Hello, my name is Menma, Lead Developer of Menma’s TERA. This will be our first developer’s note, where I will be discussing and addressing future and upcoming plans for the game, as well as current issues.
About Me
I’m a 22 year old self-taught software developer who started playing TERA on 2017, just about 4 years ago. I played in the EU Region, in Killian server, and later on moved to Mystel alongside my guild at that time. When I started playing the game I joined a relatively new and small PvE guild that had very experienced PvE players, who were even able to top the rankings of their class after a while. Me being a completely new player alongside these people, I received tons of help to eventually be able to learn the PvE side of the game and improve myself. Later on I stepped up to lead the guild, and it reached its peak level of performance at the time of my “serving”. Things happened tho and a couple of months later most of our people either stopped playing, or moved out to join other guilds since we were getting pretty inactive in general. About that time I started playing Valkyrie and was getting into the PvP side of the game. Fascinated by the big fights and the wipes following proper coordination of many people, I joined a small PvP guild for a few weeks, and later on a much bigger one that was recently established and had known and skilled PvP players which ended up doing exceptionally well in competing against the 2 other top PvP guilds. And a couple of patches later, guilds and people quitting, a guild merge and a mass guild server transfer, I ended up stepping up to lead that guild as well. That time for PvP wasn’t really the best and we were struggling a lot for content, but we were confidently the best PvP guild in the server and managed to get some good time out of it. A few months later I had to quit the game due to real life obligations and then I returned as casual player, just looking for fun mostly with a few friends. Eventually I decided to forcefully end my time as a player, following many unpleasant experiences I had with several people. And we are now in October of 2020.
History of the Menma’s TERA Server Project
All this time in TERA I was getting more and more familiar with what is making this game tick and how everything works together for us to be able to play, and following the familiar to everyone COVID-19 lockdowns, I finally had an opportunity to do what I’ve always wanted (at least sort of). Create a TERA private server and attempt to solve the majority of the problems we’ve been having with this game for a long time now. The reason I say sort of is because I originally wanted to create a “classic” server but, with technical issues getting in the way, I ended up with patch 92. Still worked fine for me, so I started doing a lot of research on it and when I finally got a server running and showed it to a good old friend of mine they were fascinated and instantly wanted to contribute and make this into a public project accessible by everyone. We agreed to a deal and they supported the project by covering the server costs for the first 4 months, in order to prepare things for public opening. To this day if it wasn’t for them, this project would never be alive as a TERA server is quite demanding in hardware power and costs to run one are pretty high for my own standards so I would never be able to cover them alone.
The Process of Getting to Release
In order for the server to reach a proper point that will be playable and will have enough content as well as give people reasons to play here instead of somewhere else, we needed a lot of ideas, a lot of work to implement, and a lot of testing. All these require time. The original plan was to do everything in the Closed Beta Testing phase of the game and then head straight to release, but at that time the project wasn’t widely known and while we did have a few people to do initial testing we still didn’t have enough available to do testing of the parts of the game (as well as the whole system of the game) in a much higher concurrent player count. So we decided to do a one month Open Beta Testing phase which is the point we reached our all time peak of ~140 concurrent players. In the end it really was needed. At the end of Open Beta Testing, we’ve reached a state where we mostly understood what we had to cover. We had to change our original plans and readjust our priorities.
Post Open Beta Testing Preparations for Release
A critical time period is here. I have to properly prepare cause after release, mistakes can cost a lot. We can’t reset the server again, no one will want to start from zero again, so I have to be extra careful. At the same time period I receive an offer from a friend for a real life business opportunity. This was very important for me so I had to readjust my priorities. Remember that all this time I have been the only person who has been making all the changes and creating all the systems, programs, and everything required for the game to run. So after the business opportunity I got, TERA is lower in my list of priorities and things are slowing down at this point. Release has to be delayed for more than a week and I have to rush changes, taking shortcuts as much as we can afford to. Thankfully I now have one more person helping me make the changes as a volunteer. I am much thankful to him, as well as everyone who has volunteered and helped a lot with their own different ways. They all played a big part in the creation of this server. But despite all that more time was required and we didn’t have any, the time for release is now set and cannot be changed again.
Post-Release Issues
I am not gonna lie, I wasn’t certain if we were really ready for release. But I couldn’t delay it more, so we went ahead. The time for release comes, I didn’t sleep for almost 2 days to prepare everything for it, we’re working, making the changes, server resets, release is now here. But of course, I missed quite a few stuff. Day 2 had to be a 7-hour long maintenance to fix the issues of release, and more maintenance in day 3, short one this time, to get the game to a properly playable state. Problems are still there though, and that is one of the reasons we are here. So time to get into them.
The State of PvE – Current Issues and Proposed Solutions
PvE is going much better than I anticipated. While the server population is relatively low, people seem to be quite interested in the process of gearing up, clearing their favorite dungeons and progressing. Despite that, we do have a few issues that need to be addressed first, before moving on in more updates.
| Issue Description | Proposed Solution | Confirmed / Accepted | Patch Version To Be Expected | Additional Information |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kaia’s Gear Upgrade NPC quests are too many and require completing dungeons that are not available. | Modify “Kaia’s Anvil” quest to be instantly accessible when a character reaches level 70. | Yes / Yes | 1.0.3 | None |
| The Guardian Missions are finishing too fast and there aren’t alternative options for when they finish earlier than the specified time. | Increase the amount of channels in the Guardian Legion Missions Locations from 1 to 5. | Yes / Yes | 1.0.3 | None |
| The Guardian Legion Merchant is outdated. | Update the merchant item table to a new one that contains, Golden/Silver Talents and Darics, Improved Dark Shard Feedstocks and more… | Yes / Yes | 1.0.3 | None |
| Golden and Silver Talents are in general hard to get and they are required for accessory upgrades. | Update the Elleon’s Mark of Valor, with a new box called “Menma’s Talent Box”, that provide Golden Talents and Silver Talents. | Yes / Yes | 1.0.3 | None |
| The gap from easy dungeons to hard ones is too wide, players have to jump from fairly easy to relatively hard dungeons with no in-between options. | Introduce new medium difficulty dungeons to close the gap between easy and hard ones. | Yes / Yes | 1.1 | The proposed dungeons are GLSNM and AANM, but others like DRCNM are in the list as well. |
| The Blue and Golden Halidom success chances are much lower than the Relics, failing at normal rate, in comparison to improved lower fail rate for relics. | Increase the Blue and Golden Halidom Enchantment Success Rate, to match the Relic Upgrade success rate. | Yes / Yes | 1.0.3 | None |
| The Blue and Golden Halidom and Relic Gold requirements are a bit too high. | Reduce the Blue and Golden Halidom/Relic Gold requirements by 50%. | Yes / Yes | 1.0.3 | None |
The State of PvP – Current Issues and Proposed Solutions
PvP is going exactly as I saw it coming. People don’t want to bother gearing not even for 2 days (it’s fairly easy) mainly because the only way for them to gear up is only battlegrounds but they just want to do Velika Outskirts fights in as equal circumstances as possible. 100% equal will certainly never be possible unless we probably force everyone to play one class only. We won’t be giving up on PvP just yet though. Let’s check the list of currently reported issues and our proposed solutions.
| Issue Description | Proposed Solution | Confirmed / Accepted | Patch Version To Be Expected | Additional Information |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The only way to gear right now is Battlegrounds for Bellicarium Credits, but people are in general uninterested in playing and there is not enough people to pop any battleground except Skyring at best. | I am currently looking into the possibility of adding a way to get Bellicarium Credits with player killing in open world or creating daily quests that require player killing to advance. | Yes / No* | (1.1)? | This feature is normally not possible due to internal system limitations. However Menma’s TERA is running a custom made system that should be able to get this feature easily up and running. |
| Battlegrounds equalized gear is believed to be causing issues with low damage output and slow progress in battlegrounds, with majority of the rounds lasting too much or ending in draws (?) | Make the battlegrounds use personal gear to help in improving the situation a bit. | Yes / No* | (1.0.3)? | It is debatable whether this change will make any significant improvement mainly due to the current equalized gear being the same as personal PvP gear without the enchantment stats and modifiers. |
| The PvP innerwears are quite expensive in bellicarium credit shop and the result is a bit of unpleasant, as it involves too much RNG. | We’ll be readjusting the list of the RNG stats to make it less unpleasant or attempt to completely eliminate it wherever possible. | Yes / No* | (1.0.3)? | None |
| Champion’s Skyring vanguard is giving Talent Boxes as a reward when it should naturally give particle boxes. Talents are pretty useless. | Re-adjust the vanguard Rewards, to give people Veteran Particle Boxes instead of Talent Boxes. | Yes / Yes | 1.0.3 | None |
Addressing Some Suggestions from Discord
Here I will be addressing some suggestions that caught my eye recently from our discord channel #suggestions. Make sure you get to that place to post your own suggestions if you have any.
- “Please add the full guide to Discord. for those who don’t know the game, a very seedy server. We can’t do anything but wander around the city like a ghost About what we should prioritize in the game. Asking people for everything is boring and annoying. We don’t need to waste people’s time” – by MersinLee
Our Community managers and Player Council Members are actually already working on that. Thanks for your suggestion! - “re-add missing costumes from tikat shop” – by Sae
I am eventually planning to add all costumes in existence, sort of like we used to have them during Beta, the only catch is that they are too many to set prices on manually right now. But I will be getting to this as soon as possible. Thanks for your suggestion! - “Any chance at increasing the default character slots or giving more vanguard credits per dungeon quest? Out of coins on 2 chars and have guardian legion at 100/100 on both.. Kind of stalled..” – by Arrow
I will probably be making it 3 characters default soon (I forgot where the setting is! sadface). Thanks for your suggestion! - “Remove this [Fire Lord’s Flame] from tikat shop, this is disrespect to bahaar.” – by Kotletazz
Oopsie, that was really not supposed to go in there. This is certainly not fair to Bahaar. Will be fixed. Thanks for your suggestion! - “Increase the number of channels in locations with a Guardian missions (for example 1 => 5). Gm with 1 channel is meme” – by so close
This will be done on the next maintenance. Thanks for your suggestion! - “(This suggestion is kinda big so I will link the discord message instead: https://discord.com/channels/809082900527579199/809085769703620645/883016744745185340)” – by Arrow
We are actually planning plans of events together with the Community Managers that will be coming very soon. We have some system limitations right now but I am already working on fixing them to bring stuff up more. The guild shop you mentioned, is also a thing that I am planning to do in one of the upcoming patches. Also more dungeons will be coming soon, and there will be a monthly cycle of them. The older ones need some extra time to make sure they can be balanced. The items in the tikat shop are obtainable by either playing the game or choosing to support us financially if you are willing to. They are mostly items that are cosmetic or utility and are not really required to play the game or are not affecting the gameplay in any way with a few exceptions that are reasonably priced. (Did I miss items here maybe?). Thanks for your suggestions! - “give some free tikats every 30 mins for all players” – by Eachna
This is actually going to be done (time may be different tho) as soon as I get on settling some of the system limitations I mentioned in the previous suggestion answer. Thanks for your suggestion! - “(This suggestion is kinda big so I will link the discord message instead: https://discord.com/channels/809082900527579199/809085769703620645/884163565903294465)” – by Void-Attitude
The idea of updating an Ace Dungeon and in general solo content is actually a thing we already wanted to do since a long time ago and we’ll be getting to it as soon as we’re capable of. I would totally remove the selling prices of the items in bellicarium but I think you won’t find the PvP people who want to have readily available gold to fight (for consumables) agreeing to this. Will keep this in mind tho. Also do we have improved shard scrolls in bellicarium shop? (I genuinely can’t recall right now.) Thanks for your suggestions!
Future Plans and a Personal Confession
We have a lot of ideas in our minds for both PvP and PvE as well as casual players and open world content. Things like improving open world bosses, providing more chances for guilds to do things together, improved and rewarding GvG system, Skycastle rewards for Civil Unrest, Battle Royale event for PvP and possibly even reworked Alliance based of the current Civil Unrest event as well as a whole lot of other things that are too many to mention. But there is a catch. Originally my plan was to first provide with as much content and ideas as I can, in order to differentiate from official servers, and then “hopefully” get properly rewarded by that, so I can also help myself and stay focused full time on this project. I had a lot of time to work on that since I was basically doing nothing else. But now this isn’t the case anymore. Time is being more and more limited as I catch on several opportunities for me in real life in order to make a living for myself. I’ve been working on different projects alongside TERA and aside from that, college studies will be starting soon as well, making my time even more limited. Τhe fact that I am mostly alone in making the changes (thankfully now I have someone who helps) will affect the speed of changes being introduced. However, that of course doesn’t mean I’m giving up or closing down, this won’t be happening as long as there is enough support by the players and we’re not forced to shut down (obviously). Player support is really needed. This is why we have to run the Tikat shop the way we do now. To eventually help the server stay up and available for the community to play.
Conclusion
There is certainly a lot to be done but we’re in the right way and as long as there is active interest and support, the game will become pretty good, better than what the majority of people is expecting. With enough work and patience, we can certainly get there. A huge thank you for reading this and for supporting this server. I hope you are having fun playing. More stuff to come soon!
1 Comment