Seasonal Server?
Hello my dudes. I have not played Tera in a while but I miss the combat. I am not much of a fan of what Tera has become with the pet and card stuff. They look like mobile game chicanery. I am however, an altaholic.
I kind of wish instead they'd put up a seasonal server that refreshes every few months or something. The end of the season they could show rankings based on achievement points and pvp rankings before it resets. Buy stuff from the store? Maybe at the end your account gets tokens it can use in an in-game shop so you get some of that value back you can use for in game cosmetics. I'd like there to be zero buddyup code use on this server and no experience perks. It's supposed to be a challenge mode server after all. There could be achievements for leveling one of every race and/or class on this server. LMK what you think.
Comments
even if you're rank 1 every season, besides the title I dont think theres much value to it. You get a mask ticket and some other small items, but they are supposed to be making pvp more relevent in an upcoming patch which might make ranking much more active. Even if they made a new server the main issue would be motivating people to do pvp (since pvp is dead most of the time)
I'm not a fan of the "mobile game chicanery" like pets, cards, adventure coins, etc. either, and I think a lot of other people have voiced that same concern besides. But... the whole reason they're doing this sort of stuff is to diversify their revenue beyond cosmetics (even though I don't think these particular things are the right way).
Setting up this server with this special configuration would take a bunch of work (both one-time and on-going), and by making it temporary and eliminating the "perks" (which I assume would also mean neutering Elite further, not having TERA Rewards, etc.), how will it at least cover its costs? Why would anyone buy anything from the store for temporary characters, even if they do get turned into "tokens" (which is even more work to program in a fair way)? If this is a seasonal server, and if it's a competition, why would anyone create "mains" anyway (why not keep creating temp characters)? And if you're truly trying to make it a challenge mode free of other perks, does that mean it'd be isolated from the main servers in its own instance-matching group? (If so, wouldn't that just make queues worse for everyone?) And even as a competition, what would be in it for the winners?
When they've created event servers like this in the past in other regions (e.g. legacy server, leveling server, etc.), their answer was to make it a one-time temporary server, and at the end of the event your character transfers to the main servers. So it was basically an unusual one-time event to encourage people to return to the game, and then after the event was over everyone merged into the game proper.
Anyway, I don't think it's a bad idea, but I also don't think it's a likely idea either. The risk is that it'd just pull some of the players that are left from the mainline servers (reducing the pool of players in end-game) and eliminate the meaningful sense of progress that is part of what convinces people to invest in the game. I think better to try to bring some "challenge mode" ideas back into the game proper.