The time to reign in TERA is upon us! Starting May 18, guild leaders who wish to declare their candidacy for a vanarch position, can. What is a vanarch? Vanarchs are an integral part of TERA's political system. This is an elected position that lets you reign over an entire province for three weeks. Start planning your campaign with our vanarch election calendar!

Elected vanarchs can collect taxes from vendor shops, set tax rates, decide which specialty shops to open in a province, and gain fame for themselves as well as their guilds. Vanarchs will be known across the realm—hopefully for good reasons!

Curious? Want to learn more about the ins and outs of TERA's political system? Check out our blog post on election details and we'll be adding a political system section to our Game Guide next week! Good luck to all of our applicants. We're excited and can't wait to see the results of this first election cycle!

Will it have info on specialty shops?

What system is in place to prevent mass recruiting zerg guilds from just voting for their guild leader and winning every election? For example; if a server has 5 300 member guilds, then should I assume that there will be 5 less chances to become a vanarch every election? I just can't comprehend how this is a good idea.

Also, will the biggest and most profitable provinces always go to one of the biggest guilds on the server? No skill or anything like that is factored into determining the winner? Please tell me I missed something.

I remember once reading that there would be a space when applying for you to enter something like a campaign speech/promise? Did I read incorrectly? I don't see it mentioned here.

Okay so we're basically going to hand over provinces to the guy who managed to spam the most randoms into his guild using the area chat.

What a fantastic system!

This is why all we see on the forums are guild recruit threads, and we mostly see the same guilds spamming their lolrecruit everyone and anyone message in the game.

Sad state of affairs. ItsReq has the right idea ^

Let the abusing begin. This is the most unfair system that should never go live. Good job at screwing the game.

A) Many of you must not know how actual politics works. NEWS FLASH, biggest mass of people usually wins. Nothing is stopping you from zerg spamming a 300 person guild as well, except your own apathy.

B) You can actually become a vanarch through pvp as well once BG's are added in.

Even if guild members vote didn't count people would just make fake guilds to vote for them.

Friend guilds with less then 300 members wont have a chance unless they go for pvp election or run for a province no one cares about.

PS : the small guilds could band together and choose one to represent them, and win over all these zerg guilds.

That is how it should work though.Sure you can zerg a 300 man guild and try to get a good province, but what happens when another 300 man zerg wants that big money province as well?

Are you going to cut a deal with another 300 man zerg alliance? What if they do the same? Form a coalition then? What are you going to offer that other max member guild to vote for you instead of themselves? It quickly becomes more complicated than "spam guild invites" because your guild size has a cap. If it did not then you could recruit until infinity to secure a spot in a good province, but thankfully that is not the case.

I am very excited to see how this turns out. I can only imagine the ways that people will band together or war for control of cities. making Politics a part of the game mechanics! Bring it on!