WTB competent game publishers and game development studios…
I hate to just casually throw around the “I” word (incompetence) when it comes to the game publishers and/or developers but En Masse Entertainment (EME) is coming really close. It wasn’t always like this…. but they’ve gone downhill since 2016 when most of the originals left. No, it wasn’t because it took their ops team an extra 6.5 hours to deploy the update. I know that shit happens no matter how many times you test things in a non-production environment (plus I’ve seen longer downtimes). It’s what happened once the patch went live.
Semi-enigmatic Scrolls (an item used to reset properties on a piece of gear) dismantles into 800 Entropic Tokens. Entropic Tokens themselves allow purchasing materials used for gear enchanting (like Golden/Silver Talents). The problem is that Semi-enigmatic Scrolls were added into this shop for 28 Entropic Tokens… do the math here…
So players who spotted this early on, began dismantling their Semi-enigmatic scrolls (800 Entropic Tokens) and re-bought them back for 28. Rinse and repeat until EME removed the scrolls from the shop. Some folks ended up acquiring mass amounts of Entropic Tokens (see image below) and began purchasing Golden/Silver Talents (a required material for gear enchanting or for crafting upwards for higher tier gear enchanting material like Golden Darics, Silver Siglos, and Golden/Silver Plates) from the Entropic Token shop in bunches (they cost 30 Entropic Tokens).
EME in a nutshell just wrecked the TERA NA economy since one of their QA people (you know, the folks who are supposed to go over the patch and check them for things like this) noted on the EME Discord they do not foresee a rollback because it was Bluehole that worked out the prices for the NA region economy. Sure, the developer can work out that information BUT the publisher is supposed to also do their due diligence and go over the patch (I do realize the QA priority for many publishers is to make sure the payment flow is working properly first, but they still own damaging issues like this).
EME eventually removed the Golden/Silver talents from the Entropic shop but the damage was already done (there were some who managed to purchase tens of thousands of Golden/Silver Talents). This is an issue that needs to be escalated up the chain of command and properly dealt with. IMHO, a rollback is no longer valid because hours have passed already and there would be too much disruption in progression for those who had nothing to do with the above (and aren’t even aware – like new players; and they should not be punished – the ones who took advantage are the ones that EME needs to deal with).
But most competent publishers (well, even incompetent ones like Trion Worlds had contingencies in place to deal with things like this) at least have some form of standard operating procedure to deal with differing levels of exploits. Something like this is contained within a specific timeframe where that data can be extracted and looked at. It’s time they are going to have to eat if they care about the state of the game they are managing.
Seriously, EME have already been skating on thin ice and aren’t doing themselves any favors by taking such an initial “oh well” approach to what is clearly an exploit. Why should anyone now spend money with EME? I stopped well before this (like when they couldn’t even be concerned with keeping the dressing room properly updated). They can go and look at my EMP purchase history to see how much money I spent (mainly for cosmetic items) as a sign of support (I didn’t go crazy either though else I’d easily have been TERA Rewards Tier 10 a longtime ago).
But they’re managing to make Gameforge and Playwith look incredibly competent by comparison (and neither of them are good including Playwith which on my incompetence scale, ranked way below Trion Worlds).
P.S. – As far as the reset scrolls go, it sucks for those players who did not open up their Elite Consumable boxes before the patch because those gave 1 each of the various dungeon reset scrolls. Also, for players that had Elite and actually logged into each server before the server merge, that’s a ton of boxes they would have had). Since the adventure token system replaces these reset scrolls, any unused ones are NPC fodder for the following prices:
Alpha – 3 gold
Beta – 15 gold
Gamma – 85 gold
Delta – 525 gold
Epsilon – 8,750 gold
Zeta – 11,000 gold
Eta – 15,000 gold
I haven’t sold all of my scrolls yet and I made 14 million gold. Before that, I had a total of around 2.75 million gold across all of my characters on Velika server. And no, I don’t feel suddenly rich because of that since it’s just causing the price of things to inflate as well (if you were a frequent user of the trade broker). And I know there are a lot more players who had double through quadruple the amount of scrolls I had. A lot of stuff that had been listed on the trade broker before the patch went live, ended up being scooped up as a result.
This is why the lack of advance patch notes is an issue since there were also a lot of players who did not know these changes were incoming where they failed to open their boxes. I tended to stockpile them as well but once I learned about the changes, began opening them up the week the patch went live in EU and SEA regions. After the update, the boxes no longer give those scrolls. Given the gold costs involved with the new skill advancement system, even this amount of gold isn’t going to cut it with a roster full of characters.
These scrolls are a separate game economy issue that is not related to the Entropic Token exploit though.
