I quit TERA (for now)

Once again... I quit TERA....

It's been a while since I last played actually, but I never wrote about why I quit and how it came to happening. I need a reminder on why to do my best not to come back, so let this post serve that purpose!!

This game could now properly be considered an addiction of mine. Every year or two I relapse and spend months playing it. That is, after initially playing it non-stop for about 3 years. Basically, a large part of my life was spent playing this game. I don't really regret it, because I did get better at managing my time while playing it and I don't let it take over my life completely. I simply abandon some of my other hobbies when playing it, like my site lmao. But overall I don't think it's affecting me too negatively.

Around 10 or 11 months ago I got back into some shitty russian server. It was fun for a bit, and it was one of the rare times I was playing without my original guild. I was playing in some normie europe based guild, and we struggled to communicate with the obnoxious russians a lot. I never had a reason to hate on russians until I played this server. My guildies were a bit weird though. The guild was started up by two friends (that met ingame in like 2012). The guild leader quickly stepped down because of a death in his family, and his friend took over. This lead to their actual friendship almost breaking apart because they kept bickering over why the guy that stepped down doesn't want to come back and play. For some reason they thought it best to include me into their personal drama by making me a guild leader even though I didn't want to lmao. Not counting the two leaders that hardly logged on, I was probably the most skilled and versatile player in that guild, carrying everyone literally all the time, if I'm not playing a healer, everyone will be dropping dead every 0.2 seconds, if I'm not tanking, the bosses will be jumping everywhere, if I'm not dpsing, the runs will take forever. Not a bad thing for me because I love to struggle in this game and help people learn, but it also made a lot of the players visibly upset because they thought I'm bothered by them sucking, tale as old as time. Whatever, I quit that server around February, when I went to visit my family.

Then around March or so the longest standing and most stable private server announces their shut down. This bummed me out because I had a few years worth of memories on it, and I can already feel the flood gates opening. And boy did they open. Suddenly millions of new private servers are popping up. This particular server splits into two, one being ran by shadier players, the other being ran by less shady players that had a better vision imo but because they didn't play dirty and didn't advertise as well, their server becomes less popular. I played on both of these servers, mostly the latter. I quit around July-ish because it got too dead for me, along with some other issues I'll mention later.

Around May or so, another server pops up. "Classic", they call themselves. But really it's just the earliest leak of the game, a 2015 build that's not really classic at all. They start to shill it greatly on the subreddit but genuinely only a handful of people are playing it. Not until some semi-popular mmo streamer decides to give it a go through a stroke of pure luck (something that never happened before with tera priv servers) and makes it explode in popularity. The server easily had around 5k active players for a bit, 2k active at any time. However, the server was ran by an honest to god schizo. Usually all tera private servers are ran by someone that's a part of the community (which at this point heavily skewed europe focused, with all of the best tera devs being from EU). You really have to be, otherwise you wouldn't be aware of all the tools tera players have created over the years, and you wouldn't understand the culture. This guy showed up out of nowhere, known by no-one. He's Canadian, and he placed the server quite literally in his town. Ok whatever, he wants good ping. The moderation team on the discord consists of more literal whos hired by the server admin, none of them familiar with TERA in the slightest. He started making big promises while doing minimal changes to the server (thus proving he's likely very uncapable) and going against the general grain of your average tera player, which meant no proxy/toolbox (proxy users were being called cheaters right away - when this was a completely normal part of any tera priv server for ages), no software that helps with ping, no dps meters, he wants everything to be vanilla, he wants leveling to take forever, he wants gear to be insanely hard to get etc. For anyone that's a tera veteran, this all smells like bullshit. TERA leveling is nostalgic, but it's extremely stale. To make it fun you'd have to change a lot of things and while completely possible, nobody ever wanted to take a shot at it because it's a temporary part of the game you're usually out of quickly. Some time passes and people are really struggling to gear on the server, and at this point I'm playing a bit too because the server is so active you can't resist even if it's shit. Everyone is writing feedback on fixing drop rates, the mods and the admin aren't having it. The admin nerfs material drop rates even further, making grind incomprehensibly hard. He says he's planning on changing things up severely, but it's going to take a while. Along with the gearing being shit, the discord mods are simply the most generic and stereotypical discord mods you could ever imagine, making any type of critical discussion impossible. Like genuinely in my whole life up until this point I haven't been met with such sweaty and powertripping discord mods.

Now to rewind a bit. This server has only one admin, and only ONE server tester, called Noobex. This is insane. But the admin claims he doesn't trust anyone, and this guy is his best friend. While the admin is pretty polite and down to earth, his bestie Noobex is an edgy smartass that keeps getting into fights with people. So much so he ends up leaving the discord to not tarnish the servers image because people started complaining about him a lot. Noobex is a part of the best guild in the server, and they're attempting to run the hardest content, with Noobex flexing on everyone all the time about how good he is (he's actually getting carried by this guild). Amidst people complaining about how hard it is to gear, they start... nooticing. They noticed Noobex is decked out in full +12 weapon and bis gear. Ok fine, he's been playing since before the server blew up. But he also has a weird etching that has never been obtainable in any version of the game ever, and he also has jewelry that isn't on any dungeons drop list. Ok clearly, the admin spawned these items for his bestie, I mean, it's a private server, if he admitted to it nobody would care. But the admin is vehemently denying it. The admin goes full schizo and starts blaming the community for witch hunting and being meanies, meanwhile everyone is grinding the hardest dungeons they can and none of this gear Noobex has is dropping anywhere. He goes so far to show us trade logs to prove some level 30 player traded Noobex the recipe for the weapon, which proves nothing because a level 30 player couldn't obtain that recipe in any way. Hilarity and drama ensues, the server is up in flames as the admin changes his story a million times. As the server reaches a boiling point, the admin "secretly" tweaks the drop rates for the weapon design, so suddenly a couple of them drop after months and months of the design never dropping. Still, no sign of the jewelry nor the etchings.

Then, the second plane hits the tower. A data breach. An ESL shitposter showed up in the discord demanding gunner buffs, the admin didn't listen to him and he decided to punish him by hacking the server. All of the data is out, apparently paypal info from early subscribers is out too because the admin didn't properly mark his account as business or whatever. For some reason this lead people into sniffing around to find the admins credentials in programming because he's severely unskilled if the data breach happened so easily. The admin's discord account has his steam account linked to it, among all other social media. People open steam and just start going through steam screenshots... in one of the screenshots, of Dark Souls 2 from ages ago they see a familiar... username... Noobex!!! Everyone starts shitting and pissing themselves, including me, I hardly slept that night from the sheer hilarity of it all. Even more proof, the admin had his real name linked to his discord through various social media, and when you google his real name you can even find the Noobex username tied to it through other accounts. Furthermore, the hacker confirmed they both played from the same ip address lmao. So the admin pretended to be the tester on his alt account, argued with people on his alt account, defended himself, geared himself in bis unobtainable gear, and spent his free time getting carried by the top guild and still not being able to clear top content, while 95% of the server was still stuck leveling because it took so long, and the remaining 5% was stuck clearing mid tier content in shitty gear because enchanting gear was an impossibility. While he didn't allow for software that helps with ping, he placed the server in his house. He didn't allow for dps meters because he's a genuine shitter that can't do hard modes in gear that is way overpowered for them. The admin unironically tried to claim Noobex was his roommate but at this point, it was too late. The server completely imploded.

This all happened in July, and ever since then the admin has been promising the server will be up soon, new and fresh, with the backend being built from the ground up. Obviously it's just empty promises, and nothing is going to come out of it. They spent a whole month with the discord in lockdown mode, banning anyone that ever said a single negative thing.

And now, I begin to grow bored of one of the M*nma splinter servers. The population is just too low, and doing anything fun is impossible. All that's left are the top tier parsers that wouldn't touch you with a pole because you're not in their circlejerk, but suddenly they're getting desparate and inviting me to do runs with them. I don't like running with this breed of players because they always put pressure on you having to perform your best, and they're just not fun people to be around. The only person I like is my friend who became a tester for the server, but sadly I just lost interest at this point and he probably did too at this point.

More servers are popping up, like EU Classic, and another "Old School" server, that's being developed by members of oldfag /vg/ guilds. It's supposed to be a very early version of the game, and even though I kind of wanted to play, my desire to interact with /vg/ players was at its lowest at this point. Thing is, the tera /vg/ general made a comeback some time last year because of a yet another server, a long running american server. I started posting in the general a lot again, and when classic was having a moment I joined the /vg/ guild and realized I've outgrown most of the players there. They're all obnoxious nostalgiafags that are all too shit at playing the game while having a horrible superiority complex and I just couldn't deal with that in the second server too so I gave up. It's funny how in this decade of not playing TERA a horrifying number of these men turned to vtubers and vrchat and all they do is jerk off and erp all day. Was kind of shocking to see the guild chats lmao. Genuinely the most normal person in that guild was this elder troon dude that revived the general and did a lot of effortposting to keep it alive. You know I'm in the trenches when I say that, but at least he's a true and honest mmo enjoyer.