He also created a virtual machine with everything in place (new Web API and Steer Box components) which allows most folks to get up and running really quickly.

Patch v71.03 is before the level cap was increased to 70, and has the older Arsenal gear system (basically Guardian through Heroic Oath).  It also has the older client UI.  It’s also just before the aerial Guardian Legion missions were added (so it has the skywhale performing its leisurely cruise over Val Aureum before exiting out to the abyss).  Yes, there are merits to getting older builds (more on that below).

While this one happens to be an older build, I look at each one of these as an archived preservation of the game (more so now that the PC version no longer operates officially).  Older patches for example have game systems that were disabled/had their functionality actually removed (Crusades and Alliances being prime examples) in later builds.  What I hope to see for example, are those builds (as well as the older ones with the Vanarch political system).  It’s all a long shot, but some of that exists (Akeron has the Fate of Arun Russian leak while TERA CZ is a hodgepodge of this and later patches; both of these are tightly held though).

I do have to say that it’s HIGHLY unusual to see a full official server build leak out from what was the NA publisher EME which was also a Bluehole subsidiary (given that relationship, plus the usual policies and protocols that are put into place to prevent such unauthorized leaks from happening or being deployed outside the publishers server environment).  Since it seems that this wasn’t a QA build (like 92.03 and 100.02), the Arbiter Server was DRM’ed (it had to be run on a specific EME system AND the year had to be 2018).  That check however was patched out by another TERA RZ community member (hsdn).  Sure, EME stopped operating back in 2020, but I am sure a lot of of its employees (especially ones who worked closely with the game/backend) have remained within the game industry where you just sign new NDA’s and contracts (trust is always an issue in this area so it’s not a good look for ex-employees that may have worked in this area when leaks of this this sort are out in public).

Bluehole/Krafton has kept a relatively hands off approach to this (only early on were they aggressive with the DMCA takedowns of file archives; I have a large mirror for example and would know about such actions).  And none of the private servers have been taken down via a cease and desist order (there has only been a C&D that Menma’s said they received, but that hasn’t been independently validated as originating from Krafton’s legal counsel).  I do know that IP stakeholders HAVE TO go through this legal process once they determine that someone else is using their IP to make money (doesn’t matter if it is under the guise of donations) since failing to do so, could result in them losing those intellectual property rights, service/trade marks, copyrights, etc.

What’s becoming somewhat clearer though is the relatively large number of leaked builds that are likely in the possession of people (most of the older pre-v50 patches seem to have come out of the old Russian publisher, Destiny Games, while the post-v88 ones have come out of the Taiwanese publisher, HappyTuk).  Only the HappyTuk (v92.03 to v100.02) and now this EME build have seen wider distribution.  The HappyTuk v105 QA server files remain tightly held similar to the Russian server files.

I do understand the desires of intellectual property owners not wanting that IP to be hijacked/used/profited from improperly.  Me as a regular person though, likes the whole archival/preservation aspect when it comes to running the official server binaries locally (like what I’m doing), or even having the ability to clean reverse engineer them (which the DMCA exemption allowed for back in 2018).  The fact that there are now three different official versions widely available, is just remarkable since it’s normally just difficult to have ONE completely functional version (case in point is nothing for Devilian or ArcheAge 3.x being in the hands of just a few people).

While they did warn all of this would eventually be removed, it took them only a week to make it all go poof (Twitter, Facebook, forum, web site, YouTube).  Thus even their recently posted Last Quest cinematics for TERA, disappeared as well (I have them backed up on my channel; it’s just disgusting how much Gameforge doesn’t give a damn about anything).

En Masse slowly turned off most of their presence but left their YouTube channel.  The Trion Worlds YouTube channel didn’t disappear immediately after Gamigo took over (they slowly removed it even though they maintain the branding for the remainder of the Glyph platform games that were part of Trion’s portfolio; the Trove channel however still has livestreams from the Trion days).

After taking on SOLO, Gameforge’s community management for TERA really nosedived.  Backing up a bit, when they took over EME’s NA region in November 2020, it wasn’t any sort of improvement from my point of view since by that time, they internally seemed to have already wound down on TERA (as they were probably in negotiation talks at that time with SOLO’s developers to publish the game in the west).  Most my TERA Thalers balance was converted from my EME EMP (since Bluehole had paid Gameforge to honor our virtual currency balance), so thankfully, I didn’t spend a lot of money with this TRASH company.

Now contrast this with the Japanese publisher of TERA, Pmang.  First of all, it should be noted that parent Neowiz’ (which owns the Bless IP and isn’t great regardless of region serviced) owns the Japanese subsidiary GameOn Co Ltd and it’s Pmang portal subsidiary.  Pmang maintained their JTERA social media presence and web site even after their shutdown in April (they all have the appropriate notices in place stating that their capacity as official publisher ended on April 20, 2022 @8:30AM).

Then on June 30th, they tweeted out about their Japanese translation of The Last Quest cinematic which is posted on their JTERA website

守護者の皆様、こんにちは！
韓国で実装された「Last Quest(日本語字幕)」動画を公開しました。
共に歩んだ戦友たちとの最終章をぜひご覧ください！

シャネーラ「もう…行くのね？」

▼動画はこちらからご覧ください。https://t.co/vUXRoEAHwE #TERA_JP pic.twitter.com/qXLRveG46l

— TERA公式【サービス終了】 (@teraonline_jp) July 1, 2022

https://twitter.com/teraonline_jp/status/1542799074344128513

Their site is still region locked to Japan but here’s a screenshot of their final tribute as the game closed on PC in the remaining regions.

And this is the Japanese sub of The Last Quest:

They obviously didn’t have to do any of this, but did it for the players who supported them (as publisher) and TERA JP.  This is how you maintain some goodwill and loyalty.  Yes, eventually even Pmang will remove all of this (the difference is they aren’t in a rush).  Most publishers (especially the ones who service western regions) have absolutely no clue on how to do that because all their executive leadership cares about is extracting as much money out of our wallets with minimal effort for everything else.

Gameforge has handled several of these service migrations including TERA SEA and RU.  The most confusing thing for players will be how Gameforge sets up players that have used the same e-mail address, as sub-accounts that you needed to switch between if you already had a prior TERA EU account.   I remember after the SEA transfer occurred, I logged into my original EU account for TERA, and switched to the SEA server, and didn’t see my characters there.  It turns out they linked your original TERA account to have access to the other server BUT it’s actually a separate sub-account.   I presume this is how they’ll handle it for NA.

EME has updated their support page to cover this change.  Players who have purchased EMP (the virtual currency) will also have their balance transfer over (this is remarkably good news) at a rate of 100 EMP to 10 TERA Thalers (Gameforge’s version).  Interesting, anyone who has Elite already enabled will see that carry over, and will also see TERA Club benefits on the other Gameforge servers.  Elite vouchers will not actually work once the service migration happens though so any such vouchers need to be used before the EME servers shutdown on November 9th (so it looks like there will 3 days of downtime).  The TERA Rewards system was a unique feature of TERA NA and will not transfer over.  Gameforge also has their own FAQ regarding the changes.

Patch v97 also includes a new 20 player raid, the return of Rift’s Edge dungeon (5-player format), and a revamped version of RK-9 Kennel (Hard).

This game mode is associated with the portals (that have trees sprouting out of them) that have been appearing around the large cities (like the following in Velika).

There had been speculation that this might have been a new story line associated with a series of wanted posters of various TERA heroes that were being posted on EME’s Twitter feed as well as the following.

All of these teasers are associated with this new game mode which will be released in the fall.  There’s a small amount of lore information they also posted:

After the defeat of Shandra Manaya, strange portals appeared across the world, offering glimpses of other realms where dead heroes lived on, live heroes fell into darkness, and heroes that never were stepped up to save the world. 

To learn more about these strange visions of alternate realities, a group of heroes fought their way through to a new realm called Agaia, where they encountered eerie replicas of themselves from worlds almost, but not quite the same as their own. 

In this twisted underworld stands a majestic structure known only as the Tower of Shara, an architectural wonder defended by even more familiar faces. Only this time, they’re ones corrupted and controlled by the mysterious…Manahan?

“The heroes you’ll control in TERA Battle Arena each have their own skill sets and abilities, drawn from those TERA players have spent years mastering.  Players will also be able to customize their heroes with runes and cosmetic items.”

The runes aspect reminds me of Devilian’s Devilian transformation mode (where you had not only separate gear, but a separate skill system with runes of varying quality which modified the way those skills worked).  It will be interesting to see if this is another small part of that game which will live on in some form in TERA.

K-TERA received the upgrade on May 28th; Bluehole/Krafton’s technical director Jin-ho Kim had a Q&A interview with Inven regarding the update which provides further details to the above linked note.

One of the key points he noted is that moving the client to 64-bit will remove one of the key limitations that prevented design and development teams from implementing new types of content.  Generally, they had to be careful since the game was really sitting on a foundation that wasn’t able to handle certain (read large scale) types of content.  Memory constraints with the 32-bit client impacted performance including loading in graphical assets; something that long time TERA players visually experienced with the texture loading prioritization default gray character model silhouettes and the FPS drops (where visual assets are automatically reduced) for the auto optimization system employed for Guardian Legion missions, as well as stability (due to the addressable memory limitations).

Kim said it was the TERA’s development teams wish for a long time due to the constraints on the type of content they could pursue.  And unsurprisingly, he mentioned it ended up being a “massive project” that took longer than expected and required a company effort.  While the graphics (assets, animations, skill effects) have not been changed, the prior techniques used for “optimization” are effectively lifted and thus some players will notice a graphics improvement (both performance and visually).  One of those constraints; level of detail (LOD) being drastically cut back for major regions has now been removed which translates into better overall visuals (a good example is how objects are rendered when they are far off in the distance).

As noted before, since they also upgraded the Unreal Engine 3 build to one of the final versions (before Unreal Engine 4 was deployed by Epic Games), this will also allow Bluehole to further optimize the graphics performance (and also increase some of the visuals) in the future.  Technical upgrades were also made including multithreaded rendering (taking advantage of multicore processors in most modern PC’s) as well as asynchronous loading which will eliminate that infamous screen freeze that happens as resources are loaded (again, normally seen in Guardian Legion missions).

Besides providing a new foundation to design new content for TERA, the team is also evaluating the official support of add-ons (which as of now, is via unsupported and at times, questionable client side modules).  There are some really good quality of life ones though and it would be nice to see an actual supported framework for them.  Kim did mention they are open to this possibility (but it will likely be a lower priority project).

Kim was also candid with some of the various bugs in the game (not surprising given the amount of stuff that has been added over the years by different development teams and their respective cast of rotating personnel).  It’s something they want to tackle but acknowledges it will take time to address.  He was also upfront about challenges with server side lag since they haven’t yet tackled server side optimization (which is actually where a lot of the spaghetti code logic involved with calculations take place) which they hope to deal with in the second half of this year.

As expected, the actual rollout for K-TERA wasn’t issue free. Players there still experienced technical problems including client crashes (bugs specific to the new client code are going to create this duality for awhile where players are expecting better stability, but are going to see bugs from completely different issues that were previously the root cause of crashes).

I thought the most funniest part of his interview was with “renewing the graphics”; where Kim talked with the various production people and artistic director (where they said they “wanted to do everything”).  Like any major project, it’s a matter of resources; time, money, and people.  And Kim acknowledged that the amount of work is “so large” that it is difficult now (but not out of the question).  Opinion:  what they really need to evaluate is the end goal.  It doesn’t make sense to invest the resources into trying to perform too much optimization around even the latest Unreal Engine 3 build.  If you are going to even considering redoing graphical assets, it really makes sense to just redo everything in Unreal Engine 4 at minimum or Unreal Engine 5.  Whether or not they are open to effectively rewriting the game code from scratch, is something they need to look at in the context of addressing the spaghetti code cruft (where the bulk of the bugs exist).

Basically, it’s the exploding parts problem and it really does come down to resources (time, money, engineering personnel, coders, artists and animators) since it does amount to the sort of production resources that goes into creating new games.  The player side of me would love to see something like this come to fruition BUT the business hat wearing side of me does not see the case of it in a niche title like TERA.  Regardless, I cannot complain about a better foundation being put in place since it’s a better start than nothing at all.

The current patch is v93 where a lot of changes were made to the level 65-70 progression as well as gearing.  The APEX quest chain has been simplified (the need to kill multiple dragons have been reduced to one in each of the stages) and nerfed (mob health and damage reduced).  The previous gearing system has been mostly depreciated; you can still enchant Guardian gear all the way to Heroic Oath using Metamorphic Tokens and gold with 100% success rate but it’s not really needed if a character hasn’t yet completed the APEX skill awakening quest chain.

As part of the revised APEX storyline, new Exodor starter gear is provided at the start (this gear is around equivalent to Stormcry (SC) and is more than sufficient to clear the nerfed awakening content).  This “scout” gear can also be enchanted with weapon and armor feedstock specific to it (and this gear can later be disenchanted into materials that can be used to enchant the more permanent Exodor superior tier of gear).  The prior green and blue (uncommon and rare) equipment drops are pretty much irrelevant (except for disenchanting for materials) because the yellow superior gear (Annihilation and Dark Light) now drop in abundance such that there are pages of them on the trade broker (just need to play through Exodor to hit 69 to begin using them).  The scout gear is good enough to take a character through the Exodor story line.  For characters that completed APEX prior to this change, the new enchanting with only Metamorphic tokens and gold can bring it up to SC+9 which is also good enough to complete the Exodor main story quest line.

All of the prior daily quests (that was required to grind from 65-70) have been removed and Vanguard Requests for those zones (which requires killing a 100 of those area mobs) has replaced that as part of the XP, gold, and material reward loop.  The initial Exodor story line now takes a character from 65-68 due to the increased experience rewarded.  Basically, all of the prior ridiculous grind (which was due to Bluehole/Krafton piecemeal releasing bits of content over the course of 2018 and 2019), has been better streamlined and reduced drastically to something that is more sensible.  I resumed playing my main character (ninja) and simply purchased Dark Light gear (with the proper stats and whatever desirable random properties) from the trade broker.  The success rate for enchanting has also been increased where you don’t go through 10+ failed enchants even at lower levels (presume that becomes the norm at higher enchants).  Additionally, patch v91 (looking that up, this was around March) brought about the newer Mythic tier of gear.

I also played some alts that I had not yet played through the APEX awakening quest chain and then through the initial Exodor story line that leads to level 68 and the actual entry into Exodor.  Basically, there was a reason I hadn’t bothered before and that was due to the unsatisfying grind involved.  The previous Arsenal patch gear and enchanting system (with all of its different materials and item XP) also wasn’t lost on me.  I never did tryhard enchant that tier of gear myself (the only time I did was during the special enchanting events where I finally got my main up to Stormcry).  But I know others that did (spending a lot of materials and gold in the process, not to mention the item XP grind).  For those alts that I did complete APEX for, I had to enchant the existing Frostmetal or Stormcry (SC) gear to SC+9 since there is no way to acquire the Exodor “scout” gear (it’s only available if a character has not completed the APEX quest chain).

In another twist of irony, characters that had already completed the entire Exodor main story, have a lot less advanced skill points unless you played a lot of Exodor content before these later patches.  The reason again is that the revised quest chain from 65-68 rewards a lot of advanced skill experience.  So some of my alts are sitting on triple the amount of advanced skill points at level 68 compared to my main level 70.  This is typical Bluehole/Krafton though where their catch up mechanisms favor the “better off not to play for a long time” philosophy.  The Exodor open world content is still unappealing meh though.

Humorously, it’s like the current TERA development team did a complete full circle with the equipment system where it’s now back to random properties and rolls with feedstock material used for enchanting.  And since K-TERA is months ahead, a preview of a later patch shows they will be introducing the ability to re-roll properties (which was something that was part of the old Visionmaker gear system that preceded the Arsenal version) as well as a reutilizing the crystal slots (that are unused with the current Exodor equipment).  That’s why I’m referring to all of this as the Dejavu gear system.

It also looks like Bluehole/Krafton is planning on something new with the games storyline since there is something in the skies above Arborea (they recently hinted in K-TERA that it’s a new planet).  Great, seems like they are hellbent on the aliens from another planet angle versus trying to clean up the incomplete mess with the Island of Dawn.

While I know it was the prior team that had originally written the level 65 quest chain on the Island of Dawn where they had hinted it was slowly recovering (Signs of Hope quest in patch v68 below), everything there now seems to have come to a standstill in terms of that particular story line (I would’ve personally liked to see this current TERA team complete that and at least return the Island back to its prior colorful/unburnt out state).

Since the BAM’s there are largely irrelevant now, the zone is also no longer a major stopping point since the level 65 quest chain is now focused on the Exodor story line (and not the post Fate of Arun quest chain that took players to the Island of Dawn where the quest chain came to a sort of incomplete ending that looks like it was meant to be continued, but never happened as the development team ended up changing at least twice before the current team).  This is pretty much the story with TERA’s chop suey handling of its story lines.

On the technical news front, K-TERA 64-client client test server was also recently closed so it is looking like they may deploy that during the summer in Korea (and likely the fall in other regions).  This should eliminate some of the memory related issues which causes a lot of client related crashes.  My expectations for dramatic improvements to the games content and graphics aren’t very high though.  This is just something that will allow the game to run on updated/supported Windows systems (since Microsoft is slowly phasing out support for pre-Windows 10) for the next few years (TERA does fill a niche where there are enough hardcore players that still spend money on it in each region that can keep it afloat). Myself, it’s sadly no longer a play everyday game for me (taking an almost 6 month break can also do that).  And this years anniversary (8th) events are also pretty lackluster (I remember last year, how much 7th anniversary scarves I had; the 5th year one was the most memorable since it was the last one with open world blue boxes and those cool Mystel wings in the above image).

As far as publisher En Masse Entertainment goes, no improvements there.  I would say they’ve gone further downhill and have become even more loot box crazy (they now publish the percentages on these newer loot boxes) in terms of the newer stuff they have for sale.  Thanks but no thanks.  I guess I’ll see how long the current patch keeps me occupied since the only other game I’ve been playing has been ArcheAge Unchained.

This new mount says it all… or more specifically, the description.

Fastest flight speed and a passive buff that allows flying (without the use of Azart Elixirs) on Exodor once a character completes the main story line.

I label this as a blatant cash grab because while Bluehole/Krafton did have a mechanism that eventually allowed flight with existing mounts, the above telegraphs how the Exodor content was purposely made inconvenient (in order to leverage a QoL feature that isn’t temporary like the Azart Elixir buff) where there are going to be cash shop solutions.  I wouldn’t expect anything less from a product manager that worked on Black Desert Online (BDO) at Pearl Abyss, who has been leading the TERA design team for over an year now.

When you complete the main story line, Exodor reputation merchants are unlocked where you can perform the Exodor dailies in order to earn points.  With some of the merchants, completing their dailies gives you varying lengths of this flight buff (and also allows using the jump platforms).  You can also purchase Azart Elixirs for 200 reputation credits which provide a shorter (15 minutes if I recall) buff that also stacks with same buff given by the reputation NPC’s.  These purchasable potions can be stacked for up to 2 hours (you’ll just need to buy a lot of them).

Moving around Exodor on the ground is inconvenient not only due to its layout, but also because you will easily aggro mobs due to how tightly they are placed in some areas where there are choke points (and unless you are geared towards the higher end, is a slow going process to take them out).  The above IMHO, is just the beginning of the QoL improvements (monetized via the cash shop so that players can buy back that functionality that was either removed or made inconvenient enough) that will be introduced going forward.  This is one of the key reasons why I refused to even buy into BDO even at its low price because I find the entire “nickle and dime” to buy back your RNG or QoL approach, to be near the top (loot boxes will always be the number one though).  In TERA, we’re about to see both dominating its business model (since loot boxes are still abundant as is tossing this sort of content specific QoL mount into RNG boxes).

This new mount lacks the actual power buffs (like existing ones that increase crit power) which likely will be introduced in the future to not only build on the increased flight speed and flight ability on Exodor, but to also enhance power for the new gear system.  For NA publisher En Masse Entertainment (EME), this new mount is being introduced via their Christmas time Golden Gift Box event which is not guaranteed (the jackpot items you could receive are RNG).  I believe the price for a single box is around $20 US (can’t recall exactly and the gift shop is not up yet for me to check).  It nonetheless is still one of the more blatant cash grabs in recent months (on top of the loot box with the new feedstock for enchanting the new gear).

This unfortunately is not how you retain long time players (especially ones like myself who have limits on what I consider as acceptable when it comes to monetization).  The current team managing TERA at Bluehole/Krafton has also lost the plot as far as I am concerned while EME has managed to fall below EU publisher Gameforge starting in full earnest since 2017 (and are probably close to Trion Worlds level).  The usual suspects will spend a lot of money trying to get this (and they are free to spend their money whichever way they chose to do so) but doing that does nothing to help improve the game; it only incentivizes both publisher and developer to release more of these type of cash grabs and to do so in ways that takes advantage of how much those folks are willing to bear (and as I mentioned before, this is one of those games which has a portion of the player base that has way too much money than actual sense by helping to perpetuate these sort of business practices).  So once again, here I am willing to spend money BUT not in this way (so the wallet closes and remains shut).

My actual engagement of the Exodor content has been minimal since its launch (I did complete the story line and still have to edit together clips of the post 65 quest chain so that I have a video showcasing what little actual new content has been holding things over the past 1.5 years) and I see myself at the start of a slow disengagement from the game itself (which can be easily overtaken by ArcheAge Unchained since even though I have issues with the management of the game, that aspect has been nothing new in recent years – I’ve still found ways to enjoy the actual games themselves despite the lousy oversight).

This is again, a major problem with the game industry where far too much of it is low quality effort on the part of both the developers and publishers because they have a willing group of customers that pay into such garbage (which is why I am writing about the poor experience with ArcheAge Unchained because I should’ve known better that it would not even be primetime ready, and I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt when I hit the purchase button, thus becoming a part of the problem).

I’m not complaining; I’m just saying that after months of slow progress, I didn’t expect the reduction in the amount of XP required to level to be that much where a solo dungeon boss would finally put me over the top (I normally record once I get close to leveling up so that I can grab a frame with the level up graphics).

So what does this mean?  It means alts are at least a thing again in terms of at least hitting max level.  I’m also presuming the changes made to Frostmetal and Stormcry enchanting (item XP/material reduction and increased success rate) will at least reduce the progression wall.  Leveling skill XP is still a per character thing though (and still costly in terms of the amount of gold required to completely level all 3 advanced skills and unlocking all three options for the two skill optimizations.

(*) – This was probably a bug since I ran Pit of Petrax on a level 66 character and received 180K XP from Withered Petrax.  My client crashed before I managed to check the system messages tab to see how much XP I had received at level 69.  My last screen shot was from last week where I am just a little over 4 bars into 69 (cropped below).  Level 69-70 required 40 billion XP before todays update (I am not sure how much they squished this by).

So there is probably an error in whatever scaling they use for calculating experience percentage rewarded at level 67, 68, and 69 where I got way more XP than intended.  I’m not complaining (I just don’t believe this was intended).

I did a set of Exodor dailies (70 and 71 zones) and while they did reduce level 65+ mob HP and attack damage, it still is time consuming and not very engaging (considering the rewards for completing the objectives are XP if below 70 and the credits for reputation NPC’s).  They need to rebalance these dailies, the rewards, the gear enchanting RNG all at once in order to dial in a more appropriate effort/reward ratio.  They also need to have a system for level 70 where the XP is converted into EP.

EME is also running a daily login event called Exodor Supply Drop (rewards 6 times per day with 45 minutes of total play time and six cumulative rewards at 5 hour intervals from 50-75 hours) until December 17th.  The rewards are primarily Exodor focus (token/badges, feedstock, ores, and armor chests).  Translation?  The second row of accumulated hours is telling; it’s to boost the login and concurrency metrics back up to more reasonable levels (these are several core metrics normally used for determining if the product managers will end up retaining their positions or not).

This is also supposed to intersect with their Black Friday sales event which is in conjunction with their EMP bundle promotion (so basically a revenue bump which is another important metric that has probably taken a significant hit over the course of this year).  I usually purchase Elite vouchers when they tend to be discounted heavily during this event (though I’ve been playing without Elite since I am rarely playing nowadays).  I still have 15K EMP left from the last time I purchased the limited 35K EMP bundle (which is normally either during this holiday period or during their anniversary week).

Most all of my goodwill has been exhausted where I have reason to be cynical in this regards due to EME’s conscious decision to eliminate their community teams (having them to take on other non-community facing tasks) and to effectively have very little engagement except Discord (which I do not consider proper community management/interaction since I feel that it is a low grade effort to rely primarily on a chat based platform).  I know this is something other publishers have also done (including Gamigo) where their forums are echo chambers.  If these publishing companies handled things a lot better, I would have no problems spending way more and in the case of EME, doing things like EMP giveaways on my own (and being a better recommender instead of having to be more critical of the overall poor handling of these titles).