Troubling News for TERA Japan

The troubling news for TERA in Korea and Japan seems to continue despite winning the Presidential prize (or Game of the Year Award) at this year's G*Star. In Japan TERA has announced that the big scale server merge will commence on January 25th 2012, early next year. How big scale is this, you ask? Well, 10 servers merging into 3 kind of says that there's a probelm doesn't it? The Japan server is apparently infested with 3rd party bot programs as well, something which the Korean server is having difficulty to control.

Charra, Caia and Cillian will merge into the one and only PK server, Charra; Arun, Belleek and Selen to form into 1 of the PvE servers, Belleek; finally, Elrinu, Jurase, Mistelle and Balder into the 2nd PvE server, Elrinu.

In order to stay fresh, attract new players and maintain the current player base, some  dungeons' cool-down timing will be reduced by half, with drop rates  doubled as well. This event will begin today and last till January 18th  2012.

The saddest part to me is that TERA got off to a great start in Japan with a reported number of 48,624 players just in Open Beta which was a record for Hangame Japan. With emergency servers needed hopes were very high for TERA in Japan. With TERA having had server merges in Korea as well, I'm starting to think maybe this game isn't as great as it's been made out to be. I might be wrong though and I'll find out once it hits the NA (if it ever does).