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.

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, a few 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!


This information can also be viewed on our blog post on the political system update.

I like.

To clarify, are all guilds in GvG status or only those going for the "PvP Province" in each continent?

Cool idea, but it's flawed system for large guilds and it's very easily abusable.

Quote: Hong on 06/19/2012, 12:01 PM - view

Agreed.



Just another reason for people to gangbang those without sufficient numbers. PvP was stated to be balanced around Group battles, which literally translates to the bigger the group the better. Which should be the case, of course, but adding more incentives to gang up on the little guy is not necessarily gaining favor with those little guys subscriptions.

I was surrounded by 3-4 players in a guild I was at war with the otherday when doing a daily, to my surprise only 1 faught me, the others watched putting me in defensive mode, but then finally left us so I wasn't afraid to go offense. Very cool 1v1. Now add in the GvG vanarch scenerio, I do not forsee this happening ever.

It sounds fine for the PvP servers. I would not want this at all on the PvE servers.

Quote: Hong on 06/19/2012, 12:01 PM - view

Not really. Too large of guilds often get abused by smaller more organized guilds through guerrilla warfare tactics. Happens all the time.

Quote: Tman229 on 06/19/2012, 12:15 PM - view

If each guild thrown into this free 4 all scenerio is at war with eachother...do you group w oppossing smaller guilds to not hit with your attacks? What about the known Zerg+Zerg alliances using the same tactic?

When talking competitive pvp, you can't say a large guild that never plays together counts. If 200 people are only ever 10 who play together, of course the smaller guild that's 20 players who always play together will win. Those 20 out # those 10, even if guild charter depicts a diff #. The numbers only count when placed on the battlefield.

Pretty sure once they add an incentive to not die in GvG, a lot of those bigger guilds with fodder getting picked off will change their ways and roll in force, or play it safer and dominate with votes instead of GvGing for it. Especially if your usual opponents opt out of the voting race to fight the GvG one.

I think it's the medium guilds that always roll with 20+ members to PvP are considered the zerg guild in this situation.

Tough to balance pvp around groups when groups aren't balanced.

Good. Can't wait.

I like the changes, adds a reason behind gvg. My only concern is the nexus system, and how broken it currently is. Allowing gvg battles during a nexus should be disabled, until nexus are working as intended. Guilds already use the nexus as an opportunity to gvg, when players can hardly move. I would like to see gvg disabled during nexus, especially with a Vanarch position is up for grabs.