“Community outreach and interaction was key to forging relationships that enabled TERA to succeed. We found great success in TERA in the constant engagement with communities, in building features, and running events and web systems outside of the game that increased engagement inside the game.”
https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/28/en-masse-shifting-and-sharing-with-the-times/
My thoughts? En Masse Entertainment isn’t perfect by any stretch (they’ve had challenges recently with server stability as well as dealing with 3rd party mods) but there is another area where I see differences compared to say Trion Worlds; and that is they try to be far more transparent. They are also brutally frank about the challenges of monetizing a free to play game. Are they perfect in their communication and dealings with the community? No. What I’m saying is they are (IMHO) above average with trying to balance keeping their community happy while also monetizing these games.
That symbiotic relationship (the stuff they do outside the game that increases engagement within the game) is something that Trion is hit or miss on depending on which game of theirs you are talking about. Trion’s community management has a dismal track record with actually following through on giveaways for example (from Twitch streams or contests they run); no one as far as I know ever received their mount for this contest.
These small things were the primary reasons why I made this one of my main games post-Devilian/ArcheAge; it’s about voting with ones wallet.
