TERA Players Aren't Happy With En Masse's Handling Of Vanarch Exploits

Written by: QuintLyn (Twitter @QuintLyn - Google+) | July 9, 2012 12:30 pm

35 Comments

TERA‘s long awaited Vanarch system was released in the US recently and it hasn’t taken one industrious group of players long to figure out how to take advantage of it.

According to a very lengthy thread on the TERA forums, larger guilds are separating into smaller guilds and trading kills in order to feed points and win a zone — as well as take advantage of all the perks that go along with that.

Needless to say, TERA‘s player base is less than happy with the situation. Still, according to a screencap of a players chat with a GM, the tactic may be an exploit but it’s not against the ToS. In fact, the GM states that until the system is changed, this will just continue to happen, so at present there is no action being taken against the players.

To further complicate matters, at one point one of the GM’s began muting players in chat and is reported to have sent them the following message:

Some of the muting may have been in response to players spamming the channel and baiting the GM’s.

While I can understand the frustration and angst from both sides. I feel that at this point, everyone needs to take a deep breath, count to ten and calm down a little.

What do you think? Leave a comment below and chime in!

TERA Players Aren't Happy With En Masse's Handling Of Vanarch Exploits

TERA

A TERA Sequel?

Bluehole Studios Is Hiring For Their Next Game; Possibly A TERA sequel.Read more »

7 comments
1:40

TERA

TERA Introduces All New SAMs

TERA has announced a new PVE update including all new SAMsRead more »

5 comments
TERA: Rising

TERA: Rising Reaches Over One Million Players in North America

En Masse Entertainment reports that players in TERA: Rising have increased to over 1.4 million in North America. A Five-day in game event will be held in celebration. Read more »

6 comments

http://profile.yahoo.com/YSVAPKVBUPTX6YS3W2DLPOBNN4 AlokP

My understanding was that some players were spam reporting in-game and on chat, and the GM muted them in chat then sent that warning. At some point, a customer becomes so high-maintenance and such a nuisance that just the GM resources spent trying to calm them down isn’t worth the $180 a year. The customer isn’t always right, no matter what the cliches say.
- http://twitter.com/Mantose Leo P
  
  They dont have enough customers to be this rude to any players. They probably should have been more polite no matter how bad the customer was….
  
  The reason the customer is always right is because if they are treated poorly it will ruin the reputation of the company. Customers dont really care what the true story is, they only care about how the company treats customers. So they think if the company can treat someone this poorly , maybe next time it will be me.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Willi-Enderle/1668850948 Willi Enderle

A rise of the smaller guilds wouldnt work in TERA.
The system isnt made for that.

In EVE you could destroy ships, stations and whatever.
But in TERA you cant do anything like that. You couldnt deal permanent damage to punish those big “evil” guilds.
- http://quintlyn.com/ QuintLyn Bowers
  
  Yeah. I didn’t really think it was, but I wasn’t sure. That’s why I said “IF” you can do that, do it because it really is an amazing amount of fun and you’ll feel great about doing it.
Makeitso GW

So THAT’S what goes on under Seattle?
- Old Ben
  
  Looks like the Tera GMs are a bunch of basement-dwellers.
  
  Then again, there’s a reference to “action”, so maybe they’re the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles…
7BitBrian

This is just some horrible PR, even if it was blown out of proportion, it’s out there right now, and bad PR like this can make or break a game. I don’t play Tera but I hope they see how this was handled wrongly and take care of it.
http://twitter.com/BPowered Brainpowered

They have locked the original thread and posted a stickie on the general forums.

#1

07/09/2012, 09:39 AM

To quote Minea.

“Using another guild composed of alternate characters to farm GvG points
for the vanarch election is not an acceptable way to become a vanarch
and we take this matter seriously. We are investigating this issue and
will take appropriate action.”

To add further clarify, we are going to continue to iterate on the GvG
system and plug holes where needed. I have seen many good ideas of how
to ‘fix it’ but none are bullet proof. In the meantime we are going to
take action and reset points to 0 if you are kill trading with alts.

http://tera-forums.enmasse.com/forums/general-discussion/topics/Vanarch-GvG-and-killing-Alts-for-points?page=1
http://twitter.com/Thaguf Thaguf

Crap GMs for a crap game.
http://profile.yahoo.com/Z36GPOU3Q2QIQYBIDVNQAVGNGE Raul

“if You don’t enjoy Your experience with the Game,
Your subscription doesn’t mean enough to us for You to stay”

Good luck with the future, enmasse.

-Now if I can just spike the rest of the world’s water supply with truth serum.
Jason Barlow

Doesn’t matter what happened, The GM is wrong for responding how he did. Being the front line of Customer Service you need to be the face of the company. With a face like that people will walk away. It is just bad business practice anyway you look at it.
- Old Ben
  
  Well, yes and no. By trying to keep everyone “happy” (i.e., subscribed), including scammers, ninjas and anti-social players in general, Blizzard has allowed its player base to decline to the point where civilized players feel like they’re no longer welcome (let alone valued).
  
  Obviously if Tera’s GMs respond like that to every player, they’re going to be looking for a new job soon, but if this was just one particularly disruptive player, it’s good to see that the En Masse won’t bend over and take it just for fear of losing that subscriber. It’s not even (just) a matter of principle; in the long run keeping an asshole subscribed can cause them to lose several other subscriptions.
  
  I don’t really care enough about Tera to investigate, but if that was what happened, the response would actually make me _more_ likely to play their games.
  - http://twitter.com/Mantose Leo P
    
    Bliz has about 10 million good reasons why they try to keep everyone happy …
    
    Tera has less than a million from what I have seen/heard/read and with bad press like this , I doubt they will surpass 1 million
    
    Dealing poorly with almost any subscriber will lose you many more in the future.
    
    There is a right way and a wrong way to deal with customers … Tera/en masse obviously picked the wrong way in this situation.
    - Old Ben
      
      > Bliz has about 10 million good reasons why
      > they try to keep everyone happy
      
      They would probably have 12 million (or more) if they were a bit more selective about _who_ they choose to keep happy. Valve’s Gabe Newell has talked about this in several interviews; some players bring more people to the game (or make others want to stay), some players drive people away.
      
      Of the “10 million subscribers” WoW supposedly has, I doubt more than half were around before WotLK. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised it it was less than 25%. Of the people I played with regularly in vanilla and TBC, not a single one has an active subscription (actually, I think one has an annual pass, but doesn’t actually play). Most left during WotLK, came back to check Cataclysm, saw that it was basically more of the same with declining civility, and gave up for good.
      
      Player churn is at an all-time high in WoW. Blizzard spends huge amounts of money on worldwide advertising (and gives away free copies of Diablo 3, etc.) to replace the players it loses, and is still not managing to do it fast enough, despite the fact that the video game market is growing, especially in the East.
      
      WoW didn’t go into decline because of Rift, Aion or SWTOR, it went into decline because of WoW.
      
      If they hadn’t gone after the “casual jerk” demographic, they would probably have held on to most of their original player base, and kept growing slowly but steadily (as they were up to the release of WotLK).
      
      Like I said, I have no idea about the details in this situation (and could hardly care less about Tera or En Masse), but I would applaud a company willing to put the health and civility of its player base above its focus on short-term profits.
      - http://twitter.com/Mantose Leo P
        
        I dont disagree, I do disagree with how they went about making this known to their players. Poor manners is poor manners no matter what type of customer it is towards.
        
        10 million 12 million…. lol who cares its many many many more than others.
        
        Turnover is expected … and not many people will spend more than a few months on a game nevermind close to 10 years.
        
        Fact is no other game really comes close to WoW numbers .. so they must be doing something right, otherwise the game would have crashed and burned long ago.
      - Old Ben
        
        > I do disagree with how they went about
        > making this known to their players.
        
        You don’t know that (unless you were there, and were one of those players). For all you know, this was the 10th reply they got, after they kept spamming chat and flooding the GMs with support requests.
        
        There comes a point where they have to either say “if you’re that unhappy, leave” or just disconnect them without giving a reason. The latter, IMO would have been a lot ruder.
        
        Like I said, I don’t know what led up to that message (assuming it’s real), but I can definitely remember some similar situations in other games where seeing a GM do that would have significantly improved my opinion of him.
        
        > and not many people will spend more
        > than a few months on a game
        
        WoW was clearly designed to keep people subscribed for more than “a few months”. And it managed to do that just fine, up to the end of TBC. Most people who started playing in vanilla were still around for WotLK’s release.
        
        > Fact is no other game really comes close
        > to WoW numbers .. so they must be
        > doing something right
        
        They certainly _did_ a lot of things right to get to this point (a large company, with a presence in almost every country, international marketing, support for lots of languages, etc.).
        
        But when (despite the millions of new players brought in by that marketing), their population still goes down by 20% in less than two years, they’ve clearly started doing several things wrong.
      - http://twitter.com/Mantose Leo P
        
        doesnt change the fact that they were rude to their customers. there is a right way and a wrong way to deal with customers, they chose the wrong way. not sure how many times I have to say that before you understand it.
        
        would love to see some facts instead of your speculation on the wow subscription times before and after wotlk.
        
        wow is old, new games are coming out. its a fact of life , old stuff dies. I am surprised wow has lasted this long … and to be honest it isnt dead, they still have more subs than every other mmo. so I am not sure why you are beating this dead horse.
      - Old Ben
        
        > doesnt change the fact that they were
        > rude to their customers
        
        They said “if you don’t enjoy the game, you’re free to leave; we’re not obsessed with your money”. Which part of that is “rude”, exactly?
        
        How would _you_ have handled it, if you had a guy flooding support and chat with complaints about something that you had already replied to? Disconnect him silently and pretend you had nothing to do with it? Let him keep flooding chat and delaying support replies to everyone else?
        
        > there is a right way and a wrong way to deal with
        > customers, they chose the wrong way. not sure
        > how many times I have to say that before you
        > understand it.
        
        Repeating your opinion isn’t going to make me agree with you. Like I said at the start, if this was a message sent to a player who had been persisting in spamming chat and flooding the GMs with the same issue again and again, despite having already received a reply, then I think they handled it “the right way”.
        
        You’re free to disagree and think they should have thanked him for his behavior or tell him that they were so obssessed with his money that they’d put up with it, but that would just be _your_ opinion. It doesn’t make it “right”, just as it doesn’t make mine “wrong”.
        
        Regardless of how many times you repeat it.
        
        > would love to see some facts instead of your
        > speculation on the wow subscription times
        > before and after wotlk.
        
        So would I. Unfortunately Blizzard releases less and less data about their subscriptions each year (I wonder why). You can’t even get separate subscription numbers for the East and West, now, let alone find out the average duration of the subscriptions or how many of those subscriptions are just annual passes paid by players who aren’t even playing anymore.
        
        The only detailed data I have is from my own experience and from the experience of the people I used to play with.
  - http://quintlyn.com/ QuintLyn Bowers
    
    A few players reported getting that message. However, an equal amount accused them of photoshopping it. So it’s up to you who you believe. That said. The GM could have said essentially the same thing with slightly better phrasing.
    
    It’s not always what you say, but how you say it.
    - Old Ben
      
      > A few players reported getting that message.
      
      That’s still kind of vague. Did they get that message out of the blue? Or did they get it after being told several times that the issue was being looked into, and chose to continue spamming chat and flooding GMs with reports about the same issue (delaying support for everybody else)?
      
      > The GM could have said essentially the same
      > thing with slightly better phrasing.
      
      I’m not sure (s)he could. Seems pretty straightforward: “We have read the reports. We are working on them. If you are so bothered that you can’t stop screaming, feel free to leave.”
      
      I guess the alternative most companies would have used would be to simply mute or disconnect those players without saying anything (pretend it was a “technical problem”), which IMO would have been dishonest.
Krzysztof Kotarba

Tera should be F2P…
- http://profile.yahoo.com/3JO75BNS43WDETCNCO7F7XS6Q4 jo
  
  it soon will be F2P, and closed down in europe.
- Hannah Gibbs
  
  It technically is free to play, with chronoscrolls. Just buy the game, have the gold, buy a scroll off a player ingame.
  I don’t agree with making it f2p because if they were to add a cash shop with items that actually benefit players, it WILL break the game.
  - Old Ben
    
    Someone still has to buy the scroll, no? Same as PLEX in Eve. Just because it’s not you paying the subscription that doesn’t mean your subscription doesn’t have to be paid.
http://twitter.com/Nathiest Nathiest

Why does everyone seem to think nowadays borken shiz will be fix overnight? No. Overnight fixes rarely happen. Weeks is the norm. Take a chill pill people.
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_R35J5EUERGS3E6JRIQMBCDTRRY Nathan I
  
  and yet the exact same problem already happened when the same thing was introduced in korea and was fixed. Looks like EME was too lazy to take notes from BHS.
Sharuko

This is the Eve type politics that we need more off, sometimes drama is nice to have in a game. Sounds exactly like the Eve exploit where they were farming each other.
- http://twitter.com/Mantose Leo P
  
  lol, leave it to you to attempt to find some sort of silver lining for tera…
  
  You will have to work harder though.
- Spammerbam
  
  And suddenly it’s a good thing because it’s Tera..
  
  Nice to know you’re are okay with having terrible customer service while paying a monthly sub.
http://twitter.com/Mantose Leo P

This sort of reminds me back in the EQ days when there was an issue many players were not happy with. They grouped together and held a protest outside of Freeport.

One of the major guys at the time came in and had some words with the disgruntled people. Lets just say he didnt send the message to his playerbase that their subscription didnt matter to Sony.

En Masse/Tera will not profit from this type of behavior.
Brian Simon

I called it the day we heard about this system. Granted, it’s not exactly rocket science, but still,,,
http://twitter.com/DaPhoolz Rp TheFoolz

it’s a shame. Fair play is extremely rare these days. if still exist.
Kyan Vermet

I played the demo for about an hour… then I realised how boring the game is still I love drama
http://profile.yahoo.com/ID77ZEQTZQN52Y4E7TONBVIMZA cheeseflygon…

“if You don’t enjoy your experience with the game,
your subscription doesn’t mean enough to us for you to stay” I thought this quote was hilarious xD
http://profile.yahoo.com/ITHF7XKYGVXFAPCDMDJTKHLBBU Lian Wan

Doesn’t the Korean version of the game have the same system? Are the Korean players just “nicer” so this never came up?

TERA Players Aren't Happy With En Masse's Handling Of Vanarch Exploits

A TERA Sequel?

TERA Introduces All New SAMs

TERA: Rising Reaches Over One Million Players in North America

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Sign in to your account