[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
FFXIV is different because it's a subscription game, so it suits them just fine to have people keep working on just one character if they want.
In all seriousness, I don't have a strong opinion on this topic since I usually main one class, second one class, and dabble with the rest.
What? Have you played the same game? FFXIV leveling certainly takes longer, but that is because tera has continually nefed it over and over and over again to get people to "Endgame", or really "Money time" where you spend money to gear up.
Leveling in Tera used to be 40+ hours. I remember when someone doing it in like 20 hours was an amazing feat, where in last night I went 1-60 in 8 hours.
As far as gear, FFXIV is like 1/10th the grind this game is... so yeah.
And no, it wouldn't require a rewrite. The animations already exist, so it wouldn't hurt anything except the race locked ones... and their bottom line for costumes and what not.
This game was already coded to one character one weapon. Making people switch weapons now would require quite a lot of re-coding that considering how old the game is, BHS would most likely think it would have less revenue than whatever work they might have done to make it happen.
Never played PSO2 because it was never brought here to NA, and last time I tested, I was IP blocked from the Asian versions, so as much as I'd like to compare that game to Tera, I can't.
We're already talking about a unrealistic impossible hypothetical thing with class change scrolls, why not imagine an ideal instead of a garbage version?
You don't want a liberating scroll for cosmetics either because having it is anti-money. Again, if you do this, people will be able to just buy one costume for all their alts and trade it as they wish, rather than having to get one for multiple alts if it's a costume they like. And again, this is because the game is all monetized around people making more alts. For time-limited/seasonal cosmetics, being able to reintroduce them on the market at any time by liberating eliminates a significant incentive for people to "stock up" for when the demand goes up, which is another important reason people "invest" in these limited cosmetics.
Now, a feature to transfer a soulbound cosmetic item to one of your alts is potentially manageable if the price is right (since it at least preserves the rarity of time-limited/seasonal cosmetics to some degree), but it has to be balanced so that it's not going to substantially reduce the total amount of cosmetics that people buy. Or you'd have to increase the price of all cosmetics to make up for the fact that people need to buy less to equip their alts due to inexpensive rebinding. (Another famous F2P MMO uses this approach, along with the fact that many cosmetics are time-limited and not directly tradeable.)
So actually, the things you criticize as being "anti-money" are actually themselves the "anti-money" proposals from EME's perspective. They can't just blindly add anything to the cash shop just because people say they'd be willing to pay for it without thinking through the consequences of that decision and how it will impact overall buying habits. EME has been ignoring the anti-money types, and that's basically why we don't have the items you're proposing. But some sort of solution at least for cosmetic items would be a useful quality-of-life improvement, if it can be balanced.
It's much more palatable to sell a ~$15-20 cosmetic rebind scroll so that people can at least salvage those few items that are really prized possessions. It doesn't rock the apple cart too much and preserves the overall business model; in fact, having that option, even at that price point, could encourage some people to buy more rare/limited cosmetics knowing at least they have an option and soulbinding isn't an commitment for eternity. It wouldn't solve the achievement/laurels issue, but there are already problems with that. If you really want to solve that problem, I would just provide people the ability to share some of their achievements account-wide so that there's some sort of increasing recognition for someone who has done lots of work on lots of alts.
This isn't about not wanting to level. it's about if you have a character that you love that has hundreds of thousands of gold worth of cosmetic items or w/e and you don't want to lose that but you personally don't like your class anymore or you've started to main something else and rather have your character as that class instead. Leveling is so fast, easy, and mundane at this point that I doubt the reason people want a class change voucher is to skip leveling.
For that, I'd prefer if they slowly added one or two extra account bound costumes. They did it already with the Steampunk. We could try with something else. Sure, there's a small problem with the steampunk stuff already, and it is that when bought account bound, you get everything separated in your account item claim section. I already have like 7 pages on account bound item claim stuff, and about 3 or so are only from the Steampunk stuff. >.<
This is a good point and a perfect example of why achievements should be account-wide.