At E3 2011 this year, En Masse Entertainment devs spent time with MMORPG.com Industry Relations Manager Gerrett Fuller talking about the politics of TERA. The way the system is described is incredible yet Garrett was left, at least initially, with the question, "But will it work?" Read on to discover Garrett's thought process as he ponders that very question. Then let us know what you think about TERA's political system.

There are many differences between the real world and games. That is truly the way it should stay. Political systems are a design of our culture to keep laws and taxes in order and ensure people live in happiness and freedom, or total domination depending on where you live. Now adding a system of politics into a game that fully impacts players will come up against some serious hurdles. TERA will be implementing the most ambitious political system yet into an MMO. The question really is: how will it do?

Read more of Garrett Fuller's TERA: The Politics System Could Suck.

Unfortunately for the people at Blue Hole Studios, I believe that TERA will be vastly overshadowed by the launches of SW:TOR and GW2 which are both slated to come out before the end of 2012.

A political system like this is an interesting and potentially groundbreaking new concept in MMOs... but I do not think this game will be able to compete with the heavyweights.

It may however end up as a stable niche game.

This game is failing in korea so i'm worried it will get shut down.

Unless this game sky rockets in U.S/Europe then i don't see a future for this game.

But considering Korea doesn't like this game there must be something good with it because we all know how terrible korean/asian games usually are, they're all grindy and awfully repetitive and nothing creative about them at all.

And the fact that korea doesn't like this game makes me see hope for it in U.S/Europe.

When I saw the trailer for the TERA political system, it really got me excited to try out this game. It all depends on how and when it launches though. SW:TOR is getting closer and trying out that one is a no brainer for me.

A "justice" system with jailings and thus punishment by one player over another player exists in Nexus : The Kingdoms of the Winds. Even with a set of rules put forth by the developpers, it's a very bad idea. Just because of the political side, politics is about relations with others, both friends and enemies. More worrysome to know is that someone with this kind of power can have a "bad" day too. 

Even though I enjoy politics in games, a game should not allow players to take away someone elses fun. If there should be any message for the developers of TERA, it's that persistent online worlds are no different from the real world. You'll have outstanding leaders, good leaders and horrible dictators that manage to work their way up. The impact of repeated jailings will result in quitting players and thus a loss of income for the company. The example given about UO can not be taken as a point of comparison. Today, a player has dozens of games to choose from, most will no longer go above and beyond to better another player's experience. I do believe however that it is possible to give politics a decent place in an MMO with a medium to large player-base. 

The roles of leadership should focus on rewarding other players, the champions, at least you bring a positive message to other players. With a big check on abuse and severe punishments for the abusers that will be found (full character resets (all characters on the account and related accounts), bans,...) a political system can gain some credit. Self-regulation is utopic, the game-designer has to design the political class system with even more attention to balances then classbalancing.

Just make it so that Vanarchs are only in power f.i. for 2 weeks (alltho I think it will be 1 month):

-If the area is won by voting, then no-one will likely vote again for this dictator

-If the area is PVP-rang, then see it as a challenge for other people/guilds to conquer it and do the right thing (or do the same bad things but even worse  :P  )

Atm we know too little to judge the political system imo.. does anyone have full reviews from Korea about how it (doesnt) works over there??

OMG no. Players having power over other players? Politics!? And PVP champs get to rule me? WHOA. That sounds like someone just manifested my nightmare! WORST possible thing to give people even more ways to harrass and torture fellow players! How about... NO THANKS? This is so abysmally bad... what are they thinking? Maybe some well educated and strictly behaving Japanese can handle this, but surely not we nasty and egoistic Westerners!

3 things todays big mmo's cant compete with TERA imo :

Graphic - best ive seen so far in mmorpg (complexity of models and animation is jaw-dropping even for some1 who doesnt like that particular art style)

No target control system (i hate fact that in every traditional controll system mmo so far every ranged class dominate melee just by simple "tab-targeting" and pressing 3 same skill buttons)

Not Faction Based (most important feature for me personally especially PVP-wise... in the end it was main cause of me leaving WoW, Warhammer, Aion and RIFT lastly)

u forgot that tera is coming FIRST....its coming late 2011 while star wars and gw2 2012....besides star wars only have the name and its a 2 faction game so sooner or later it will fail hard cause of imbalance,as for gw 2...this game is a f2p gamean dpvp only,while tera is both....tera will do well in the west,ppl say ehy look tera eve nfail in korea...ask ppl why it fail first.it failed because koreans LOVE grind and RNG tera has nothing like that and its more western oriented.tera will be a succes i nthe west

Yes I do think everyone is forgetting that star wars and guild wars are next year, but those games don't bother me at all.

Besides the fact star wars shouldn't have cartoon looking humans not a selling point for me.

Anywho Tera for me looks too damn good, I can't wait, I cancelled both of my WoW accounts after 6 years of play on them.

I think what most people do realize is yes, KR/asian games have nice graphics or art work but the systems are terrible and grindy they love sitting in game coffee houses and spending hours and hours doing the samething, why else are they so good at selling gold? eastern games love stupid, goofy, grindy, terrible games what works or doesn't work over there doesn't effect us one bit. Not too forget KR Tera is up against more mmorpg's than we have and gold farmers imbalance the player base for any game statics of winning or losing members head counts. Also most of us don't even look at crappy F2P games that take away players from P2P games in a 2nd or 3rd world country in the first place.

The game mechanics of Tera seem to be "swing or shoot based" and not 40+ skills to balance which should make pvp if anything more like a mortal combat fighting style system, from the youtube fights I have seen pve and pvp are "Be quick or be dead" you can run and jump around npcs or toons kind of like the epic god of war or darksiders game play, not the same old face to face, you hit me and I'll hit you crap we are all to used to.

Politics are more for the elitist than normal people and jailing, we all know if someone is that elitist then they will have too much time on their hands looking to raid then jailing anyone unless it's a gear stealing guildie. I'm not scared of that at all. Besides they have said you can impeach a leader of bad standing anyways.

I cancelled my WoW accounts and waiting for my copy of "I hope" a Collector's edition Tera and never looking back at WoW's faction rep and RNG drops wasting time.

I feel sorry for the random people I've seen saying here and there "I don't like it and won't play it because of one little part of the game and not the whole thing, that's why there are other games to give everyone something that fits their tastes.

I think people get alittle ahead of themselves about liking or disliking a game they only just read about. Everything changes with patches.

Originally posted by albaficass

u forgot that tera is coming FIRST....its coming late 2011 while star wars and gw2 2012....besides star wars only have the name and its a 2 faction game so sooner or later it will fail hard cause of imbalance,as for gw 2...this game is a f2p gamean dpvp only,while tera is both....tera will do well in the west,ppl say ehy look tera eve nfail in korea...ask ppl why it fail first.it failed because koreans LOVE grind and RNG tera has nothing like that and its more western oriented.tera will be a succes i nthe west

 

 GW2 is PvP only? I think you'd better get your facts straight. They've hardly even talked about the majority of the PvP, it's been mainly just PvE information released.

I am pretty nervous about this system that TERA is implimenting. Politics are one thing but being able to put a player in jail is something else entirely. My question is how does a person get put in jail? Do they have to capture the "criminal" or does he just suddenly end up in prison? And what sorts of consequences arise from being imprisoned? Do you just sit there an wait it out? I think there are all sorts of questions that need answered before any real judgement can be made, but the mere idea makes me nervous.

I guess when your playing TERA, the rule is "Like a midget at a urinal, you'll have to stay on your toes"

Think of all the wrong reasons that a person could be jailed (they're the leader of an enemy guild, a political rival, they think the ruler sucks) and compare them to the right reason (they're being disruptive) and you'll see the main issue with this system: You can imprison someone for any reason. You can't do that in the real world. In the real world you have laws, courts and wrongful arrest lawsuits. Without any standard for imprisoning players, the system won't work.

And let's be honest, is there anything you can do in an online game bad enough for prison?

Originally posted by WhySoShort

Think of all the wrong reasons that a person could be jailed (they're the leader of an enemy guild, a political rival, they think the ruler sucks) and compare them to the right reason (they're being disruptive) and you'll see the main issue with this system: You can imprison someone for any reason. You can't do that in the real world. In the real world you have laws, courts and wrongful arrest lawsuits. Without any standard for imprisoning players, the system won't work.

And let's be honest, is there anything you can do in an online game bad enough for prison?

 

Well depends where u live, I can imagin that imprisioning someone without reason is perfectly possible in North-Korea and some other countries ;)

The power to put people in jail will cause drama, which leads to fight for control, which gives us end-game content.. 

Moreover, if u have issues with the current leaders u can:

-stay clear of that area

-group up and conquer the area

this will be a social nightmare.

I find it suprising that they don't even explain what measures they've gone to in order to make sure that griefing with this system doesn't occur and that is what scares me the most. How can you build a system that can be used as a griefing tool and not tell the people who are going to be potential players that you have gone to great lengths to make sure that the system will not impact them negatively unless they themselves did something wrong? It just feels like it might have more negatives than positives.

Originally posted by chelan

this will be a social nightmare.

 

Might be true, i'm quite amazed that some ppl even consider this political system reason to play TERA, but well, ppl have different tastes ...

To people who keeps saying TERA is failing in Korea, the political system isn't actually introduced in Korea yet.

Originally posted by Elikal

OMG no. Players having power over other players? Politics!? And PVP champs get to rule me? WHOA. That sounds like someone just manifested my nightmare! WORST possible thing to give people even more ways to harrass and torture fellow players! How about... NO THANKS? This is so abysmally bad... what are they thinking? Maybe some well educated and strictly behaving Japanese can handle this, but surely not we nasty and egoistic Westerners!

 

Good to know I am not the only one thinking this way!

It seems to me that once a guild gets into power though the PVP ranks it will be very difficult to kick them out.  Without big restrictions jail will become a tool to keep your rival guilds from every getting to the point were they can compete.  Just imagine a raid leader of a rival guild having to call a raid because the guilds healers are all in prison that week.

Originally posted by Chimps

This game is failing in korea so i'm worried it will get shut down.

Unless this game sky rockets in U.S/Europe then i don't see a future for this game.

But considering Korea doesn't like this game there must be something good with it because we all know how terrible korean/asian games usually are, they're all grindy and awfully repetitive and nothing creative about them at all.

And the fact that korea doesn't like this game makes me see hope for it in U.S/Europe.

 

You do realize. That they are "westernizing" it for us... They are adding raids, adjusting quests (adding quests really xD), and just making it more "appropriate" for the Western territory. Which I think is stupid. But I don't even know where you are coming up with this "Korea doesn't like this game." I've read reviews and it has good feedback. It's a ground breaking game. Just because other games come out at the same time doesn't mean it will over come TERA. Everyone has their own preferences anyways so definitely the type of MMO impacts the player's choice. Idk about you but I love fantasy MMO. And it's all I do 24/7 if I can help it... 

I don't know why people are saying such harsh things about this game. Steparu.com has a thorough review and it's very good. But it's of the KOREAN version not the one we are going to recieve. So all we are going to have to do is wait and see... This game is going to be good and I'm sticking by it like I have the past 7 months... I don't care, I've literally become a little obsessed lol. I enjoy the lore too much. Those of you who don't just are missing a lot.