Due to the number of questions En Masse Entertainment (EME) was receiving regarding whether or not TERA Proxy (third-party software in general) was ok or not, they provided an updated response.
Legally, they cannot come out and say they will be supporting the current unofficial solutions (because there is no legal binding contract with those third-party developers and their software; liability would fall completely on EME as a result). This was pretty much their stance before the recent DMCA takedown which as I noted in my updated commentary (at the bottom) in my previous blog entry, that EME has come out of this entire situation with egg on their face.
Again, this is coming from someone who does not engage a lot with the online community (forum, Discord, Tumblr, etc). I just play and keep out of the drama since I had enough of becoming too involved with that in Diablo III and then Devilian.
IMHO, those at EME who signed off on the DMCA should be directly addressing the community rather than letting a lower level community management representative just posting the info. From what I’ve seen so far, they’ve painted themselves into a corner on several fronts including better communication (which has to happen both ways), more transparency, and coming up with solutions to address core problems related to the games outdated tech in its code.
The actions will need to speak louder than the above words when it comes to reasonable official solutions because again, I do not realistically believe that Bluehole has what it takes to address TERA’s core issues without tossing bandaid fixes on top of what currently exists. I suppose they could prove folks like myself wrong by biting the bullet and rewriting the TERA client from scratch (and moving to UE4 in the process) but the realistic side of me says that time/resources would be better spent on creating an entirely new TERA related game (and that as mentioned before, was something that Bluehole decided was not going to happen).
And as if the timing weren’t bad (and also proving my point with the cash grab vibe that has been happening with frequency ever since the new product manager came onboard last year), EME released this Lustrous Federation Crate today (players have been long complaining about the acquisition rates in-game but rather than coming up with reasonable adjustments in-game, the product manager in charge of monetizing decides a cash grab solution of using the K-TERA talent crate as being a great idea instead.
I realize production schedules and decisions like this being made ahead of time but a higher up should have realized it would not go over well given the acrimony of the last 2+weeks. It comes across completely as tone deaf (this was something I had huge beefs with Trion Worlds when it came to ill-timed boneheaded decisions) while also taking another backwards step towards doing a better job with communicating (that includes listening) to the community.
UPDATE: On the flipside, part of the player community hasn’t been coming off completely maturely (toxic doesn’t even begin to describe some individuals) where they are doing more damage to how other players perceive the community to be.
Some of these individuals have had an ulterior motive to put a significant dent into the NA player population in order to “put a bag of hurt” on EME. This is also why EME’s updated stance gives off the perception that they caved and implies that they’ve either seen CCU’s drop significantly (and/or a sharp revenue drop off which is what I personally belief has happened on top of the already declining trend for the past 2 years).
The reason I don’t believe CCU’s have fallen that dramatically is because I see it with my own eyes with players in-game. During the time this whole thing was a few days old and I was leveling a new character, the starter zone was heavily filled (and I actually talked to a lot of players who weren’t regulars of the game). Sure, those with a desire to see EME take a huge population hit from this will be biased in how they view things (confirmation bias) and will also say that all the higher level players AFKing in Velika or Highwatch aren’t actually doing content and that the rest who will be staying won’t have anyone to “carry” them through the more difficult content.
That kind of talk is what I call absurd because if there is one thing, “nature abhors a vacuum”. Thus there will always be others who will fill the place of those who have left (especially considering this is a F2P game). It may take awhile for a newer group of players to come together to create their own static or to get geared up. But it’s not like the top ones who have left are the only ones capable.
This is why I’ve stopped becoming too involved in any gaming community. In this particular case, there are several bandwagons that people jump onto and then pile on in with fearmongering propaganda to sway others. I observed several large guilds on the Velika server “quit the game” on October 13th. It’s their right but I also am not naive enough to know that not every single guild member is ok with it. But it’s that old “highschool peer pressure” mentality where they aren’t going to go against the majority.
Myself, no one can tell me what to do with my time or money. So when I see this sort of group think happening in a game, all I can do is shake my head at how so many people cannot think and make decisions for themselves. This is a game. Games are supposed to be fun. There’s a difference between being passionate for a game and being outright obsessive about it where they then decide to kick it to the curb in order to make their point of how right they are. But that is where things currently stands when it comes to how much acrimony there is with the player community (between each other as well as the NA publisher En Masse Entertainment).
