En Masse Entertainment (EME) posted a “direct” message from the Bluehole (Krafton’s subsidiary design studio) development team handling TERA’s development.
Part of this is a response to the survey that was posted on their behalf by EME as well as feedback they received from a similar survey done with K-TERA earlier in the year. Much of the near term solutions revolve around the main complains regarding character leveling, gearing (the entire RNG enchanting process), skill advancement (the amount of advancement XP as well as gold required per character), redundant daily farming routine (to get the materials and XP needed for advancement), addressing the low card fragment drop rate, and dealing with other limitations “proactively”. Some of these have been handled with the recent events (but obviously aren’t enough).
Part of the November 26th update (and associated update in other regions) will deal with these as an interim step. They did mention these issues are being tackled from the perspective of what can be easily addressed first (and that additional improvements will come in subsequent patches). The issues with the new gearing system will come in a later update (in the meantime, enchanting of the level 65 gear; Frostmetal through Stormcry will be eased including less item XP and materials as well as increasing their success rate). None of these interim solutions deal with the issue of needing more varied/new content and game systems that will keep player engagement from continuously declining.
The fact that Krafton/Bluehole even put out this survey (through their subsidiary EME) and are actually acting upon some of it within a month, shows how the metrics across all regions fell off a cliff (starting with a gradual decline from the level 70 update and a much sharper drop with the Exodor update). These designs (at least their implementation) were a severe miscalculation by the product director who has been pushing these designs at Bluehole. The above is what should have happened at least 3 months ago (better late than never though) and is one of the main reasons why I decided against try hard leveling to 70. If only that sort of data points existed (with hard core grinders and try hards representing the majority), they would’ve just seen data that said “no problem” here because the majority are leveling up. And this has always been a problem with the player base (grinding through content and throwing money at terrible design decisions).
This interim step MAY temporaily stabilize the declining player retention numbers; but they need to quickly deal with the new gearing system as well as introducing actual new content in order to keep players engaged (and to give players a reason to return or new players a reason to stick around). Games like this are supposed to have fun elements; not to always feel like work. Based on the above, I will resume my leveling progression (which I’ve stopped again even with this current event) in order to evaluate these interim changes.
