TERA’s political system is one of the features we’re most excited about, and it’s a part of the game we’ve spent a lot of time refining. With our second round of vanarch candidates stepping up to serve their servers, we thought we’d take some time to talk about some upcoming changes to this already popular aspect of gameplay.

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As originally conceived, a player seeking vanarch status had two paths to the office—campaigning and conquest—with the latter requiring candidates and their guilds to distinguish themselves through battleground play. While revisions to the battlegrounds aren’t quite ready, we are happy to announce that we’ve found a way to put the fight back in political infighting!

In the revised system, candidates will select a continent as usual, but they will also select a competition type. If they choose a straight election, they’ll rank their preferred provinces and then begin campaigning for votes. If they choose to fight for the right to rule, they’ll rank their provinces, and then their guild enters a modified guild-versus-guild (GvG) PvP battle with all other candidates’ guilds on that continent.

When the competition phase begins, all members of other eligible guilds become targets. But instead of a normal 24-hour fight, vanarch GvG is a weeklong affair. We’ve set some limitations: only kills scored on characters level 40 and up count, and there’s a cap on the points your guild can earn from a single guild’s members per day. Vanarch GvG doesn’t replace normal GvG battles (those are still declared and resolved as usual), and even though you earn no points for lower-level characters in rival guilds, they’re still on the hit list.

Vanarch GvG tracks progress the same way as voting races. Players in candidate guilds can check their current vanarch GvG points but not those of other competitors. At the end of the competition, the guilds with the most points on each continent get provinces to rule, with ties resolved by the first guild to reach the point total.

In each election cycle, several provinces per continent (Southern Arun, Southern Shara, Northern Shara) will be eligible for vanarch GvG. Those provinces will not be eligible for voting purposes, so dust off your weapons and get ready to fight!