Enmasse, agent in US and Europe for Tera, among other games, has figured out a new way to Screw their player base. This time it’s a “Server Merge”. Before we get into that, let’s remember the two ways that Enmasse has screwed it’s player base before:
- In September of 2016, Enmasse changed the rules for guilds. You had to maintain a certain status of guild accomplishments over time to be allowed to have a Guild Bank. Obviously a Guild Bank is useful to allow players to share loot among different accounts, on the same server.
- Some time, before this as I recall, they changed the number of accounts that could log in from the same IP address, in 24 hours, from 10 to 6. This allows you to have only SIX family members playing the game, or only Six friends over at a time for a TERA Lan Party night or whatever, but maybe those are corner cases. So for some reason, they were trying to limit the number of these “Alternative Accounts” as they call them. Correction: Testing indicates a max of 5 Alternate Accounts accessed in 24 hours, not 6.
Ok. So as you’ll read below, maybe this server merge is not a complete Screw Job, but it’s not as nice as it could be and it’s work for all the players that are still playing the game.
Previous Screw Jobs
It seems that the guild change above, was to nerf the usefulness of Alternative accounts and also, by the way, of Family Guilds, so if you and your children, or you and your parents, are Tera players, you get Screwed, since the work required to keep up a guild Active enough to maintain that Guild Bank is pretty well impossible for a Family, let along a Solo Player. And this was by design. No Guild Banks for you. You aren’t a serious player.
What I don’t get is “Who the Freak Cares”? Was your database full? After years of supporting Family Guilds or Solo Player / Alternate Account Guilds – with Banks, they removed it. What hurt / harm was it causing anyone? Was it taking away money that they might have gotten. What it caused me to do was just play less and now, NO Tera. Yep. Left the game for greener Pastures. So, Was that good for them? Few “Active Monthly Accounts” that’s for sure. That does not look good. Those are the stats folks care about, right?
So what’s the latest SCREW JOB?
They are doing a Server Merge and Limiting the Number of Characters that are merged.
Server Merge Coming on 18 Sept
Here comes the Server Merge. There are some important Rules here:
But here’s the fix, apparently.
Eight free slots across the whole account to use to fix things up.
Not sure why they just didn’t do the merge and only bother folks that had more than 20 characters on a server, and then allow them to “Transfer” those characters to another server for free. Simpler? Maybe not since banks etc. Doing a transfer without allowing you to clean up get into or out of a bank before you do that might be a mess.
Whatever, at least I think I can fix up my accounts. But what this Server Merge really means is that Tera player population is dwindling. Not surprising really. I’ll bet it is not because server computers are more powerful and we don’t need as many servers as previously. Right?
Other Games Do This Differently
What Blizzard did when Wow population dwindled a few years back was completely different. They did connected realms. The Wow Realm [server] you were on became sort of a Tag that was largely invisible. When you played out there in the world, folks from lots of “realms” were playing together. Just like you had to combine folks from different realms into a dungeon when they queued for it, now just playing in the open world added folks from different realms. Your Realm became sort of an invisible tag on your name. Tera could have done that too, but it is more expensive. It requires software development and testing. This “Server Merge” thing is all on the users. So, Bluehole and Enmasse aren’t in it for the long term or they would have fixed the server code rather than messing up the users.
Guild Wars 2 never did have such a problem. From the beginning their worlds did not have “Realms” or “Servers”. GW2 has US and EU and other regions, which of course do not play together. But when you create a character in a region of GW2, it’s global across the entire region. Servers / Realms / or what used to be called “Shards” way back in the first MMOs, are completely invisible. And you need to have a “Join” command to join with your party member into the same computer server if they don’t happen to be in the same server as you are when you party up.
Tera and Enmasse have gone “On the Cheap” for a few years now. After the 60 – 65 content, The Fate of Arun, they have only added dungeons – which are much cheaper to add – and filled in classes that were Gender / Class locked previously by adding missing “Genders” or “Races” to existing classes.
Not sure how exciting adding a new Elin Gunner to the game can be, really.
OMG Look at how many dungeons have been removed!
It’s been a while since I’ve played. I’m not clear on the advantage of removing content. And I can’t think of any content that has been removed from Wow, even though most folks just skip through it to max level. The Bluehole folks clearly have a different model in mind for “MMO” than most of them out there. Anyway.
So, 11 am tomorrow, I need to start logging into some of my accounts and clean them up to prepare for the merge. It will take a couple of days because I have more than six “Alternative Accounts”. I have so many that I have a google docs spreadsheet with all the details so I can sort it out.
Sigh.
Update: Breaking news: The server merge is apparently merging all PVE servers together. Celestial Hills (RP) – role playing server, Ascension Valley, and Tempest Reach are all merging together. Until today, the fate of Celestial Hills was not decided. This will likely cause yet more folks to have to delete characters since it means that three servers are merging into one server with a maximum of 20 toons per server. I wonder how hard could it be to upgrade servers to allow more than 20 toons per server.
Also, there is apparently a Name Wipe that is planned for after the merge. Oddly. This mean that folks may have to rename their characters twice. The last Name Wipe, as far as I could find was in September 2016, which freed up names of characters that had not logged in since September 2015.
If you are interested in this, you may want to follow the blow by blow issues and updates as they happen here at the Tera Forums News and Announcements section.
:ww
Windy Weather 