Well, as my last post suggested, I bought TERA yesterday.
I spent four hours afterwards trying to get it to work. That includes reinstalling it twice, talking to a technician for an hour (including wait time), and grasping at straws until finally figuring out the answer.
I bought the physical copy because I didn’t want to wait for a download. And besides, I was near a Game Stop, so I wasn’t going out of my way.
I get home, I put in the first disc, I install, everything goes smooth, I tell it to launch TERA, and…..nothing.
I go to my Start menu, go to click on the TERA Launcher icon, and…apparently it can’t find the link.
I go to the program folder, manually launch the TERA Launcher, and I get: “C:\Program Files (x86)\TERA\TERA-Launcher.exe is not a valid Win32 application.”
I get frustrated.
At this point, I tried everything under the sun: made sure that Windows was up to date, followed a post about installing VeriSign root certificates, played with every single .exe file in the folder (with and without “run as admin”), and nothing worked. This included talking to a support rep through live chat who gave even more advice.
Last ditch effort: I uninstall and delete everything out of every temp folder I could find.
I install it again. This time, to a different folder. I also temporarily disabled my antivirus. I also told it *not* to launch Tera at first.
I checked the start menu and tried launching it from there. Success! The launcher starts. It patches itself super quick and restarts. …Then nothing. Failure!
At this point I’m back to where I was, except this time the launcher has created its own folder back in the same place I originally installed the game even though the new install was into a completely different folder.
All hope being lost, I tried one last thing. I found a folder called TERA-Launcher.exe.update, and another TERA-Launcher.exe file. I took that file, cut and pasted it into the main folder, and tried it again. Success! And now I can play.
I write this article for those of you having this same issue. I assume that the issue has to do with the launcher that was placed on the retail discs and doesn’t apply to the downloaded copy. This really is a stupid bug that should never have been put on a disc. TERA, you need to warn your customer base about this as I didn’t see anything relevant to this issue on your site.
The Creative n00b 