Tera Online News

Good day, this is Lime.

First of all we'd like to thank all of you who participated in the discussion regarding group duels during the past two weeks.

The participants of the discussion gave us great feedback on how to make the Group Duel system a fun part of the game, no matter where or when you want to participate in a duel. We've summarized the most interesting suggestions for you.


What do you want to see in TERA's Group Duel system?


1. Bet amount restriction and receiving bonuses
We have been told that being able to set a lower limit for the amount of money that participants can bet in group duels and adding bonuses to the winning team will increase the incentive to participate.


2. Setting restrictions on the battle area and the length of the battle
In the current Group Duel system there are several points that have been pointed out as disappointing.
We're adding options to restrict the battle area and to change the time limit to change some of them.


3. Addition of different battle modes
We've received word that players want to see various battle modes in the group duel system. We were also told that in order to be more fun, various battle items should temporarily spawn during group duels.


4. Increasing the fun of spectating
You told us that it would be fun if duel spectators were not only be able to view the duel from a distance, but also be able to place bets on contestants between each other.


5. Addition of a balancing system
We received word that to make for a fair fight, it would be good if participants could use a balancing system when both parts agree to it, which would balance out the two teams for a fair fight.

Your passionate comments have definitely reached our development team. We're very much looking forward to the day when we can allow everyone to experience the world of TERA.

We would like to thank all of the participants of the past discussion and ask for your cooperation in the 35th upcoming discussion about our website's functionality.

Thank you very much.

Concerning security on TERA, answered by En Masse Entertainment COO Patrick Wyatt:

Greetings from TeraHispano.com, Pat! First of all thanks a lot for your time and for answering our interview questions. How is everything at the moment in the TERA camp?

Thanks for the opportunity to talk to TeraHispano’s fans, Nestor. It has been busy at En Masse Entertainment over the last few months. When we opened the Seattle office in November last year there were only four of us, but we’ve grown dramatically since then--we have 32 people working at En Masse! Now that we’ve brought aboard so many talented people, we’re making preparations for the launch of TERA.

Our most recent effort was preparing for the second Focus Group Test. Unlike a beta test, where users are playing a mostly-complete game and providing feedback about hardware compatibility and server scalability, the Focus Group Test gave several hundred users the chance to play the game early enough in the development process that the dev team will be able to listen to their feedback and then make substantive changes to the game.


I´ve read a lot about your point of view about MMOs security. Let’s talk about this first. Gold farmers and game-fraudsters earn about 1-10 billon dollars annually. With TERA in the eyes of a lot of people (and growing) I think you should know TERA will be focused by these "cybercriminals". Are you conscious of this?

We’re very much aware of the problems caused by cybercriminals in other online games; given the enormous amount of money that they can generate by gold farming and stealing game accounts, then selling game gold for real-world money, it’s no surprise that they’re already looking into TERA. While their interest does validate the growing excitement for our game, we know that online crime is a critically important problem to solve, and that we have to do much more than other game publishers have done in the past. Players have already seen that simply pulling out the “ban-hammer”—as publishers have done for many other games—is an ineffective solution.

We have a lot of work to do to ensure that our game has a high-quality play environment free from chat-spam, account theft, purchase fraud, phishing, scamming, and all the other nasty behaviors that criminals use to make money. We don’t have these mechanisms in place yet because we’ve been focused on creating an excellent gameplay experience first. That said we know it is a critical area for us to innovate before we launch to ensure that gamers have a great experience playing TERA. Just so no one gets alarmed by that statement, we won’t be using GameGuard or its like.

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