On Tuesday, it was reported that ex-NCsoft employees were found guilty of leaking Lineage 3 information and coding to a rival and were sentenced to jail time. It was reported generally by media outlets as a win for NCsoft and implied by some that Bluehole Studio, the makers of TERA, were guilty because of the verdict.

On april 18 Bluehole Studio’s fought back stating they are “NOT guilty“, calling NCsoft a “corporate bully“.

NCsoft is a billion-plus dollar corporation, so they can afford to have a team of high-priced lawyers spin out reasonable-sounding documents. These baseless accusations have led to unfounded rumors, which is disappointing and unfair. But that doesn’t mean the rumors are true.

It is no surprise that the latest spin on the story has it that “TERA is guilty.” That is wrong. For the record, after extensive Korean proceedings, Bluehole Studio was NOT found to have made any use of any NCsoft trade secrets in the form of source code or game design. In fact, TERA didn’t even exist when the Korean case against the former NCsoft employees arose, and neither did En Masse Entertainment. In Korean civil proceedings, Bluehole was also found NOT to have been responsible for the exodus of NCsoft developers.

To our fans and followers, we want to let you all know that we are not going to let a corporate bully or baseless rumor mill derail us from focusing our efforts on delivering TERA to you on May 1, 2012.

BlueHole Studio’s goes on to point out that NCsoft has not filed a motion in the US to prevent the launch of TERA, suggesting they have not done so because the claims that Bluehole used any trade secrets is indeed false.

While the guilty verdict for the ex-NCsoft employees does prove that they did indeed shared trade secrets with Bluehole Studios, it has not yet been proven that Bluehole used any of them.

While the image posted above is from one of the documents submitted to the case and shows many character similarities, really how many different ways is there to draw a elf, high elf, human etc? Half of them don’t even look alike imo other then physical size.