The MOBA TERA Battle Arena did not have a long life. After only 27 days, publisher Gameforge shuts down the servers again. Read here what happened.
What is TERA Battle Arena? Behind the name TERA Battle Arena (TBA) was a new game mode of the MMORPG TERA. Similar to how Final Fantasy XIV had done it with the Rival Wings mode, it was about MOBA-style PvP battles.
You could start with fully equipped, predefined heroes from the TERA world and fully focus on TERA’s still highly praised action combat system.
The new mode launched hopefully on October 31, 2020, but the joy was not to last long.
Player feedback leads to the death of the TERA MOBA
What now happens with TERA Battle Arena? In a message to the players, publisher Gameforge announced on November 26, 2020, that they would not continue to actively support the TERA Battle Arena mode. With the next update B102 in the coming year, the servers for Battle Arena will go offline and the game mode will no longer be available.
The issued real money currency called Tikat will be refunded as such and can then be reused in TERA. Real money will likely not be refunded.
What are the reasons for the shutdown? According to the announcement from Gameforge, the feedback from the past 27 days was likely the reason for closing down the Battle Arena:
We would like to thank everyone who gave us such great feedback during the TBA beta phase! Based on the responses, however, we had to make the difficult decision to close both TBA and the Core Zone.
What is the players’ reaction? Looking at posts on reddit regarding the topic, a clear picture emerges of what went wrong with TBA. A player named biome3 reported after just a few days that hardly anyone played the new mode. Furthermore, TBA was only the regular TERA PvP with fewer skills that could not be altered and a lack of innovative ideas. His detailed opinion stands for many players from the TERA community:
It really makes no sense to talk about the gameplay, it’s just Tera-PvP with six skills instead of whatever a certain class has. The game has almost no features and its user interface is bizarre, as if it were designed to be played on a phone. And when I say no features, I literally mean none, no friends list, no keys to remap, no scaling of the user interface, no swapping of skills in the skill bar, no scrolling, so the camera remains stuck up the character’s backside.
The entire game consists of reused assets from Tera that have been cobbled together into a complete mess, the lobby is a giant circle with random props and NPCs scattered about, in the middle stands a large, dumb-looking tree, and around the whole place is a massive wall that makes it look like Allematheia, followed by a random forest that you can’t even reach. And the map you play on is just a random green field with no real variation.
In summary, TBA is the worst piece of content ever added to Tera, it literally has no merits, there is nothing good about it. The only people I can imagine playing it are those who find the regular PvP in Tera too difficult and want a stripped-down version, or those who played Tera who liked the combat but didn’t want to level or grind. And these two groups are so tiny that Tera’s current PvP scene looks like that of World of Warcraft.
At least one thing is not the fault of the downfall of TERA Battle Arena: MeinMMO author Jürgen Horn! For he has a dubious “superpower” that ensures games die miserably as soon as Jürgen discovers he likes them. Therefore, Marvel’s Avengers probably isn’t doing so well right now. But in the case of TERA Battle Arena, he did nothing!
