How Mabinogi Can Alleviate Content Rot And Encourage Multiplay

[z99o]

Mabinogi has 20 years of content which has for the most part become obsolete. Bosses, dungeons, raids, maps, equipment and weapons... While there are features that alleviate this through daily and weekly missions, the only worthwhile ones to do are for meta content. I would like to introduce Warframe, a game that is about half as old as Mabinogi, but has managed to avoid the pitfalls that Mabinogi has fallen into, even while pushing new quests and mission types multiple times a year.

Warframe is a 4 person multiplayer shooter. Players can vary their playstyle by using different weapons and "Warframes", which can use abilities akin to casting attack or support magic. Like Mabinogi, missions are procederally generated. Player progression is centered around doing the "star chart", a semi-linear set of missions, as well as completing story quests and leveling up equipment. Playing with other people is easy, as matchmaking is automatic.

Here are some of the things that Warframe does to allow players to enjoy older content.

1. Randomized Hourly/Daily/Weekly Missions That Are Worthwhile
Warframe has periodic missions with unique rewards. Every hour a few missions called Alerts will show up with unique rewards such as a rare cosmetic, an important item for progression, or a rare resource. Some items are exclusive to Alerts. This same principle applies to the daily and weekly mission types. These missions span across nearly all of the content the game has to offer, this could be content from the beginning of the game, all the way to the most recent content. This helps players enjoy old mission types, boss raids, and locations, that ordinarily offer nothing worthwhile, with a guaranteed reward. Because everyone is interested in these rewards, you are guaranteed to be put into a game with other people, so missions that require multiple roles like raids are played exactly how they were meant to be.

2. Weapon Exclusive Upgrades
Warframe has hundreds of weapons, dozens introduced each year. This inevitably leads to some weapons that suck and some weapons that are extremely useful. The developers have introduces two features that help bring irrelevant weapons back into vogue.
The first feature is a type of upgrade called Riven mods. Riven mods are randomly generated upgrades that you can put on a specific weapon. You can reroll these stats by spending a small amount of farmable currency.
When you first get a Riven, it is "unveiled", you must complete a special challenge to reveal which weapon it slots into. This could be something simple like "headshot 15 enemies while airborne", or "complete a mission without taking damage". These challenges encourage players to try different playstyles, weapons, or bring friends to help carry them while they're trying to complete the objective. The % stats that rivens have are also balanced by how often that weapon is used. This means that a riven for a meta weapon might not even be worth using because of how poor the stats are, while an underused, forgotten weapon, will have the highest statted riven, and can become very powerful.
The second weapon exclusive upgrade is called 'Incarnon'. These upgrades also slot into specific weapons. Unlike randomized Rivens, these are intentionally designed. Incarnon weapons have a charge that builds up when you kill enemies, and once you toggle it, it will have some special effect like "bullets bounce between enemies" or "bullets cause an aoe". Again, this whole system helps repurpose old weapons into being viable. It is fun to see others use a unique build because they found a cool weapon that clicks with them, and is viable in meta content.

3. Weapon Leveling and Mastery
In Warframe you have a "Mastery Rank" increasing it is very worthwhile. To increase mastery rank you need to "master" a weapon or warframe. This is done by leveling it up to it's max level. This is similar to Mabinogi's Proficency, where a higher proficiency allows you to put more upgrades on a weapon, the same thing applies to Warframe. Because each weapon gives its own Mastery Rank XP, this encourages players to use as many different weapons as they can. They might find a new weapon they like, or a new playstyle they like. It helps a lot with building an "arsenal" rather than one "best build".

4. Legacy Content Revamps
Unlike Mabinogi, Warframe does not have an system to rocket players into meta content. This is because they recognized that the old, unpolished content is simply filtering new players out. You still fight the same bosses, see the same cutscenes, but there is definite focus on making sure the new player experience hooks the player in.

How can this apply to Mabinogi?

1. Make daily missions worthwhile, and randomize the content it covers
Right now, daily missions are a chore list of random tasks scattered around the world. Often times these missions don't reward you with anything substantial besides adventurer medals. Reduce the number of missions available at any time, and time gate them, sharing these quests as the come in to each player. Include dungeons of all skill levels so new players have something exciting to do with other people rather than be committed to the Blanaid Book Hell Mines. Make sure the niche item based dungeons you really have to go out of your way to do like Par Ruins Mirror Witch are included. Give them a more substantial reward than a small number of adventurer seals. Maybe it could be a limited dye ampule, a reforging tool, a reward from the current event. Make it so *everyone* wants to do them. This will let players experience old, abandoned content, with other people, just as they were intended to be played.
Even with existing periodic missions like dragon raids, give a special participation reward like a rare enchant, skill book, etc, so there's some sort of urgency or FOMO, it will attract more players to the raid. You can see this when the auction house starts because it's one of the only periodic events I've consistently seen a lot of people attend.
Mabinogi is a game 90% of the players spends AFK in, this gives them a reason to check in to see if a good alert is happening. Just have an window pop up asking the player if they want a teleport wing to the alert when one happens.

The biggest sacrifice being made here is that you are not using the dark pattern of making people gamble for minuscule item drops. These missions will have *guaranteed rewards*. It will always be worthwhile and satisfying to do them. It's also a great way to reintroduce unobtainable items from previous events, giving them as rewards for these periodic missions. You can still keep your 0.002% drop rates, but not here.

2. Give Equipment Non-Stat Identity
Mabinogi's weapons are two things, a weapon type that acts a certain way, like a 1 handed sword or a shuriken, and a stat bearing item. If you're lucky, aweapon will have a trait like reduced cooldowns, a special upgrade path, or do marginally more damage for some skill. At the end of the day it's a game of Bigger Number Better. This leads to a steady power creep of new weapons needing to have higher stats if they are intended to be used. If equipment had attributes that were not just stat based, like an AOE that happens every 5 hits, or an arrow that bounces to 1 additional enemy. Developers would be enabled to be creative with the new weapons they add, and older weapons could be reworked to be fun to use. A rare niche weapon made 10 years ago could be given new life, and people could be rushing to farm it, revitalizing old areas of the game.
What to do about the hundreds of event and cosmetic equipment? Make them reskins of their base weapon, meaning they would just have the same effect as that weapon. Include armor and other equipment into this system.

3. Encourage Weapon Variety
Now that weapons are not just stat sticks, implement the same type of Mastery Level as Warframe. Reaching 100 proficiency in a weapon gains you some Mastery XP. Total Level is meaningless now thanks to Blanaid, so you could gate content behind Mastery instead, helping pace new players so they can experience the game without feeling rushed. You could also give rewards for hitting a certain level. This whole system would encourage players to find new weapons they like, and make dungeons more interesting because you or your allies might be using a weaker or niche weapon that ups the difficulty.

4. Modernize Old Content
Devcat seems afraid or unable to change the way legacy dungeons are generated. The very simple, hallways with chest or orb room. I personally think they could make them a lot more interesting, and that should have been what was done when they updated the G1-G3 storylines. They gimped all the story dungeons to have 1 floor instead of 3-5, because they very were a huge slog to get through, especially when you're playing solo. Procedural dungeons have gone a long way since 2004, there's a lot of good games to take inspiration from, and while it's legacy and it's nostalgia, it's also very boring when you have to spend an hour in them.

Tangential Rant:

The whole gimping the story dungeons thing is very sad to me. While it's better to have a short, painless experience rather than an hour long boring dungeon that makes you want to quit, it reminds me that it was always intended to be that long, slow experience. When Mabinogi came out and G1 was the only thing you could do, you would get a story quest, read some dramatic VN dialogue, then do a dungeon with 2-7 other people. After spending an hour, you get that payoff to the quest, then you have to wait some amount of time to start the next step in the questline. It was slow, intentional, and let you actually engage with the story. This bastardized state of the quest just boom boom boom 30 boxes of dialogue, teleport, run to dungeon, kill everything in one hit, 5 minute cutscene, go talk to gleeblo the goblin just so he can tell you that he doesn't know anything repeat ad nauseum. I can't imagine how any new player that isn't emotionally invested in Mabinogi nostalgia gets through this without quitting. Your eyes just glaze over. This should not be how the game's story is presented to the player. The entire story structure should have been reorganized to accommodate all the QOL changes the game went through, and doing the legacy story should have been some sort of optional thing you get a special title for.

5. Add Matchmaking
Mabinogi is a social game, and while it's nice to think about the good old days of standing around asking people to help with your dungeon, the reality is that there are far less people active, and they are much more spread out. A good matchmaking implementation that allows for both social party gathering and a quick way to jump into someone's dungeon run would make playing niche content a lot less lonely.

6. Rebalance Reforges By Copying Warframe's Homework
Reforges are pretty similar to Warframe's Rivens. Unlike Warframe, rolling reforges actually costs money if you want to do it a bunch of times. You only ever want to reforge your very best items, so gating easy reforges behind money makes sense. Rebalance reforges to have higher stat gains on underused weapons, and give more F2P reforge options. I have no doubt that whales will continue to pay real money for reforges, especially if the system is expanded to make most weapons in the game worth reforging.

All in all, some of my suggestions require that Nexon concede that rare and powerful items dont need to be gated around real world money or predatory RNG. The reason why that model exists is because content creep makes old content irrelevant, forcing the developers to make the newest content take as long as possible, otherwise players run out of things to do. Alleviating the creep to open up older content to relevancy will let developers loosen up on the RNG and predatory monetization without people running out of things to do.

When I read about Eternity Project, I am concerned when I see little indication that they are going to improve the core Mabinogi experience. If the Mabi team is going to make the effort to port every single map, model, dungeon, boss, mechanic etc. They might as well implement some things to make the 90% of them that are functionally useless, relevant again.

[java.lang.NullPointerException]

Bro I have 11k hours in Warframe and I can say with certainty that Warframe is not well designed for longevity. And the only reasons it has for returning to old content is when your, optional, 6 month long weekly chore list tells you to.

[z99o]

Автор сообщения: java.lang.NullPointerException

Bro I have 11k hours in Warframe and I can say with certainty that Warframe is not well designed for longevity. And the only reasons it has for returning to old content is when your, optional, 6 month long weekly chore list tells you to.

That's not really my point. My point is that it reuses old content in a way that benefits the player, in a way that mabinogi can replicate. Any game will seem like it's not built for longevity when you play for 11k hours.

[Paxseko]

Автор сообщения: z99o

Any game will seem like it's not built for longevity when you play for 11k hours.

I don't think their point was that the game promotes 11k hours of play, as much as they're trying to tell you they're very familiar with what Warframe offers. I have 5k hours there.

Автор сообщения: z99o

That's not really my point. My point is that it reuses old content in a way that benefits the player, in a way that mabinogi can replicate.

A lot of what you're talking about players have chosen to skip/ignore in Mabinogi and Warframe. For instance, stats show only 30 percent of players bother getting MR 10. When Nexon saw similar stats, they introduced Blaanid, which made it possible to skip most of the 'old content' skill gathering, like skill books and page drops. Players can still opt out of that, if they want-- they just choose not to.

All of the points you make about 'gimping' dungeons reflect Mabi's particular pain points of players who are even lazier than Warframe players. For instance, we have the journal achievements in Mabi, which require doing all the old content on every difficulty. How many players bother with those versus afk in Dunbarton and turn off their journal so no one can shame them for it?

Talking about equipment without stat identity and weapon variety is definitely ignoring Warframe's meta, which typically comes down to half the playerbase using a currently high damage setup.

I can continue on, but while your comparisons are interesting, a lot of them underestimate how different the player demographics and types of players are who play the two games. Nexon well knows about Warframe: that's why First Descendent exists. But personally, I think Devcat and Nexon have all the data and stats they need to make intelligent decisions about the game for THEIR playerbase, it's just upgrading the engine likely has more precedent right now. Anything you're writing about here may be reflected in Eternity.

Also, I don't think this is the proper place for feedback to devs. Maybe write a ticket or go to the official discord?

[z99o]

Автор сообщения: Paxseko

I don't think their point was that the game promotes 11k hours of play, as much as they're trying to tell you they're very familiar with what Warframe offers. I have 5k hours there.

You're right, I'd like to tell a story to illustrate why Warframe has good longevity for me.
Last week I did a daily bounty and got a riven mod, after unveiling the riven mod, it was for the Opticor, that's a pretty old weapon, but I like that it's a big cool laser that punches through enemies. It also has a fairly high disposition, so my riven is going to be pretty strong on it. I decided to spend the week using the weapon so I could upgrade it enough that I could do this silly build. Because it was weak while grinding, I had to play differently to still contribute to my squad's damage. After finishing, it's both a fun weapon and does enough damage to be meaningful in steel path. I decide to go into Duviri, a game mode that gives you random equipment options, sometimes including ones you own and what do you know, it's my Opticor. So now I can use this weapon I just built in this entirely different game mode.
I just spent a week's worth of my playtime on this side project no developer intentionally put in the game, this was all my idea, my build. This is the kind of experience I want to have in an MMO, a game that presents me with a new idea, gives me a reason to spend time on it, then rewards me for the effort. That I think is core to a live simulation game like Mabinogi.

Автор сообщения: Paxseko

Also, I don't think this is the proper place for feedback to devs. Maybe write a ticket or go to the official discord?

Oh I dont think any dev will ever read anything I write. I dont want to join the discord just to post a 3 page essay about my opinions, worry the mods with my psychopathic behavior, then leave because that would be rude. Nor do I want to throw this into a web form and never see it again. Any feedback they’re gonna read will be in Korean or Japanese. I do have a mental illness that makes me think about mabinogi several times a day and I wanted to get this out and at least talk about it.

I do appreciate you reading the whole damn thing and replying though.

Anyway, I do agree that my wants for the game are probably way different from the typical Mabinogi player. And while Warframe has a meta, in my opinion it’s a soft meta. And you’re right, I did ignore Warframe’s meta because Warframe allows me to ignore it and still do difficult content like steel path. My big point is that you can find a way to run pretty much anything if you put your mind (grind) to it. That’s the kind of gameplay I like. Which admittedly is antithetical to the way 00’s MMOs like Mabinogi are designed.

Автор сообщения: Paxseko

A lot of what you are talking about players chose to ignore

I understand this and I thought I had implied that its ignored because it’s unfun and worthless to do. Gimping the dungeons and Blanaid is a necessary evil. My rant is just a lamentation on how the original game’s vision was lost in the process. No matter how you cut it, the legacy questline being a miserable solo slogfest is not great for on-boarding a player. It’s not even that they're lazy, it’s that it’s a lonely, slow grind nobody was ever meant to do.

Unless you count 2013 beta Warframe, the grind does not remotely compare to Mabinogi. I did want to highlight that they completely redesigned the intro questline, rather than just add a skip button. I hope eternity can do something similar.

[Owlski]

As someone who has tonnes of hours in both Mabi (mainly in the past) and Warframe, I do think that Warframe has it's fair share of problems as well. Before Rebecca became the games new creative director, the game suffered from:

• Feature Creep
  Releasing new/innovative ideas/mechanics/gamemodes and not doing anything further with them, and constantly trying to chase the newest big thing, before even fleshing out the thing before it
  
• Heavy Reliance on RNG
  Game did not value your time. You could spend hours farming for items, mods, etc. all of which had % rng values that dictated if you'd get said item. (recall the mods that'd have a .005% rate of dropping?) These days there's still rng, but it's a lil better with modern things have a sorta token system.
  
• Lack of Vision
  As much as I love Steve (the former Creative Director) he was a dreamer, and this left Warframe with many, many unanswered things in both the lore and the setting/story of Warframe. For example; When I took a hiatus from Warframe around 2020/2021, a warframe called Yareli came out, and (story wise) it brought up many concerning questions that just felt to conflict with the whole lore/concept of Warframes.

There's other issues I could list about Warframe, but my points are that Warframe has it's fair share of issues.

Another thing that you should take into consideration is that both Mabinogi and Warframe are two very different games. Yes, they are both online games with multiplayer aspects. Yes, they are both older games at this point. But that's really it.

I do think it's a little unfair to compare an actual MMORPG (Mabinogi) to an Online 3rd Person Shooter with RPG elements (it's not even an mmo).
Whilst that's not to say you can't compare the two, you have to take their stark differences into consideration when looking & comparing at what element(s) you'd like to see in each game.

[z99o]

Автор сообщения: Owlski

I do think it's a little unfair to compare an actual MMORPG (Mabinogi) to an Online 3rd Person Shooter with RPG elements (it's not even an mmo).
Whilst that's not to say you can't compare the two, you have to take their stark differences into consideration when looking & comparing at what element(s) you'd like to see in each game.

You're missing the forest for the trees here. I took some very specific things Warframe does well from a live service RPG standpoint, and applied them to Mabinogi.

RPGs are gameplay agnostic, it doesn't matter that Warframe and Mabinogi are completely different genres. They follow very similar patterns of building a character and gathering resources for progression.

Forget that I mentioned Warframe altogether - I regret that I spend so much time on it, clearly it's distracting from my points - do any of my suggestions not make sense in the context of Mabinogi?

[Owlski]

Автор сообщения: z99o

You're missing the forest for the trees here. I took some very specific things Warframe does well from a live service RPG standpoint, and applied them to Mabinogi.

RPGs are gameplay agnostic, it doesn't matter that Warframe and Mabinogi are completely different genres. They follow very similar patterns of building a character and gathering resources for progression.

Forget that I mentioned Warframe altogether - I regret that I spend so much time on it, clearly it's distracting from my points - do any of my suggestions not make sense in the context of Mabinogi?

I can't ignore/forget the Warframe aspect, as it's an integral part of your original argument, and your key/main comparison when trying to compare how Mabi could be better. I can however provide some examples where something (from a baseline value) is interpreted as similar, but (in practice) doesn't really work in the same manner.

Good such example is your viewpoint on Warframes Rivens and Mabi's Reforges.
Yes, both provide a general rng increase in stats which boost a users weapon. They're similar in that regard, however this is what I mean in by which the manner doesn't align.
Rivens in Warframe are primarily used as an incentive for players to revisit old weapons and find new uses for them to be competitive with more of the stronger/meta weapons.
Whereas Mabi's reforges simply provide an upgrade stat boon, reforges aren't designed to make older gear more effective anymore than they do endgame gear.

Even if they were (as you suggested), people will most likely hoard any reforges earned and use it on late/endgame gear regardless, as you don't often see new players going through the hassle of fully upgrading, erg enhancing, enchanting, and/or special upgrading beginner gear to begin with (disregarding story or events), despite blacksmith and special upgrading being pretty simple/affordable. Only way to convince players then to want to spend the mats, time, money, & resources on upgrading lower tier stuff is if said lower tier gear can grow to be as comparable to endgame gear, which (if it was done) would most likely upset majority of the playerbase, and defeat the point in really farming or working towards endgame gear to begin with, as you could gain the same stats with weaker weapons earlier on.

Автор сообщения: z99o

They follow very similar patterns of building a character and gathering resources for progression.

They can, but they also don't. For gear it works completely different in these two games.
In mabi, you can have different loadouts you can sorta hot swap between to change your playstyle, but the gear progression in mabi is very much linear, and more stationary. You wouldn't often find yourself in a situation wanting to swap out your enchanted, upgraded, erg, ego'd, R1 Reforged gear for lower, less powerful gear. In mabi, the only difference gear of the same class type have between each other is just their visuals (ie. how they look) and their stats (ie. base stats, are they upgradeable, enchantable, erg compatible, etc.).
In warframe though gear offers other factors such as their built-in mechanics, how they're modded, how they feel to use, etc. No two weapons in Warframe really feel/act the same, whilst in Mabi a 1h sword will always feel/act the same as another 1h sword, a lance will always be a lance, etc, etc.
It's that difference in nuance in how each weapon handles and feels for the user that makes them even want to invest time/resources at making them better (which is also where rivens comes in). There is no incentive for Mabi players to want to revisit old/dated gear from that standpoint, as they don't have such a thing.
Which is fine, as it would be unrealistic to ask Mabi devs to make each weapon feel unique to each other...
..but that's why I'm reinforcing that just cause Warframe and Mabi share RPG elements, it's not always fair to compare the two when pointing at one as the solution for anothers issues.

I should also clarify that I'm not arguing against changes to be made towards the Reforge system as (I'm sure we all know) it could use a better rework, but the ways in which you're proposing I can't see working as well as you think it would in an MMORPG such as Mabinogi.

[z99o]

Автор сообщения: Owlski

It's that difference in nuance in how each weapon handles and feels for the user that makes them even want to invest time/resources at making them better (which is also where rivens comes in). There is no incentive for Mabi players to want to revisit old/dated gear from that standpoint, as they don't have such a thing.

I agree that just giving reforges a disposition mechanic would not be effective, since weapons of the same type play the same. I bring this up when talking about weapon identity. It's essential that weapons do more than just apply their stat block onto enemies. It would also be very unprofitable, since nobody would bother farming the most recent weapons if they could just use a broadsword with busted stats.

It's unreasonable to expect devcat to remake every single item to have some sort of gameplay quirk, but adding them to new and a couple old weapons periodically would make progression a lot more open ended, without disrupting development. I also like the idea that development time spent on those weapons wouldn't be wasted with subsequent updates, which is how it works in the standard MMO power creep model.

Of course, unless they say they're going to radically change gameplay in Eternity, all of my ideas are fantasy, I can't imagine they'd be able to add weapons with compelling quirks without rewriting the entire combat system. I do however, think adding random alerts would be doable within the existing game.

[Owlski]

Автор сообщения: z99o

I agree that just giving reforges a disposition mechanic would not be effective, since weapons of the same type play the same. I bring this up when talking about weapon identity. It's essential that weapons do more than just apply their stat block onto enemies. It would also be very unprofitable, since nobody would bother farming the most recent weapons if they could just use a broadsword with busted stats.

It's unreasonable to expect devcat to remake every single item to have some sort of gameplay quirk, but adding them to new and a couple old weapons periodically would make progression a lot more open ended, without disrupting development. I also like the idea that development time spent on those weapons wouldn't be wasted with subsequent updates, which is how it works in the standard MMO power creep model.

Of course, unless they say they're going to radically change gameplay in Eternity, all of my ideas are fantasy, I can't imagine they'd be able to add weapons with compelling quirks without rewriting the entire combat system. I do however, think adding random alerts would be doable within the existing game.

Maybe I'm too grizzled to expect such changes from ever occurring. I can respect the optimism you hold, and who am I to deny someone elses dreams.

I just personally don't expect a 17 year old game to make such drastic changes, but I will be pleasantly surprised if they ever do.

[z99o]

Автор сообщения: Owlski

Maybe I'm too grizzled to expect such changes from ever occurring. I can respect the optimism you hold, and who am I to deny someone elses dreams.

I just personally don't expect a 17 year old game to make such drastic changes, but I will be pleasantly surprised if they ever do.

I'm no grizzled vet, but I was playing when the game first came out in the US, so I know that it's unlikely for anything to change. The one spark of hope I have, is that they've been modernizing things in the game since the beginning like UI and auto pathing, so they're been taking steps into changing core things like that. I have some suspicions that the back end of the game is so difficult to modify without breaking, that core changes take way longer than just making a new feature.

I'm just gonna wait and see how Eternity goes.

[Owlski]

I think if you (like me) have played since the game came out in NA, then that also makes you a grizzled vet. XD

I have seen the UI changes and heard of the auto pathing. No doubt changes being made in preparation for their Unreal engine switch.
And yeah, I can't imagine the amount of old code that's holding their game together.

I've done well to temper my expectations, (especially in this day/age of gaming and state of most mmos). Mabinogi has been (and still is) one of the most unique mmo's I've ever played, and I do hope the Eternity project sheds new/fresh light onto it, but only time will tell~

[President of his Fan Club]

No one seems to have been able to solve this issue in PvE MMOs. Content decay. Also mabi is niche IMO.

[yumri]

1 the randomized drops will not do much as you have people at end game who will run the same thing 300+ times until they get what they want with a lot of “junk” items that will be very good for people at the beginning. So all it will do is increase the amount of time people spend in dungeons and shadow mission until they get the rare drop they want then they will stop but if it is able to be sold then it will be the auction house. So like with everything a few people will do it a lot and sell it for an insane amount of gold lowering it until they find the price it will sell

2 I am kind of for this at least for the celtic and later weapons. Why those 3 and not the before ones? You can get a celtic weapon for free after I think G15 or G16. It is annoying and it says in the lore that it is a rewriting of the lore but the reward is a free celtic weapon.

3 Weapon leveling will be used to make the end game weapons even better. Even if you put it onto only celtic weapons the objective best might move back to an entirely maxed out celtic weapon again instead of the ruination weapons.

4 Nexon did revampl old content 3 or 4 times already. The last time was most likely to make it so we can just speed thruogh it all to get to be able to do techs with the rest of the population of the servers. Yes servers as the last server merge did not happen yet.

Now for how to make the story better? Do what they are doing with Chapter 7 ( G22 through G25) that is saying go closer to the mythology instead of putting a nexon spin onto it. Yes it makes for much more dialog but the story makes more sense why stuff is happening. They kind of did that in G1 through G3 before the first story revamp.

For Matchmaking there is already a find a party system would be nice as yes it is already in mabinogi. The issue is no one uses it as it s easier to find a party with party sign instead of a party listing.

I highly doubt Nexon will do anything to hurt their profits. So gacha RNG, gacha having the subjective in Nexon’s mind best fashion, Nao stones, etc. wills stay. I do wish that the pet shop went back to having all the pets again instead of time release pets depending on the time of the in real life year it is. As even though they are marked as “limited time” in reality they are a time of the year pet or partner thing in the web shop.

Another thing I wish Nexon would add is a way to get partners to be stronger. There is an entire skill set around getting pets stronger but after you hit partner level 200 they stop getting stronger which makes the newer pets the better option if you want something to fight beside or for a tank or to take the aggro off you during skill cool downs.

A way to summon a partner and a pet would also be nice but in that it would be kind of balance breaking. As a partner is a character before arcana and for most of them without music buffs it would increase the effective party from 8 characters to 16 characters and 8 pets. 8 of those characters being controls by the game AI that you can customize in game. Why would that be helpful? For people who have yet to reach end game and for people who are still struggling with the story missions.

Now like I do agree revamping world raids would be good as it most likely is not made for 1 person without buffs of any kind to kill a world boss for whatever it drops. Maybe if mabi was single player I could see people having that much power but thankfully as mabinogi is a MMO world bosses should not be solo able bosses. Implementing something like 1 person can only do up to 90% of the world bosses hp bar would be a simple fix for this. As that would only apply to people trying to solo a boss not the parties that change channels eto kill the dragons together. Yes it is a way to force people to play with others but it is a MMO the reason for MMOs is to play with others.

The part I really ope they fix in the Eternty Project is the air commerce gliches and bugs. Go to any mabinogi streamer on I think Friday and they will have an air commercing thingy. At least 1 of the 8 or more people in the stream will get the bug of they cannot move nor use any skills until they log out and log back in. Another one that will happen is the wyverns and/or red dragon will spawn above where the air can aim.
Most of the time it is in the cor area that those happen but not only there as for me I have had it happen around filia and around qillia camp. Wierdly never in the phsis place.

Now to adress his thing of “content creep” that happens in every MMORPG that newer content gives better stuff than older content did. Just be happy most of it you can now buy on the auction market

[vxidwvlkxr]

My main takeaway looking at the general discourse surrounding Mabinogi is that, honestly unless you were among the OG players returning after some period of time, there's no real reason, no pull factors to make new people jump into it fresh like I tried to, as the game just didn't age well after long enough and any QoL updates that had come out in recent years wasn't enough to save the game from itself in that regard. As a *BRAND NEW* fresh player just jumping into it for the first time despite knowing of it for years already, I can't personally see myself being sold on the experience of what this game IS currently. I wish I could put it more eloquently than that but I just don't have the words for the frustrating first play-through experience I am having. Are there any redeeming qualities about it after all this time? I'm trying to be as patient with it as I humanly can, but my patience is diminishing with this game quicker than I thought it would.

[z99o]

Автор сообщения: vxidwvlkxr

My main takeaway looking at the general discourse surrounding Mabinogi is that, honestly unless you were among the OG players returning after some period of time, there's no real reason, no pull factors to make new people jump into it fresh like I tried to.

OG players returning have the same issues as new players, that's why there's so many posts here from confused returners.

I've been paying a lot of attention to the QoL updates, but none of them have really restored the type of gameplay I yearn for as an old player. As you've seen, there's no gameplay hook for new players, they just try their best to have players catchup ASAP.

No QoL update will fix Devcats reductive game balance, instead of remaking or tweaking old mechanics, they will remove or cripple them into triviality. This is because they are working on 20 years of tech debt on a proprietary engine, where any retroactive change is like playing jenga.

An example of this is that you used to have to fight enemies with a high "Combat Power" to rank up skills, this became both confusing and broken as powercreep and catchup mechanics made it difficult to make any skill progress unless you were constantly doing difficult content. Instead of coming up with a new skill progression system, they removed it from the equation entirely. Any joy from grinding a non life skill is lost, and rips any motivation to do higher level content. Now progression is about feeding gold and resources into machines that adds minute stat increases to your equipment, which is not reason I play any RPG.


They have an immense opportunity with the Unreal 5 update to fix these old systems, but until then I wont be playing. My best case scenario is that they release it in a G3 state and carefully add back content. But they already promised character transfer and their intent seems to be to replace this version of mabinogi seamlessly. So it's more likely to be a 1:1 port than anything else.