TERA Online : BetaCake’s CBT1 Impressions

Maybe I shouldn’t call this article “impressions” because frankly I wasn’t very impressed. Could it be the lag spikes, or the continuous PK grieving around quest hubs, or simply the fact that I played the very same game, same class, exactly a year ago on the Korean retail servers?

Dunno. Maybe I’m spoiled by ArcheAge and its nearly endless content. Fact is though, I played TERA last weekend because my friends had planned to play it too and knowing its always fun playing an MMO with friends, I couldn’t possibly let the opportunity slip away.

So I patched my Sneak Peak event client and joined the TERA Online sensation on Saturday evening. Despite joining in late, I duo’d with one of my friends and we reached level 22 fairly fast, took us about 7 hours or so.

My favorite class in TERA is the Lancer, yet I never really played the tank class in other games. I’m usually a mage, I enjoy using powerful spells to manipulate my enemy. Somehow, Blue Hole Studios managed to make the Lancer super fun to play, giving him the most unique combat playstyle I’ve ever seen.

For those of you who don’t know, the Lancer is the only class in TERA which attacks in a straight line, while all the other classes can easily strafe and aim their next attack towards the moving enemy. So the Lancer is automatically a high difficulty class, you actually have to know what you’re doing in order to survive. Because if the Lancer dies, its most likely that the rest of the group will follow.

The class is super fun to play because all other classes usually see the back side of BAMS and bosses.
Lancer is the one who must keep aggro on him at all times, therefore the monsters always face him.
I believe its a tiny little detail that many who played TERA didn’t really pay attention to.

Using your block, stun and aggro abilities requires absolute precision (and good ping!). You can’t just block for ever, the mob will eventually aggro on the healer or the DD with the highest DPS and if you don’t have the reflexes(and gear) to take aggro back immediately, chances are somebody will get one-shotted.

The Lancer is also fun in PvP, especially on the max levels when the class’ arsenal is full of crowd control abilities and also two very useful skills. Self Heal and “The Bubble”. First one is obviously a heal (heals 2k+ HP at 40+) and the second one is a magical shield buff that absorbs damage. A lot of it.
The combination of the two is amazing, since you either use them all the time to ease the burden the healer carries, or you save them for the “OH SHIT” moment that the someone resisted your aggro or stun and is now having destroying your healer or your DDs. Either way, those two skills are fundamental, you must use them at all times.

Enough with the Lancer though, I think I derailed this article enough. Where was I? Oh yes, the TERA CBT1.
Several way to describe how bad it was.

With one word : Lag
With two words : Spam + Lag
With three words : Griefers + Spam + Lag

Sorry Frogster, I know you guys are doing your best but the truth must be told. The CBT you hosted was a fiasco. There’s a reason why people started cancelling their pre-orders and gave you the nickname “Lagster”.

Oh man, those lag spikes. I saw people with full HP fighting the last minion of the group of mobs and die due to 5-7 seconds lag spikes. Tragically hilarious.

Please don’t get wrong, TERA is great for what it is, an action combat MMORPG and in the end its not the game’s fault CBT1 was bad. Blue Hole Studios made a really good game, in fact, TERA has the most responsive combat system I’ve seen so far in an MMO.

Frogster on the other hand, seems like it was just a bad choice of a publisher. Or they were the only one who offered for TERA. I don’t know.

What I do know is that Frogster keeps making mistakes that could have been avoided by using common sense.

Okay. I really want to know who was the one who had the brilliant idea that only 1 PvP server would be enough. I mean, did it not occur to these people that gamers are interested in the PvP features of TERA more than the PvE content? Didn’t the trailers boast about the unique political system?

So who were those people that came up with the decision that 1 PvP server and 2 PvE servers are the ideal way to do this?

Having 1 PvP server means one simple thing. Everyone will want to join it. And that easily translates to queues and lag. Sadly that’s exactly what happened. I played on Saturday and Sunday for more than 12 hours in total and there was one thing which was always present. The lag spikes.

Once in a while (few minutes) the game was freezing up, people died to mobs here and there and ofc there was the typical chat spam. “LAAAAG”

Talking about chat spam….

It honestly was unbearable most of the time. Just like the Sneak Peek event, there were certain individuals that genuinely believed its a good idea to just spam the chat with nonsense and cuss words.

Obviously the players can just add them to their ignore lists, but the problem lies deeper within. Why was there no GMs taking action against these people? They clearly didn’t enjoy TERA and most definitely craved for attention. I pretty much expected chat spammers to be completely removed from the CBT.

That didn’t happen, so that’s another point lost there for Frogster. How are they going to deal with gold farmers and bots when they are not taking action against simple stuff like spamming the chat with a ton of crap?

Then comes the cherry on top. PK grief. Lots of it.

Let me just try to defend myself here and claim that I’m definitely not a pussy. I will fight back if you attack me and I think I might win. However, I don’t go around picking fights, nor I attack people without a reason. Well, at least not all the time.

So in TERA CBT1, everyone rushed to level 22, which was the cap and apparently there was a very large group of people who actually thought the best thing to do in the game at that point was to mass PK others. I’d be ok with that in general.

However some of these people got their asses handed to them from other level 22 players and decided to move back to lower level areas. I was actually two shotted by a lvl 22 Ranger when I was about level 11.

At that time I thought it was the regular PK you’d encounter in a PvP game and was OK with it.
Leveling up though revealed the truth. When I went to get my horse outside Velika, I saw dozens of people fighting and once I tried to join in for some fun, I quickly realized that it was a bad idea, since they were all level 22.

As me and my friend level up past level 15 we had people in groups actually hunting us down, chasing us with horses and trying to get us killed no matter what.

There were countless quest hub campers, PKing anyone on sight. To me, that’s disgusting. Getting PKed in a contested area is OK. Getting PKed while you’re trying to talk to an NPC to finish your quest is not OK.

And it wasn’t a one-time thing either. There were people that moved around in groups and just killed everyone and anyone they met on the road.

In my opinion, this is a serious issue and need to be addressed ASAP. PvP is fine, being PKed is fine too. But there must be a reason! You can’t just go kill people only because you’re higher level, they can’t fight back or even worse, just because the game allows you to do so.

I sat down and tried to figure out why that happened in TERA. Then, my experience from TERA KR kicked in.
What’s different I thought?

Well, its the community. Its me, you, your friends and everyone else playing TERA from the West.
I’ve never seen Koreans act like that and that’s obviously a community / culture issue.

The other day I was playing ArcheAge, I asked a Korean if he could sell me some 100 wood and that I was paying 2 gold coins for it. Guess what happened. He traded me, gave me 50 wood, I gave him 1 gold coin.

We did the trade. But that’s not all. He immediately traded me back and gave me my money.
This has never happened to me in the past while playing games on EU or US servers.
So it must be the people.

I don’t know why, but it seems like the majority of the EU/NA gamers have turned into whinny, spoiled little brats who want things to go their way and only. They will trow a tantrum at you if you try to reason them and most likely call you names. Superiority complex epidemic?

Anyway.

I want to finish this massive wall of text by saying that TERA is a good game for what it is. A heavily instanced MMORPG, with amazing graphics and awesome artstyle, the best action based combat system I’ve experienced and also unique elements like the political system.

The problems we all faced during TERA CBT1 have their roots in Frogster. I hope CBT2 will be nothing like CBT1.

Thanks for reading guys, I hope you enjoyed this article.

Have a nice day,

-BetaCake