Giving this whole thing an initial benefit of the doubt, there were way too many red flags that it really wasn’t something official (my source not being able to find out anything from his contacts at Krafton was pretty much the biggest giveaway though). But as I mentioned before, I wanted to see what would happen.
One of the administrators on the Discord for this TERA SEA server, posted images from the game client (and also a terse post that it is “100 and 64-bit”). I immediately knew it was the virtual machine made by tya411 as well since the level1 test character (an elin valk) is in the character selection lobby from one of the screenshots.
This is therefore the v100.02 server binaries that were recently made more widely available back in May, which obviously means this is NOT an officially licensed version of TERA being operated by GameOn, Co Ltd. (if it was actually official, they would have access to the final build which is v116; the KR build with the last quest). In short, it’s another rogue private server that is being run.
This is fine so long as they do not misrepresent they are official (which means they have a publishing contract and licensing agreement from Krafton/Bluehole) or misrepresenting this is being operated by GameOn, Co. Ltd as noted on the Twitter account being used (GameOn again, used to publish TERA in Japan until it shutdown on April 20th).
But that is exactly where they are getting off to a wrong start (IMHO) having initially spammed their Twitter announcement all over the place (I guess an initial red flag), and then being vague when responding to some really basic initial inquiries on whether or not this was really official; there is literally no need to be evasive if you know you are using leaked official server binaries to create a rogue server. But doing things this way makes it difficult to trust the underlying intentions (especially if you are trying to misrepresent this as official).
There’s already a lot of competition in this rogue server space with two established for over an year; Asura (which has a lot of players from the RU region) and Menma’s (which has soaked up some of the Gameforge hardcores). There are also lesser known ones like TERA Magic (Russian) and TERA CZ (which is an older “classic” version). To put it more simply, there’s a point where population splitting becomes an issue; where some rogue servers will flourish while other won’t. Region/language specific ones are obviously doing well and Menma’s has developed a solid reputation when it comes to interaction and support. This TERA SEA “Official” (which isn’t official) server’s reputation is already on the line before it launches; IMHO, they should be upfront about what they are now versus giving potential players false expectations.
UPDATE: a few users chatted overnight asking about transparency on their Discord since they also seemed to be taking a wait and see attitude. From what I could gather, a lot of this seems to be communication related (one of the devs/admins seems to be a non-native speaker of english). They did change the name of the project to TERAS overnight. They’ve also changed the Twitter name and bio to make it more clear that the official name of the project is TERAS. This is fine and I wish them the best of luck with their private server.
In other rogue/private server news, a US based rogue server is also in the works; OMNI TERA (and will also be based on v100.02).
Finally, v100.02 is also not going to be the end of the line since the rest of the server binaries that were available to HappyTuk until their closure, were all siphoned off (that means up to v109-110; the patch after this was v112 which was a combined build released after HappyTuk sunset the game). Like v100.02 which took awhile to surface to a wider audience, no one knows how long any of those remaining versions of TERA will see the actual light of day (I’m pretty sure some of it is going to go up on the auction block ).
UPDATE 2: I don’t know what the deal is with this group (TERAS). The original Twitter account was noted as misleading by a lot of people; that was chalked up to a non-native speaker of english. That same admin (with a new name), has now posted what looks like a slick website (not going to link it) which hosts several other games including their TERAS private server.
What gets me is the amount of bovine feces on this site (lot of the terms of service portion for example are lifted verbatim from other gaming sites where portions of it does not apply because they do not have a valid licensing agreement for any of those titles).
But the biggest piece of BS is the “WE ARE LUNASSOFT WEST” information that tries to create the impression that this is a established worldwide publishing company. Established in 1997 (domain name created on June 28, 2022); ok, let’s go further and ask if this was such a long established company, you’d think it would show up in sites like Crunchbase or ZoomInfo. Headquartered in Seoul, South Korea (no such company registered since it does not show up in sites like DART or Hometax; domain also registered from a Vietnamese provider). And then the rest of the obvious lies. I did a worldwide trademark lookup for LN® just to humor myself and unsurprisingly enough, any trademark registrations are to totally different corporations in Vietnam, Asia, South Korea, Thailand, etc.
There is an obvious trend with MISREPRESENTING who they are. Something like the above goes beyond a simple language misunderstanding because it is blatantly MISLEADING. And that speaks a lot to the character of whomever is overseeing that private server project. Beware if you play on this server (especially if it ends up being heavily monetized). And anyone who is asked to work on this private server project, should probably steer clear of it.
