Why do you all expect the population of WoW on a niche appeal asian title? Also, why do you expect the game to die just because it does not have the population of WoW?

Do any of you have ANY experience with asian translated games? Translation of an exsting game costs a lot less than creation of a new game. Translated games are sometimes an afterthought, they know they will not make much money, but that's not the point. I have over a decade of experience with the Phantasy Star games. Sega knew these games would never have the population of WoW. In fact they underestimated the initial population of Phantasy Star Universe in the west. The game had 31 channels on one server, capacity 31 thousand (a drop in the ocean vs WoW.) In the first week, we could not get online, or had to sit in a queue to get in.

About a month after release, PSU was hit by hackers who destroyed the economy by handing out free money in the most populated areas. Most the players quit, down now to about 2000 max online. How long did Sega keep the servers and updates up?

Three years. 2007-2010, RIP PSU PC.

We quit too, or at least, we quit for the 360 version of the game. Always a niche afterthought, this title never had the population of the initial PC/PS2 cross server. They guessed it would have less players, so everyone across the globe was integrated on the 360 version. So we had Japanese players too, despite the fact their own PC PSU release was months ahead in updates. I would make the conservative estimate that PSU 360 probably had at max, 2000 players online, or at least did when I was playing - I was living in Japan at the time.

How long did the 360 version of PSU last?

It's not been closed down. People still pay for sub, still play it. We got bored of it 3 years ago, but it's still there. 5 years now it's been going. PSU PC Japan, still going strong.

If you use this as a model for Tera, will three years online be really a disaster if they close the US version? Is WoW a real model, massively popular with even casual gamers, still going afer what, 10 years? Aren't those people bored? No sequel to WoW? No update of the core engine, still playing on graphics circa 2000? Why would anyone do this?

Bear in mind PSU was a followup to PSO, which I played on Gamecube and there was such a small community on there I knew most of their characters and had played with most the server.

Sega released PSU in the West DESPITE the small community on PSO.

All money is good, be it masses of money or a small influx of money. One of our guild members has changed his race four times. I bought two copies of the game and CE upgrades for both. Another guild member bought a reskin for a weapon. I bought a character redesign. I am subbed til Dec 2012. No, I don't think the game is dying. I'll quit if there is major hacking, like PSU, but I'm thinking of learning Korean anyway. I already speak Japanese, and will be on PSO2 open beta next week. This time, Sega on't say if it'll get a US release, but if it doesn't, we all know why. The games are always targetted by hacking causing a huge exodus of players. I haven't seen this happen to Tera yet.

I don't think in their wildest dreams, EME expected another WoW. Expecting another WoW would have been bad business sense. The game already has nothing NEAR the population of WoW on the Korean servers. Despite this, they released Tera in the West. Do you think they were thinking they could make WoW money, or "Whatever we can get from our first title" money? Whatever they can get from a translated job most likely will not put them in the red.

I very much doubt they even opened the game with the initial server capacity that, say, Diablo III opened with. Remember PSU and its 31K max? Directly preceding PSU was an updated PC release of PSO. It had a VERY small community. Closed down after 3 years. Yes, I do think they made money from it, or we wouldn't have got PSU, or PSU's major upgrade 6 months down the line. We wouldn't have got the two Phantasy Star games for the PSP either (and bear in mind the PSP is a relative failure in the west to start with.) But we did.

How do I know how many people were online in PSU? Well, Sega told us early on that a star on a channel=200 players, 5 stars to each channel and 31 channels total on one server. I just counted the filled in stars, and when I couldn't get on without sitting in a queue, I realise 31K were online.

I agree with your post. People make such skeptic complaints about games, but they don't realise that there are active players even today on MMO's that people thought would "Die out and vanish".

And even those that were made F2P were made for the sheer purpose of not only money, but getting more players interested in such good games. Sure, every game has their flaws, but predicting failure from fixable flaws is childish. We don't know if EME is fixing their flaws or not and until someone has proof of them not doing their job they're just pessimist smack-talkers.

There's another few details I missed out.

PSU opened sparse as all get out with only three dungeons and variants thereof on one planet out of a total of three planets at "endgame." Phantasy Star games start out with low level cap, and incrementally increase this up til 200 over a period of, well, potentially a couple of years. Levelling is much slower in Phantasy Star, mind.

It's an instanced game, so bare in mind those three dungeons were all we had, aside from lobby areas. And all we had for a month. Lots of people quit just because of that. I just spammed those dungeons thinking "Oh, it's Phantasy Star. This is what Phantasy Star does, and we knew this when I signed up for it."

When I bought Tera I was BLOWN away by how enormous it is at launch, and BLOWN AWAY by the complaining about lack of content. Lack of content, what?

EME are updating and tweaking this game at FAR greater levels than Sega ever did. In PSU 360 we had a bug that slowed the 360 down to unplayable levels in two of the dungeons. Sega NEVER fixed it. In Tera there's the UI bug. It's nothing like as bad, and at least EME acknowledge it. Sega pretended it didn't exist, PSU 360 was a PC port and nothing that bugged out on the 360 would be fixed unless it bugged out on the PC version, which it didn't. So Sega didn't want to know.

I was still blown away by griping on PSU. Most of this griping followed the fashion of "It's not exactly like PSO, I wanted PSO." So Sega introduced all kinds of silly stuff imported from PSO, like a holodeck type thing where you could play "an emulation of a world" which was uh, and emulation of PSO, with PSU gameplay. But no, not good enough. They wanted PSO gameplay, which is like, um, take the warrior class from Tera and imagine all they can do is a 3 hit combo attack, pressing one button, or a second button for a higher damage attack with lower hit rate. Take warrior class from Tera, add all the skills you learn and there's PSU's combat. I have no clue why these people could not unglue the rose tinted spectacles off their faces.

So PSO2 is the true official sequel to PSO, not like that cacky PSU. I'm going to play it, but no clue how it stacks up to Tera, and no clue if I can go back to pure instanced with lobbies vs. massive open world. Oh, but massive open world with lots of questing=boring, right? Can't possibly sub to a game labelled as an MMO and expect MMO questing. No, we want pure action, pure dungeons. People, please go play Monster Hunter or something. Or heck, PSU on 360. Looks dated as hell nowadays, but I think if you're citing the ten year old snorefest that is WoW as a good success story purely for its userbase, you can handle 5 year old graphics (and mass slowdown in 2 dungeons.)

Quote: Ippiki on 06/18/2012, 05:59 AM

Enough said right there. Its been getting annoying to see people constantly compare Tera to WoW and to see how much people expect the population on Tera to be just like WoW.

On a side note, i've tried WoW a year or so ago and didn't like it at all. I didnt really understand how it could still be so popular. There was a F2P game that I liked better than that game Haha.

Lol@ comparing a [filtered] asian MMO (console-based, no less!) with another [filtered] asian grindfest MMO.

Man I guess you really have to lower the bar before TERA looks successful.

Quote: MidnightStar on 06/18/2012, 07:00 AM - view

When WoW came out it already fame and a solid playerbase, add the fact there weren't that many options that time and then you have a monstrous community. Of course, quantity =/= quality. Most people stay there because of friends and because of the time invested. I know a person with some 85 chars there who is really bored from the game, but don't leave because she has her guild and the raid appointment, but is really going to update her PC so she can try some other games.

Quote: EasymodeX on 06/18/2012, 07:11 AM - view

PSU was on PC where the core of initial launch players hailed from, but, nice try.

People who read posts that are created by trolls who want to make you think what they say
is LAW!/true. So you gotta understand something here; unless you play the game itself,
be it on a low population Server. There will be Other servers out there that might have
more people than you think.

This game isnt dying, its just people moving to a different server. This game isnt going F2P,
but the trolls want it that way so they can be happy and not pay for a game they WILL NOT
play.

Also, neither game is "[filtered]", if you do not like asian games, please don't play them.

In fact the only mistake I think EME made was marketting this game like a Western title. If it couldn't compete with Diablo III, why try? Why not aim at the existing playerbase that were on PSU and Monster Hunter? And all the Ragnarok Online userbase (huge).

Some people like asian games, so feed them an asian game. PSU was marketted like an asian game, and Sega never expected high capacity online. 31K absolute max. In fact I think they added channels early on. Only reason it tanked population wise was due to hacking, which has plagued Phantasy Star since 1999, and we were sick of it by that point. We expected that PSU, being server side saved states, would not have hacking, how wrong we were.

Quote: Crideon on 06/18/2012, 07:18 AM - view

Ok that makes sense.