Community Play Event: Ramping Up

 

With our Community Play Event just around the corner, we wanted to take a quick break from our prep work to give you all a look into the whys and hows of what we’re doing.

Our primary goal with the Community Play Event is to reward the community for their support and input over the past year. From the day we announced our plans to bring TERA to North America, we’ve had an amazing amount of support and input from our fans. What better way to reward those people who’ve been active in our community than to give them a taste of TERA to whet their appetite? We want our core group of super fans to see where we are currently, and to give them a sneak peek at what’s to come. We at En Masse also get the added benefit of testing some of our brand new hardware and pieces of our live operations for future events.

A lot goes into planning an event—even a small-scale one. There are steps and procedures we have to go through whether 400 people log in or 40,000. There’s scheduling and planning, hardware testing of our servers, network testing for client/server connections, client testing, localization tests, patching update checks, downloader and installer testing, and that’s just the beginning of the game side! Our Community team has been planning newsletters and articles, setting up our forum, and a host of other items. Our Operations and Platform teams have been prepping the back-end server infrastructure and account management (without which we’d be unable to play). It takes everyone working together to execute a gameplay event, but the end result is worth it.

Sure there are a lot of technical features we test during the play session and the community gets to experience the latest North American version, but I think the biggest bonus to putting on an event like this is logging in and watching players experience our game and really love it. Seeing players enjoy TERA fires me up to make the game even better. If you were chosen to participate in the Community Play Event, log in and have a blast. It’s our thanks to you for your continued support.

If you didn’t make it into this round, don’t worry—we have more events planned and can’t wait to give everyone who wants play TERA a chance to experience it firsthand.