Boy oh boy, it seems like trouble comes knocking just when things most need to go right. Closed beta event #2 starts in just a couple of hours (Friday, February 24 at noon PST), and our online store won’t finalize purchases of TERA to player accounts—what gives?!?
Our ecommerce (online store) provider had a massive systems failure on Thursday afternoon. The failure affected not only En Masse, but all of their customers, including some of the largest game companies in the game biz. There was a failure in a “storage array” (a whole pile of hard drives) that they’re working to correct now.
Our online store allows purchases of TERA, but the provider’s backend systems that “commit” purchases to the En Masse account system (as well as the account systems of all their customers) is hosed (that’s a technical term we use around here when we can’t use four-letter words).
Now please don’t blame the vendor—they have extensive disaster recovery systems and practice system failovers from time to time, but sometimes systems fail in new and complicated ways that prevent easy fixes. We know they’re doing their best to fix these problems.
So here’s what we’re going to do: we’re monitoring our purchase logs to detect when players purchase TERA, and we’ll batch these up every two hours and email those players a game code to play TERA. It will be a “trial code” that enables you to get in and play this weekend. When the online store problems are sorted out, you will be automatically upgraded to the full account you purchased (standard edition or collector’s edition), never fear.
We are sorry this problem is affecting you and your gaming friends. We’d like nothing more than to get you right into TERA without this additional hassle. If you’ve made a purchase and haven’t received your game code yet, please be patient. Give us a few hours after the purchase to get the emails sent out; this is a manual process and is a bit time-consuming. If you haven’t heard from us in, say, six hours, contact our Customer Support team and they’ll ensure your account is fixed.
In the event that you’ve accidentally purchased more than one copy of the game in attempt to force the store to add TERA to your account, we will of course give you a full refund for any and all copies you’d like to return. One brave soul purchased 13 copies in an attempt to get his account activated; there’s no need to do this yourself!
Again, we apologize for the problems, and hope you’ll bear with us through the mess. And we look forward to seeing you battling monsters during the closed beta event this weekend, even if we have to sacrifice a thousand tuwangis to make it happen!