Alert! Incoming interview from a friendly TERA fansite, TERAHispano.com, with Patrick Wyatt (En Masse) and Sam Kim (Bluehole) about protecting TERA from bots and other security-related potential problems. It's been a hot topic since TERA hit the ground, so I'm glad a fansite like TERAHispano got the chance to talk about it. They like to share things with alternate-language fansites, as do we! Here's a little preview:

We’re very much aware of the problems caused by cybercriminals in other online games; given the enormous amount of money that they can generate by gold farming and stealing game accounts, then selling game gold for real-world money, it’s no surprise that they’re already looking into TERA. While their interest does validate the growing excitement for our game, we know that online crime is a critically important problem to solve, and that we have to do much more than other game publishers have done in the past. Players have already seen that simply pulling out the “ban-hammer”—as publishers have done for many other games—is an ineffective solution.

We have a lot of work to do to ensure that our game has a high-quality play environment free from chat-spam, account theft, purchase fraud, phishing, scamming, and all the other nasty behaviors that criminals use to make money. We don’t have these mechanisms in place yet because we’ve been focused on creating an excellent gameplay experience first. That said we know it is a critical area for us to innovate before we launch to ensure that gamers have a great experience playing TERA. Just so no one gets alarmed by that statement, we won’t be using GameGuard or its ilk.

Next up: today's skill list is for the Slayer class! As always, you can repost the list if you need to translate it from English to another language, but please link back to the source! ;)