TERA Console studio Krafton insists it’s never given any private servers an agreement to operate
If you’re among the small number of western MMORPG players who still follow TERA Console following Krafton’s closure of the PC service back in 2022 (something many of us are still salty about), then you might have noticed an odd social media post this week.
“Hello, Guardians!” Krafton wrote on its TERA Console Twitter account. “We do not recognize any private servers. To be clear, there are no private servers that have an official partnership or agreement with us.”
To that message, the studio appended a screenshot in German, which when run through Google Translate appears to be a message from a rogue server administrator discussing server stats and further claiming to have an agreement with Krafton to operate the game. According to Google Translate, the admin says, “We are one of the last active TERA servers in Europe, and as of now, the only server with an agreement with the manufacturer (KRAFTON).”
Further research makes clear that the server being referenced is EU TERA Classic, and according to its Discord, there’s a pretty widespread understanding among admins and players of this server that such an agreement exists. In fact, the same admin wrote a few weeks ago that the group’s agreement with the studio forbids them from advertising RMT, though it apparently does (or at least did at one point) accept money. “[T]he Krafton agreement is so tight that even should we want to we couldn’t make a profit,” one mod said this past December. “[W]e have an agreement with Krafton as to how much we are allowed to make,” wrote another last fall.
Nevertheless, Krafton appears to now be disputing the idea that it has any sort of agreement with any of these servers, and it’s not clear what sort of miscommunication mishap led to this trainwreck.
Either way, in its haste to denounce rogue servers, Krafton also reminded the world that TERA rogue servers exist for PC fans who didn’t want to migrate to console. In fact, if you mosey on over to the TERA subreddit, you’ll find a recently updated mod post with a complete list of the live servers – we count five, with three in the USA and two in Europe. There’s also a reference to Krafton’s having pursued the purveyor of a now-dead server with legal complaints, so as always, consider your risk accordingly in this era of emulation lawsuits, and remember that all of this may be moot (or even more risky) once Krafton releases TERA 2.