around, and tera legit can't do it. I'm an officer in a guild that gets new people all the time, and once they hit 65 they basically quit a week later, nearly every time, even with everyone helping them gear up and being there with them. It's exhausting when you realize that no matter how supportive your guild is, it can't compete against the terrible server stability and the lack of stuff to do.
They've spent years stripping the game down, killing pvp, killing crafting, killing pve, and now there's nothing left to do in the game except run solo stuff or do harrowhold and people are leaving so they're trying to fix it in Korea, but any change they give them will take us five to six months before we even see it in NA. So even if it's a great fix that changes everything, the kinds of people required to make MMOs function, like guild leaders and content organizers and raid runners, will have all gotten fed up and moved on before we even see the changes. It's already happening. I'm not trying to be a downer, just keeping it real. I logged in today and LFG was actually empty. There wasn't even a guy trying to sell stuff in there, just empty. The day after a content patch. Everyone I know is playing FFXIV and BDO. Even the hardcore HH raiders from last patch that I knew have left. You need glasses if you think the game's in a great place.
To fix these issues, first and foremost BHS would have to care about optimization efforts in places outside of Korea. They won't though; they've had years to care about it, and the most we got was a new party UI. You'll always have terrible delay on your skills when your ping spikes, which it will, even if your connection is amazing, and if you try to work around it in any way, EME will ban your account for using third party tools that let you play their game in an acceptable manner. That in itself is grounds to just play something else. Stability is an issue. They won't do anything about it. They punish others who try to do something about it. So people leave in droves for games that don't have these issues. You look at BDO, it's packed and their server lag is nowhere near as bad as Tera's. This game's a ghost town and it can't even handle an event without nearly crashing the servers. I've gotten off track, but yes -- server stability and optimization should be priority one. They aren't, though. And they haven't been for a long time. Don't hold your breath.
Next would be variety. The old game had way more stuff to do, which is weird. Usually games have more content over time, not less. When I first joined, in addition to dungeons, you could focus on crafting and actually make some money from it if you chose a decent craft, you could pvp without feeling like you were wasting your time, you could do alliance vault with your guildmates, you could do alliance stuff in general, you could queue blast from the past and show newbies around, there were more vanguard dailies per character so you could keep doing dungeons without feeling like it was worthless. Now, it's possible to cap on a character in an hour from purely solo activities. Beyond that, there's not much left. Crafting's dead, won't be good again for like six months. Every pvper I know is done with it. Alliance is gone. Blast from the Past isn't a thing anymore either. And the world is full of these reputation daily merchants that hint at yet another concept that they tried and threw in the trash. Bringing all of these things back -- hell, raising the vanguard cap from 8 to 16 -- would give people more things to do when they log in. Otherwise folks just log in, check LFG, and log out when it's dead. But none of that will happen until Korea demands it, because BHS are the ones who handle that and they only care about their Korean players. Ping's fine in Korea, so why look into NA's problems. Optimization's fine in Korea, so who cares that it sucks in NA? Players in Korean net cafes don't mind having 8 vanguards, so NA players will love it too.
Your list of suggestions is great, OP, but as long as the game's development team in Korea continues to not-care about their international players, there's no future for this game. It's already dying out and I don't think a new gearing system will change a thing. I am thankful that discord exists, so that long after this game vanishes I will still have a way to contact the friends I've made through tera. I'm sad to say that I'd give it another year at best, unless things turn around in an unprecedented fashion.
As a former guild lead that has rebuilt my guild three times (and finally let go this year after losing everyone to disinterest), I couldn't agree more. This game is in a terrible spot and has no way to hold people's interest. I talk to my friends on discord who are way more into Tera than I am, and I can't get them to run any dungeons or anything related to Tera. Maybe like 2 vshm a day then they're bored and go to play PUBG or Overwatch. I'm alone most of the time on Tera so even I'm getting to that point where I just don't want to log in, and even I'm considering finding another game to occupy my time.
I also resent BHS for catering to only Korea. I know they are based there, but if they're to take cash from other regions they need to give a [filtered] about them too. I've made a vow to never play an mmo that is ported from overseas again, because it's clear the companies don't listen to the publishers (Sorry EME unless you have an interview stream with BHS about how to repair the state of the game you'll never convince me, I feel like you guys are on different pages on how to run the game. It feels like you guys don't have a close relationship.)
Anyway, just about everything fun about Tera is gone. Just my thoughts. I'm still hanging around to see if things improve but we'll see won't we.
1 SERVERS AND STABILITY
2 ADD WHAT WAS REMOVED(alliance, nexus etc)
This pretty much. I was in a very active and friendly guild and when the VH/VS patch rolled around most active members quit because they cleared all the new and returning instances within a few days of release. Some also quit because the prospect of MW/rerolling/enchating/etc new gear gave them a burn out in advance.
Soooo, the very active guild i was in pretty much died within a month of the new patch and now i have even less reason to log in. Especially on AV since LFG is empty most of the time and instance matching takes forever.
Also those old green quests were basically the old vanguard quests and the way to make money and also the only way to obtain Zyrks. It was better in a sense since they forced you to travel around the map and the quests didn't punish you for grouping like with the IoD dailies.
My love for this game went all the way back to 2009 when BHS started releasing teasers and alpha footage of this beautiful game which stood out greatly from the once-current MMORPG line-up. They announced that it planned to have all of these amazing features, one of them being "completely open-world". This meant at one point they planned on having the entire map accessible by regular means very early in development, but was scrapped. Through out their release of early concept art, it shows that they planned on having air-crafts and boats, large and vast environments to explore without the need of teleportation.
When I paid for pre-order to get an early start in the closed beta testing, I was thrilled. I got to see how different it was to every other game I played, and they told us that TERA would develop over time, with new features like the vanarch system's instanced guild housing, expansion on pet skills and pet taming, and possibilities for new areas in the future. However, over the first year I played, it started to show slumps and problems, and I became worried the game would shutdown before it hit it's 2nd year... but, it didn't. When the game went F2P, I had hope that these promises would still fulfilled with the future they planned... starting with the Fate of Arun expansion.
It's been almost 3 years since that expansion, 5 years of TERA in NA, and over 10 years since it's first public announcement... I haven't stopped waiting for these changes.
I know by now things will probably stay the same, and I don't mind it really... I enjoyed exploring the voids, unfinished/abandon areas, bugs and glitches, and all of the misadventures that came with playing TERA... even kind-of shaping me into who I am today. I've already known why TERA never got to be what BHS wanted it to be, as there is a lot of legal conflicts in the gaming industry, as well as budget and time restraints (especially on that time part... people push workers too hard to get things out before the holiday)... Heck, I even know if they had spare time or sheer will-power, they could of done it too... but for me, I'm okay with what I got... because in the end, between what it was dreamed to be, what it was and what it became, I made friends, had fun and learned a lot of new things along the way... I'm happy with that. If BHS ever plans to bring-back/add features that made TERA so dynamic from the rest, I'd be extremely grateful... but until then, I'll just keep waiting.