Tera Online PvP system and ways Bluehole could improve the game.

If you didn't already know Tera Online has the ability to flag up in opened world allowing a player to kill other players without their consent. Tera Online PvP when you have killed many players your an outlaw to everyone and can die and break a crystal. But there's issues with a system like this and honestly when you look at the big picture you realize that PvP is infact dead in mmorpg's.

What I mean by PvP is dead in mmorpg's is that ever since World of Warcraft everyone assumes PvP means you flag up when you feel like PvPing and when you don't you just stay unflagged and do your normal questing and no ones gonna bother you. Other people assume the word PvP is associated with closed PvP arena's that are a separate instance from the rest of the world. When it comes to open world PvP it hasn't existed in the mmorpg market for at least 4 or 5 years maybe longer depending on how brutal we are talking.

The issue with Tera Online's open world PvP system is:

• No incentive for PvP
• No punishment for people that Pk too much
• Safe zones in every small town

Now I'm sure every care bear who's gonna read this is gonna be like why are safe zones a bad thing. Think about it like this they put in safe zones to make it so lower levels have a place to hide but a safe zone becomes the same place for the Pker to hide as well after they've farmed you over and over and you go get your fully geared main they go to the save zone and call you a scrub and all sorts of stuff and you don't get any closure to killing them cause your not able to.  So in the end all safe zones seem to do is make it easier for your Pkers in the end.

The reason I say theirs no incentives for PvP is related to the fact that the only thing that you get for killing anyone is your Epeen level grows it's more of a haha I killed you reward but in the end you get nothing for it so unless your into griefing people and trying to prevent them from doing a quest or something that's the only reason you would turn on PvP.

No punishment is bad because people can just get 100 or more points and keep killing and the only thing they can lose is a crystal which most likely is like 5g and many people go Pking with complete crystal bind anyways so they won't break anything.

So in the end unless the PvP system gets revamped in a way that benefits Pkers as well as making it more fun and also helps people who are getting picked on by a Pker the system will keep being pretty lame. So what I'm going to do is explain some way's the system could be improved to work like it should. I have 10 years development within the private server community and I worked on ways of making a open world PvP system for the game called Ragnarok Online.

Tera Online PvP system needs:

• Removal of safe zones
• Incentives for PvP
• Punishment system that doesn't outweigh rewards but makes it fun or interesting
• Placement of guards in towns
• World raid bosses PvE
• GvG incentive as well as removal of safe zones outside of main cities

So first lets talk about removal of the safe zones rather then have complete safe zones when it comes to our small towns the only main safe zone should be our main cities these being Velika, Kaiator, and Allemantheia. Main cities are the main hubs for players to hangout, chat etc in most of your older mmorpg's you had only one or two maps that where safe zones while the rest of the world was protected by guard's in towns. So what Tera Online would turn into is outside of dungeons and in smaller towns certain vendors, portals, and NPC's would be protected by guards these would only attacked the flagged players Pking. The towns would be an open Pking zone for the non flagged players to still kill them as well so now the outlaw has to worry about the guards in the town as well as all of the players in it. If a Pker wants a place to hide they would have to get to a main city.

For PvPers there should be some kind of incentives other then Epeen growing cause no one would want to PvP if there was no point to it. This could be done in a few different ways. The first way is by providing some sort of point system that would give rewards when players of the same level are killed then the points could be used to buy items with a special vendor. But a system like this would have drawbacks because from a developer point of view it could be exploitable.

Although a system which worked for many older mmorpg's would be the one that when your killed you drop items which you have been farming as well as a percentage of the overall money you have. We have a bank system which lets you put your money away but as your farming you constantly pick up gold and if someone forgets to put it away they could lose some of it when Pked. Item wise you make it so that items bound with the name of the player like for example your PvP set in your inventory says only "skoll" can wear it won't drop from inventory making it so you won't lose the items that are soul bound. And just make it so that the bind on equip items in a players inventory would drop and not quest items or soul bound ones. They could even make it give experience for people under max level which would give another way people could level up by Pking people and of course just make sure that it can't be exploited like you lose more experience then gained when say a level 50 kills a level 58 the level 58 loses 10% experience while only 1% goes to the level 50 as experience making it so someone wouldn't want to feed low levels that way.

Another interesting feature to incentive based PvP was one which I used in my last server related to the loss of money. How it worked was when a player lost 10% of the money they had 5% would go to the Pker and the other 5% would go to a bounty system under the Pker's name the more players someone killed the higher the bounty would be. Then players could choose from a bounty list of who they wanted to hunt down and kill them for the bounty reward. This would work well with the system in edition to the current system and provide more fun for care bears or white knight's what ever you would like to call them.

Pker punishment cause we know that it's not always enough just to make it so they are outlawed from normal towns because of the guards and players wanting to kill them. So they can face a higher loss when it comes to money dropped like a 25% loss of money a higher loss in experience if they aren't level 60. When a Pker is killed money wouldn't go into the bounty system it would drop to the floor for the person who killed them to pick up. The dropping of equipped gear wouldn't really be feasible in Tera Online so I won't really suggest it but they could drop some of what they've collected from other players of none soulbound items. But they could be made to drop crystals instead of just breaking them so the person that killed them would get money and free crystals and what ever items dropped from a Pker.

For the people who don't wanna read all of it lets break down what was suggested:

• Main Cities are the safe zones small towns guarded by guards kill flagged players
• Incentive based PvP Pkers get 10% gold, experience, non bound item drops.
• Pkers lose 25% gold being carried on person, experience, non bound items drop of crystals.
• Pkers only safe in main cities from getting pked.
• Add of bounty system portion of gold lost from normal players feeds a bounty system.

So now we have a structured PvP system which is pretty functional but we are left with an issue in the end cause once players get to max level and have everything they stop doing dailies so much and don't go out into the world anymore. That means the higher level zones end up being dead so that's where world bosses come in. Rather then just normal bam's maps should have random rare spawns of world bosses which drop valuable items which would make them worth killing for even long standing players but because Pking in open world would be possible it would become a battle for these bosses. The vanarch bams have become kind of pointless at this point would be better if they had some raid quality bosses instead which would take place in any random map it could even be lower level maps. They could even be made with no spawn restrictions so a person could in effect drag it around the map trying to kill it. The issue with static spawns is you have to worry about the boss resetting but if they are given really large health pools and no reset restrictions would be a little more chaotic and provide something interesting for people.

Now the issue is the GvG system too I'm sorry but Guild vs Guild in Tera Online is another battle for the epeen. There's no point to GvG currently but what makes it worse is you can hide in safe zones when your winning. With the removal of the safe zones for normal towns GvG would only have main cities as a safe zone. This would provide more fun for guilds cause it wouldn't be so much the game of who ever hides in town wins cause people have to do quests and unless you plan on telling your whole guild to go hide all night long in a main city someones gonna get killed at some point. Currently thats the issue when people wanna win they sit in towns tell members not to go out some even go as far as to kick members out of the guild until the GvG is over.

GvG should also be changed to have some kind of incentive towards GvGing as well its kind of boring only having a leader board of who's got the biggest Epeen and the fact you get to call other guilds scrubs cause they lost to you when you got 10 kills then kicked half your guild who decided to do dailies. GvG should either provide some point system for every 50 or 100 kills your guild gets you get point's which can either go into purchasing stuff for the guild. Or it could be done on a level up bases. Don't get me wrong I know you can currently level up for some junky potions and such but what I'm talking about is more like when your guild wins a GvG they can use policy points within the guild to give them bonus effects, increase experience, or unlock guild skills. A perfect example was Ragnarok Online you had to level guilds to get various guild skills even the Exarch system has guild skills within the system. They could incorporate housing and other benefits to the system which people would find fun.

It would be nice to see some sort of guild vs guild organized event that happens weekly or daily. If you ever played Ragnarok Online they had what was called War of Emperium which was a guild vs guild event that happened two times during the week each main city had a different set of castles like Prontera had 5 castles which could be captured by any guild who made there way up to the crystal room and broke it then that guild would be forced to defend the crystal from enemy guilds. If a guild was successful in doing that they would receive nightly treasure chest rewards and access to a special dungeon. Each city had a different dungeon with different monsters in it. Out of all my mmorpg gaming I haven't seen another game come up with something that really made use of the GvG system the same way. I played an worked on Ragnarok Online for 10 years and that was one of the most fun parts of it which if it was added to Tera Online it would be a huge hit especially since it could be added in a PvP or PvE server without to much effort.

With that being said some more types of battlegrounds would be nice. As of right now the two most popular are corsairs stronghold and 3v3 arena. Fraywind is sort of popular now that they added slightly more rewarding rewards for it. But it would be nice to see a 1v1 arena and a 5v5. More battlegrounds as well like a capture the flag would be nice since that would be popular.

Something else I wanted to bring up there's a system in Tera Online known as the death match system which you can set team verses team against each other for player vs player and you can also choose to bet money in this system but it's not really used or known about. What would be nice is if they made a system which could be queued into arena based fighting using the death match system. Players participating would be charged entry fee which would then turn into the reward for the winner. Other players could even be allowed to bet on a winning team against other players and be allowed to watch in a spectator mode.

One of the other more useless things is the crafting system. Aside from a few unique recipes which can be crafted that have some really nice armor templates there hasn't been anything new that's been added to the game since its release. With each update they should add more unique templates which add new gear set looks for players aside from the costume looks they have. They could even provide designs holiday theme'ed for special events this way you would have even more ways of making yourself unique. And since crafting becomes slightly useless unless your making nightforge or strikeforce this would be a reason to level it up.

They could also look into providing more casual gamer's things added similar to what some of the other mmorpg's have done. Some examples of casual activities are:

• Fishing
• Card Game
• Farming
• Cooking

Fishing is one of the biggest that's quite popular this being because it usually goes hand in hand with cooking very well. In Ktera one of the newer limited time events was related to cooking different types of buff food but it's only a limited time event. I'm talking about these being active events various recipes could be drop able in game which then opens another reason to go quest and grind monsters in hopes of finding rare recipes which can craft various foods. And with Tera Onlines action combat system if fishing was added with a more interactive system which simulates more how fishing is I can see where this would become a very fun aspect of the game. Not to mention the large amounts of different pond's oceans in various maps don't have a purpose but this would add another interesting angle onto game play in Tera Online.

Cooking of course goes well with fishing and like said above Ktera experimented with something during an event with it but it can be Incorporated to use many of the junk items which drops from various monsters rather then anything garbage just being all vendor food.

When I say card game inside of a mmorpg many games have added systems like this within the game as a side thing to add more things for people to do. There is many different way's a system like this could work but I would think one of the more interesting way's was a system one of my friends made for a game where cards could be obtained though various monsters within the game. You would have a album of these cards and then there was a battle area that you could play either one verses one or in a team against another team and when you used a card it would allow you control of a monster and you would obtain skills for that monster to use in the fight. In the end he never ended up finishing the game he was working on but the idea was very interesting cause it played out similar to Hero's from LOL only it was only a side feature from the main mmorpg game. Tera Online could add something to this effect which would allow players to collect cards then battle each other in some kind of card game.

Farming is not something that you see in most mmorpg's but it would also go along with cooking and it's another one of our casual features in a mmorpg being able to buy a part of a land then grow things over time and continue to check them and water them like normal then being able to gather from them in order to use what's gathered in cooking.

One of the other main things when it comes to PvP area's its not so much that the maps and types of games we have are bad so to speak its also grinding the same looking things over and over. The idea behind adding more casual things to do in a game is giving players who get bored of grinding your normal activities of the same PvP map over and over and allow them to play something else.

The achievement system they added with exploring and pets is nice and I hope they continue to keep adding onto it. I like that you can gain bonus effects to your damage for certain effects just by doing some of the achievements. They should continue adding more things to the achievement system cause this will bring more casual activities to players and give them more reason to play.

Now I know this topic started off strictly as a PvP one but everyone likes a certain amount of PvE as well so I figured would be worth mentioning as well. Tera Online hasn't done a bad job so far with its PvE aspect of course part of the issue that most people have with it is they instantly assume Tera Online is going to have as much content as the 7 years world of warcraft does. But in the end it took world of warcraft years to get the amount of dungeons and content is has.

What would be nice though is to see them follow much of the same model providing a few different types of dungeons which now we've seen Tera Online provide:

1 Man Dungeons
3 Man Dungeons
5 Man Dungeons
7 Man Dungeons
10 Man Dungeons
20 Man Dungeons

So Tera has a good amount of unique dungeons forming and I feel like the current update they did more puzzle type things in dungeons which test your memory like in Wonderholme harmode and such. I hope they continue to do much of the same type of things.

I feel like they could do some raids which take more time to clear and more time to figure out as well as make people need to bring different classes in order to complete certain mechanics of the raid. I'm going to go back for a moment and bring up Ragnarok Online again. One of the most amazing raids so to speak in that game was that of endless tower.

The object of this was it was 100 floors that you had to clear and it had a 6 day cool down if you died somewhere before reaching some of the higher up levels and not obtaining certain items to warp back in there was no way to get back inside. As you got closer and closer to the top the monsters got more tough some floors had more then one boss monster to fight. In Ragnarok they used MVP monsters which where found though out the world of Ragnarok Online and the last few floors contained monsters that where made for the dungeon itself. The main thing was group build you couldn't just go in the dungeon with all of the same class each class was used for different buffing and powerful for certain fights.  The portal for the next room would only open once the room was completely cleared and the mobs from each floor would also drop items as well but the last boss providing what everyone really wanted.

So far I have not seen any games not even wow do a system like this and I think this takes PvE to a whole new level. I can see this type of system working with Tera Online the best since your healers in Tera can resurrect just like you could in Ragnarok Online as well as the use of scrolls to resurrect just like the Yggdrasil Leaf's you had in Ragnarok Online. They could use a board ranking for how far people have cleared as well for it in Tera Online.

The very last thing I wanted to bring out is in Ktera recently they had a monster arena that monsters fight against each other and you can bet which monster will win. This is something else which came from Ragnarok Online only they also had monster racing and other aspects like this. We found these to be interesting and fun. These are known by as mini games it can be anything from playing music to racing of some sort or like the summer and autumn events that they released. Having more of this for off season times would keep people busy. No one likes to have to wait months to see new content updates. But if they worked on providing more in the future that we could enjoy that makes the game more enjoyable even though people have to wait this will keep the player base alive, attract newer players and keep older players playing as well.

In the end because En Masse has the rights to code things into Tera Online and chooses not to we might not never see these types of features. But It would be nice if we could see any one or all of these brought into Ktera or into some game out on the market. Tera Online has it right with the action combat system they just need to do more with it to make it one of the best titles on the market.

Tera Online Priest avoid all knockdowns in PvP

You might be wondering why priests are on the top rating score for most servers while most mystics are not. Whether you have noticed or not some priests are avoiding getting knocked down during any type of pvp they get into because of a bug that's in the skill animations. And pretty much this is supposed to be a hush hush in game just like all bug cause the elitist players want to be able to exploit it as long as they can meanwhile people who don't know about it continue to get curb stomped in pvp.

But like all bugs the best way to get it fixed for everyone to make it fair game play is to post about it. The trick behind this bug that people are using is the skill called arise which picks people up off the floor when they are knocked down but of course this skill has a 30 second delay so you might wonder how would a priest get around this? Some of your buff animations as a priest share the same animation as the arise animation which currently will prevent you from being knocked down.

What makes this not fair for other healers like mystics is they don't have the arise skill so they cannot avoid all knockdowns and for a priest not ever having to worry about getting knocked down is making them nearly impossible to kill. As a mystic fighting a priest you have to wait for them to go to do it and then fear and sleep them to get around it. But in the end your going to have to just focus on killing one of the dps and avoid the priest if he knows how to do this bug. And the priest having the ability to 120 stamina res in pvp makes fights really stupid if the priest can avoid every knockdown you try to hit them with.

Then we all know there's people who decide to use dysncing as well as what ever bugs. If someones using a lag switch on top of the bug above they will be nearly un-killable in any situation. As someone who enjoys PvP the most out of mmorpg's this kinda stuff just makes me angry. The good news is the GM team for En Masse has seen streamers abusing this bug and they do know that people are doing something to avoid knockdowns. But until Ktera manages to get a fix for this which most people might not know about since if you search for it you cannot find anything related to it on the net it might not be fixed for a while. So let me be the first to say something about it so they know about it and it gets fixed.

Visionmaker 3 Myth or Fact?

Update visionmaker 3 is a fact 2/17/2014

So people have been speculating a lot whether there will be a visionmaker 3 as well as another upgrade onto the conjunct set using strikeforce as a base to make another set of gear. And there seems to be some controversy whether or not Tera Online is gonna keep going with the same set's as a continuation or whether they will just junk visionmaker 2 in the future and start over in some way.

But from what we have seen so far they seem to be working towards an overall trend. This trend relates to rewarding the older player base which puts in the effort to obtain the best gear by allowing them to upgrade it to a future expansion. I'm sure many of you remember world of warcraft days but if you don't every time a new expansion was set for a release the old tier of gear was then replaced by greens from the new expansion. This was a very upsetting way of moving on to the new gear cause if you did your 25 or 40 man raids and spent all the time farming it out you would be giving it away to the NPC monster in the end and vendoring it for gold.

While not everything that Tera Online has done has been the favorite of every player in its community I believe that when it comes to gear and how they plan on structuring it they want the older player base to be happy and not feel like they wasted months farming gear only to vendor it in the future so I believe that all of your PvE, and PvP crafted sets will continue to be upgraded while the sets which drop from monsters and require nothing but participation's in daily raids with RNG based drops will continue to be the NPC fodder each expansion.

I also think they will continue with the trend of catch up gear after every new large content update with a set that's easy to masterwork for the newer players to have the ability to catch up with the old and that is most likely why the base set of conjunct now requires 0 crafting to make it as well as in the future KTera has made it even easier for players removing the need to grind battlegrounds and nexus in order to craft the set instead you would only need the two armor pieces and the recipe.

Visionmaker is a similar trend quills now drop at a 100% rate and I'm sure in the future they will take steps to reduce the cost of the items or eliminate them completely so newer players can obtain visionmaker faster so they can move on to visionmaker 2. The other notable thing is while visionmaker 2 right now for NA Tera Online is a grind. In KTera they have updated the servers with other ways to obtain materials such as the new revamped alliance systems credits allowing you to buy Sturdy forge Pitch which is a much needed item that costs 4,000 Killing Spree credits and can only be bought from the Killing Spree vendor. If they had intentions of just stopping the line of gear with visionmaker 2 I seriously doubt they would be making an effort to provide more ways for people to catch up in making this set. Instead they would just leave it as is and not say anything then one day we would be vendoring it.

The GM's in Tera Online as well as some of the development team when talking usually mention gear sets as being from Conjunct Series or Visionmaker Series and if they seem to think its a series it means that most likely they will continue the series onward rather then just removing it. In the current post about the Canyon Clash they talk about using the "Conjunct Series" for the gear for the event meaning they will most likely be using Strikeforce gear during the event.

In the end all we can really do is speculate whether Visionmaker 3 will be released in the future but I would think that there's more fact floating around to support that we will be seeing a visionmaker 3 in the future or at least some sort of upgrade for turning visionmaker 2 into something else. But in the end we are forced to wait and twiddle our thumbs and hope that myth's become a reality.