TERA consolidating servers in Japan [Updated]

@Equillian I had to go change my shorts after I saw that. And to think we have people complain about MMOs costing $15 a month for what is considered a finished product.

@Equillian The exchange rate, between US Dollars and Yen, probably distorts that figure. I am curious what that would be relative to the average Japanese player's income. But, still, pay to play in a BETA?! We call that a pre-order "beta access" bonus here in the states. ;-)

I am confused by the intent of the quote ". . the population decrease will help to improve the game's performance. . ." Well, duh.

@Equillian Yes it's the greatest of times to be a corporate "person"! To be able to sucker people to pay for testing yet... there's just no end to it! Every day I think I've heard it all, but there's always more!

@Equillian

Yeah I reckon charging for beta is pretty outrageous.

But in a free market economy no-one is forced to buy anything. People fork over money for things they want.

If players are willing to pay for a beta I think that says something about the current state of the market. There's no MMO I'd currently subscribe to but there are two in beta that would be tempting.

And in the west players are frequently charged a subscription to beta test a game. That happens every time an MMO launches prematurely, which is sadly common. Darkfall also did it with its limited early access or whatever they called it.

@J45neoboy

Oh, the flashbacks I am getting when many of us ponied up $5.00 US just to get Origin Systems/EA to mail us a CD so that we could Beta Ultima Online...

Such forum outrage! And yet, many of us threw money at Garriott and crew like they were strippers dancing onstage at a gentleman's club! ;P

@Space Cobra

On the other hand that could be viewed simply as pay for making CD, shipping & handling. Doubt they made lot of profit on those 5$.

Even open source free programmes charge for shipping & handling if you order CD / DVD (not that anyone does that nowadays as you can just download it from internet, but back in the day in times of modems to download lot of data from internet was problematic and very costly...)

@Space Cobra ...thank you for that wonderful mental image SC. :X

@J45neoboy

You should've seen EBAY back when Starcraft 2 was in Beta, people were selling (AND BUYING) Beta keys for almost 1000$.

@Seffrid The developers are reducing the amount of players who are playing, not the people are leaving, they are being FORCED to leave.

@nhat "The developers are reducing the amount of players who are playing, not the people are leaving, they are being FORCED to leave."

So I read.

That doesn't alter the fact that it's unprecedented to merge servers before a launch.

@Seffrid "how many Western gamers would shell out $38.50 per month to test a game?" - oh give em a chance! the fanbois for various games would - no doubt! (I never would, btw, just for the record, no matter how much I might be interested in any game, this is against my basic beliefs.) I have little (no) doubt you could get Wow players, or TOR players to pay for beta, just because of the hype around those games, not saying anything else +/-

@Seffrid

The difference is though the game is launched. Just because you call something beta doesn't stop the game from being "launched". They are collecting money for the game, have subscribers to the game, have infrastructure for the game. The only thing stopping it from being launched is being called launched.

Free to Play games do it most often with Cash Shops during "beta". For example Allods was around for a year or two before they decided to "launch" the game. They even had post-launch style game content patches while they still called themselves beta.

Beta doesn't mean what it used to mean in the industry anymore. Many developers use it simply as a investor trick rather then its true meaning. By calling it a Beta they can get away with a lot more and have reactions be different if they called the game "live".

@rhorle Oh so the game has launched and it's so bad people still consider it a beta. Ya that's a real winner we got there with all the problems.

@Seffrid

Meh I do testing at my job all the time. In order to fix bugs and gltiches, you have to test every single possibility or rule out possibilities all the time. Some bugs are difficult to catch because the messages that return isn't clear or ambiguous.

@nhat

Ahhh I don't believe they are FORCING people to stop giving them $38.50/month for the privilege of QAing the game for them. That is grade-A spin worthy of a political consultant on cable news.

I'm sure if you actually went to the beta forums (someone please do if you can!!!) its probably more that people are just leaving due to boredom/bots/bugs, and their beta servers are getting uncomfortably sparse.

@Chiren "its probably more that people are just leaving due to boredom/bots/bugs, and their beta servers are getting uncomfortably sparse."

I agree.

Given that we are now being told that the game isn't in beta, it has actually launched in all but name, then it makes it all the less credible that the developers have booted two-thirds of their paying customers.

There are only two possibilities - either the story is falsely based and the players are so dismissive of the game that two-thirds of them have decided it isn't worth the cost and have left, or the story is accurate and the game is so riddled with exploits and cheating that the developers have had to kick out two-thirds of the paying playerbase.

Either way it sounds terrible.

Moreover, the "news report" states that "NHN is making tweaks to the game to improve the experience for those who remain. These improvements include doubling the amount of free time for new players and cutting the cooldown time of dungeons in half while increasing the amount of loot dropped".

Doubling free time and cutting cooldown time in half are tweaks?

Oh come on Massively, this item isn't worthy of you! Where's the investigative journalism that will enable you to report what has really happened with this game?

@Seffrid That's about 50 cents in U.S. dollars