By encouraging players to trade gold among themselves by purchasing game time from each other, developer En Masse Entertainment hopes to make RMT sellers obsolete.

Chronoscrolls are tokens worth 30 days of TERA game time, and function the same way as Pilot's License Extension (PLEX) does in EVE Online. The items were launched yesterday, June 28, and can be bought initially from the En Masse store for $14.99 apiece.

Basically, TERA players can buy chronoscrolls with real-world cash and then attempt to sell them in-game for gold. So instead of purchasing gold from RMT shops, players can instead stock up on chronoscrolls and auction them off should they start to need gold.

"The system works fairly transparently: Chronoscrolls can be purchased for real-world cash and then placed on the auction block, and a scroll thus purchased can be redeemed for extra subscription time. That means that players with piles of in-game gold can get plenty of free time to play the game," explains Eliot Lefebvre in a recap at Massively.com.

A detailed Q&A section explains the finer details on how a chronoscroll works, how to activate its game time, and the various restrictions for using it.

"Safe and Legal Way to Trade Game Gold for Game Time"

En Masse said the primary reason for launching the chronoscroll system is to deter RMT sellers.

"Chronoscrolls are our way of providing a safe and legal way for players to trade game gold for game time," the company said official post introducing the TERA Chronoscroll

"Because players are trading with one another, and not with gold farmers or other cyber-criminals, players can get what they want without risking identity theft or the dreaded ban hammer. Best of all, chronoscrolls help fight against gold farming, phishing, chat spam, and other crimes against humanity," it added.

En Masse said it even consulted developers at CCP Games, makers of EVE Online and the PLEX system on which chronoscrolls was patterned after.

Like PLEX's, the trading price for chronoscrolls will not capped or controlled in any way by En Masse. "Players will control the price of chronoscrolls. Their cost will be set by market supply and demand."

There are differences though between the two. For one, chronoscrolls will not be allowed to be traded for microtransaction items at the En Masse store.

"We don't want or need to monetize every aspect of these games to be successful, and consequently we have no plans to use chronoscrolls for item purchases in TERA," the company said in the comprehensive Chronoscrolls FAQ.