Update: Political System on Velik & Callida

Quote from Raven;2198848

With the manual activation of all necessary NPCs, you'll still be able to enjoy everything TERA has to offer until the system will be available again.

Unless you were one of the Vanarch guilds that got elected, in which case you can't enjoy everything - you miss out on a month of running a province. The political system is a major draw for a lot of the long term players, and certainly for me personally it's one of the most fun aspects of Tera in relation to other MMOs.

Is there any compensation going to be given to the guilds that ran for vanarch this time round and effectively wasted the 2k gold and catharnach tokens (not that this is a major amount, but for some smaller guilds it might be).

I'm disappointed. It's going to make it very difficult to trust the vanarch system again if it's effectively deleted for a month - have you identified what caused the issue and can you assert that it wont happen again? Because a lot of the vanarch guilds put in a lot of effort grinding policy points and campaigning and to have all that effectively "deleted" feels a bit of a kick in the teeth. Why should we put in all the effort in the next vanarch cycle if there's a chance it will be for nothing again.

I'm glad for the sake of the server that the vendors and clerics are back up... but speaking as representative of a vanarch guild that puts a lot of effort into organising events around our province, I'm intensely disappointed.

If compensation isnt given to the guilds that won the vanarchy, and we can't be assured that it wont happen again, I can see guilds being intensely reluctant to run for vanarch at all in the future.

EDIT - Also it seems all the opened stores are at 5% taxes. Pretty much every Vanarch guild on Velik sets their taxes to 1% so the server is having to pay more right now anyway.

Thank you for opening the NPCs! No more having to beg for charms in PUGs :o

But as said above, not only did the Vanarch guilds lose their application gold and token, but also cashed in a serious amount of points for their regions. Hopefully, there will be some sort of compensation

Quote from Raven;2198944

Again, we're sorry for the affected guilds and vanarchs on Velika and Callida, but bringing back the NPCs and server stability had the highest priority, as it was affecting everyone playing on those servers.

Oh I can understand that - for sure the convenience of the NPCs and server stability is the priority, as it affects by far the most amount of players.

But is there no chance of injecting the 2000g and 100 catharnach tokens that each guild paid back into the system? Most vanarch guilds use the taxes they earn from the period to pay off the registration fee, and a lot of smaller guilds will be very deterred from running again if they feel they've just flat out lost that.

Quote from kadaju;2199058

And, yea, would be very grateful if we could get a refund of the money and tokens we used.

Just had it confirmed, we wont be getting any compensation or refund for the gold/time spend investing in this month's vanarchy.

Oh, and /global chat today seems to imply that the bulk of the server generally detests the vanarchs and would rather the system didn't exist. Does make one wonder why we bother, sometimes, but we do get some good feedback when we do a good job.

Wondering how to pull something more positive out of this experience.

Most people just want everything opened everywhere all the time. When a vanarch is doing a bad job at this they aren't and that's pretty much the only thing people will notice.

By the way, can the tax please be set to 1% or none? Seems to be set to the highest possible, that's a lot of money being drained from the Velik economy. When there's a vanarch this is going back into the economy, now it's just disappearing into the void.

I mailed Silvanoshi with my thoughts on the matter, not really wanting to be soapboxy or such, but that was before I'd heard he was moving on. So I figured I'd post my message to him in the hope that it rings true with other Vanarchs:

This has certainly hurt my desire to play Tera with my usual chirp and optimism. Certainly on Velik, where there's a big community drive to keep taxes at 1% across the board in all provinces, running for vanarchy gives very little physical reward for the amount of effort you need to put in to grind policy points.

Losing 60,000 policy points, 2000g, and any profit from taxes that we would have used to pay for prizes for our events isnt the end of the world, but it still hurts. This bug not that much different to a hypothetical situation where a player grinds battlegrounds for points, buys a weapon, and then the weapon is deleted in a server crash. That player would feel hurt and angry that their grinding time was wasted and would raise a support ticket to have either the weapon or the points restored, so this doesnt feel much different.

The vanarch guilds help shape the community and you've seen how disgruntled the player base gets when there are NO stores open. Vanarchs have to work in their own time to make sure that happens, with the only reward being a horse and the swift anger of the community if we fail to get stores open in time. On other more populated servers where taxes get set high and there's a lot of competition, then the reward is the money, but on Velik at least it's very different - any guild that dares to raise taxes above 1% gets scorned, and there are only just enough vanarch guilds running to fill each zone, so it's very much a responsibility more than a reward.

I'm not expecting anything, of course, but wanted to at least put down an official comment as a previously very happy customer who's now bitterly disappointed that one of the most fun and unique elements of the game has now got a big black cloud hanging over it. It's not so much about the physical compensation, but more that the feeling that the work and effort the Vanarchs put in for the benefit of the community was for nothing and noone really cares.

Compensating the guilds in the vanarch race (this would be all those who ran, not just the winners of course) would go a long way to softening the frustration of this one. 2000g and 100 tokens doesnt sound like much, and there's not really any getting back of the large amounts of policy points guilds wasted, but it's more of the principle of the thing. Guilds invested time and money into something which didn't exist, and the corporate response is "tough, your fault". If there was a huge reward for running provinces on Velik then it would even out over time, but many guilds put in their time and energy purely for the good of the community and get virtually nothing out of it bar a nice warm feeling (and a shiny horse).

Meow will run again on the 10th, of course, I'm sure a lot of the other guilds will. But it will be somewhat reluctantly, with a good deal of trepidation, and a big feeling that noone really gives a damn.

*Pats Elly*
Can't really add anything to that, pretty much sums it up nicely.

Don't worry, I'll make u some cookies to cheer you up abit. (I swear I won't put strange alchemical components in them!)