When I heard of the Unreal Engine 5 Mabinogi and saw the Unreal Nao, I had tears in my eyes, and soon after, a creeping dread of Mabinogi being turned into a wannabe knockoff of Genshin Impact or some other modern gacha MMO, but your promises to not "change" Mabinogi reassured me, but I should have known better. This most recent update has ruined the game for me and makes me sick knowing what has been lost...

SKILLS

Starting with skills and ranking them, it used to be a sign of determination, skill, and perseverance to have all skills, let alone have them all rank one, and it would take months if not years of dedication, and I agree the requirement of using a skill 9000000 times was a bit too much for ranking them, and the earlier reworks to that system were much needed with all the new skills coming out, but now people can start the game and have whole class and skill tabs maxed out in a day or just handed to them, and that ruins the sense of progression and getting better at the game.

Dungeons

Dungeons used to have their own personalities to them. Alby was the easy beginner one with spiders. Ciar was the next one up with goblins and golems. Barrie was the mining one for blacksmiths. Math Advance was the one with 100 rooms and only 1 or 2 hearty enemies in each room. There was variety to them, but the reworks and updates ruined their individuality, and things like homestead ores and alchemy ruined the need to go to Barrie. The updates remove math dungeons from having anything special about them. and no new rewards worth farming for were added to any of them. No materials for demo weapons or for Geas armors, and the few refined armor sets were so abysmal to hunt for compared to their usefulness it wasn't worth the time.

The Story, aka Generations

A lot of the reworks and beginner systems cut out and blow through the generations and story so fast or just skip, and now you pay to skip. I've met players who don't even know who Nao really is and have been playing for a few years... and people also skip through the story because there's 40 minutes of reading exposition from a no-name NPC that doesn't matter, and the dialog with them ends, and the quest wants you to talk to them again for another 40 minutes of reading exposition, and it just turns out all that exposition doesn't matter anyways...

tech dunn's and other content

Tech Duinn was one of the best forms of content Mabinogi has ever had. I wish they had added more to it. Tech Duinn felt like a refined version of the Theatre Missions and Shadow Missions. A lot of people love all 3 because each mission had its own tricks, enemies, and mechanics, but due to power creep and no added difficulty levels and rewards to these, they have fallen off, and now for some reason they have gutted and ruined Tech Duinn, and it feels like they have been trying to kill off Tech Duinn since they first removed elite passes and unlimited runs and didn't add a pity system, and now under the guise of making them easier for people to run, they have gutted and ruined them. They might as well cover the Tech Duinn dungeon back up and remove it from the game...

Combat system

i picked mabinogi as my mmo becuse of the combat system all other mmos i tried where locking you to one class with 4-8 skils that where just spam on cooldown and was boring mabinogi combat felt like it had impact to it that evean if i didn't have all rank one skills if i played it smart and with a little luck i could counter defend and smash my way to victory and if i failed i would be punched in the face by the golems and goblins and sent back to the start and as i kept playing and lurned outher skills from outher class's i culd use any skill at any time so i could punch and stab my way thru a dungeon with 2 daggers and a friend with a bow and windmill gard him in a corner as he snipes and get to the boss and pull out our wands and 2man fusion bolt charge and burst it down and now its just lazy game mechanics of multi aggro stun locking and instant kill and instant wipe mechanic's and as fun as Archana are thanks to them it has become the dummed down locking you to a class and spamming 4-8 skills on cool down and evean then i was ok with Archana because that was a late game thing you had to earn but now iv seen people who get their 1st Archana before evean clearing G1 in a week or less..

Stop making skills useless for no reason.

There's a handful of skills that have no use whatsoever other than ranking them for stats or that have been made useless for no reason in most modern content, like lullaby.

Things I Would Do to Fix Mabinogi

STOP ADDING TIME LIMITS TO ITEMS!!!

Make skills and class something to work towards again, and stop handing out endgame power to beginners. because beginners who get whole classes and skills handed to them and think they have what it takes to do Glen and Crom after 2 weeks of playing then get mad when they get multi-aggro spammed and killed because they fireball everything and get all the aggro and run around like a chicken with their head cut off and don't know how to crisis escape or manage aggro

Make drop rates better without limiting runs, and remove the BS that lowers a player's drop rates, like how long they play and how many friends are on their friends list... There is no reason why I spent a year trying to get a kraken heart and didn't get a single one, or why someone would want to grind for a Destructive Robe that requires at least 200 broken magic essence when it takes 100+ runs to get a single one. According to a few different spreadsheets I've seen of players who run Adv HM dungeons 100s of times a week, it would take a person running Adv HM 250 times a week for 2-3 years to find enough BME to make a Destructive Robe. I'm sorry, but that's disrespecting our time. And yeah, it's shorter and easier with the new update, but I can't wait to see the new spreadsheets and see it being 500-1000 runs to get a BME, not even considering this Neartite garbage is probably just a roundabout way to limit runs/drops for everything.

Restore dungeons and tec done to original release forms, but remove pass requirements and spread out drops. People want and need to progress, like the basic Geas armor set materials, from dungeon drops and BME to more places than just Adv HM. Add BME to almost all drop tables and add them to Shadow Wizard. HM and Elite add them to the Baltain Elites and that kind of thing.

Stop handing out endgame to new players through events and broken beginner systems. Sure, help them along; give them some XP or skill/class x2 ranking boost potions. But stop handing them endgame weapons they didn't work for and handing them the whole game on a silver platter; it ruins the experience and the feel of progressing and learning the game and makes them play for a few weeks or months, then leave, never to touch Mabi again.

The Mabi experience is a fantasy life, and you explore and experience life by learning about things and seeking them out and trying them out for yourself. You don't just go, "I want to be a welder," and a company hands you a $150,000 welding truck and says, "Have at it on that gas line pipe!" No, you start out small with a $100 110V hobby welder from Walmart or Harbor Freight, and if you like it, maybe take a few classes and work and save up to buy a better $500 220V welder.

Rework the combat difficulty to a scaling system. I can understand if it can't be done with the current Mabinogi, but in Unreal 5 Mabinogi, add a scaling system to monsters a lot like the one they use in the newer Borderlands game, where a maxed-out player can join a lobby of a new player, and they both see the same enemy. For the beginner, it's level 1, and for the endgame player, it's maxed out, and they each do damage accordingly, and both contribute to killing the same enemy without the endgame player just one-shot killing everything.

and for the story just add proper multi language voice acting or hell evean just give players the ability to add their own custom voice acting packs/files to the story and the community will do your job for you and Probably better....