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There was never an MMO that had the sense of community and social aspect that Mabi had back in 2008-2010.
I was wondering if people would support an offical Old School Mabinogi Server if Nexon released one. Similar to the concept of Runescape Old School. Where cosmetics wasn't such a big deal, where the skill and abilities were small and consistent instead of all these new ones that rendered old skills obsolete. Where the combat system was (flawed) but still basic and intuitive.
Thoughts?

Comments
I think I would. I remember when I first started playing, people were so chatty and down to run anything with you. Its so different now. Its all about items and such. Don't get me wrong, I love getting stuff, like a kid on christmas morning, but I miss sitting in a dungeon lobby with my party sign up and it only took about 5 minutes before I had a party of 6-8 with strangers and we would just go in and have all the fun and play together. Its just not like that anymore. I'm not sure what happened but the camaraderie is gone. I have found that if you are not in a guild, its really hard to make online friends to play with on a regular basis. Have you found this difficult?
During the pre-combat days there was far less content but the overall pace of the game was also much slower. certain skills like intermediate magic took awhile to get but were so rewarding! I think the lack of content then wasn't an issue because it took players a while to reach end game content ( mainly Peaca dungeon) at that point.
The introduction of the combat update was a welcomed change for most as it allowed for much more fluid combos and the added combat styles helped spice these up more! It was at this point however that all the new combat styles added plenty more stats to obtain and allowed for many players to hold their own soloing missions from this point on Mabi was having issues keeping their player base, I feel that was due to a large portion on the players at that time frame were entering college or the workforce and life just prevented many from playing as often and I can't speak on Nexon's marketing efforts for the game but Mabi was very niche-based as its not like any other MMO so some ppl loved that and others didn't. In order to keep the game alive they started introducing features to allow players to level up quickly or have access to hard to obtain skills early on to keep them interested as at this point there were tons of gachas being introduced to cater to the player base who liked to afk with fancy outfits on ... but hey that probably helped keep mabi alive. I think the large hike in the price of items often costing several millions of gold was a big turn off to alot of players or overtime they just were interested in playing newer games with their friends to obtain that nostalgia feeling from something else.
Although im sure there are some Mabi private servers still out there, id wager they are as populated as Tir Na Nog so reviving that sense of community would be very difficult if not impossible. I recommend if you do desire to keep playing, that you do your best to adapt, the server merge may provide that community again but its largely up to you to search for other players or guilds to get those interactions up again. Best of luck on your mabi journey!
If you want a taste of what you'd be facing then log into a pet and go fight things. See how long you can stand it.
And the population will never be healthy so long as the cash shop mirrors the eastern one. There is a reason other companies like PA don't use the same strategy in every region.
The over reliance on gatcha alone kills interest almost immediately in Western markets. From my understanding NA has tried raising this point several times but it falls on deaf ears.
There is something that Josh Straife said that has stuck with me for a bit.
People today no longer play MMO as a group. They play single player MMO.
When times moves so much faster and requires more attention from you to move along, nobody really wants slow strategies anymore. Slow magic charges that requires teaming up with someone are just not very favored, while anything that gets you in and out gets picked most of the time. This gets worse, when events are nothing but repeated chores, incentivizing speed, and efficiency, which are mostly achieved by doing things alone.
Another factor is that people who did grow up with slow paced games no longer have time to do so, and those kids who do have time, are never interested in that to begin with.
I could never go back to the good old slow mode today. I don't have the same time, so I just do the in'out and log off.
Nostalgia is only effective on the people who still have time to spare.
anyway, i'd love to try old school Mabinogi, it sounds like a ton of fun!
We were brain dead but it was effective.
This. People would fill up on nostalgia get bored and then leave. There's an obvious reason why Mabinogi has to constantly innovate and bring new content and events to players. People get bored fast and it's not financially conducive to dedicate a server to a few old farts feeling wistful.
If you want too see what the combat system was like log in as a pet. They still run on the old warm up system rather than cool down.
Unfortunately even I prefer to play alone more because if I bring a party I know for a fact that everyone is just gonna steam roll a room in a second, and personally I dont really enjoy that, I prefer the times when my party was trying everything it could to survive because even if you were strong, multiple enemies can still destroy you even when you would otherwise destroy them in a 1v1 scenario, unfortunately those times are long gone. Even with the private servers that try to relive those times, I think their main problem is the lag, it just makes the game unplayable as if it wasnt already bad enough when it happened with the main game and this game I feel like its already niche as it is, so I dont find it surprising that private servers would struggle to get any population whatsoever, heck the game itself already seems to be dropping in population, theres a reason why the server merging has happened.
I like that I can use a pet or partner sort of in place of a friend cuz sometimes I wanna just grind a dungeon or skills and I dont wanna try and make someone come with me when I am training a skill or just mindlessly doing a dungeon over and over, plus I like pets. I dont really use the one spawn aoe pets. Maybe you mean the fynni bead skills? I havent unlocked any yet so I have no idea how over powered they are. I dont like they they changed my alchemy skill wind blast to be AOE instead of single target but I guess it is technically stronger now
It was that feeling that I'd have to seemingly go out of my way to bribe people with huuuuge incentives or quite exclusively only play endgame content with sellable rewards at the end chests to get anyone to show an interest in anything gameplay related. When that seemingly became the 100% response to everything, that's what killed party play for me.
I'd rather be alone than stoop to such a low level by making everything I do be about gold or fake power or stepping over people
That sucks, it seems like most mmos seem to be having the same issues tbh, I wish it wasn't the case