Imaizumi

I've gotten 2 filia wells by now. Haven't gotten a stone fountain yet.

Remember the good ol days when Claymore was the champion of damage

Definitely one of the best updates in a long while. I don't think the puzzle dungeon is the best part, but it certainly is a step in the right direction like Iyasenu mentioned. The puzzles could do to be a bit more difficult and varied. The music math dungeon as is, is already not that fun to clear imo despite being fairly fresh just because you know what you're going to get every time. Also questioning how long this burst of commerce will last since people will eventually get the stuff they want. It still needs a more long lasting overhaul imo.

If anything the best part of the update is freestyle jam, the bard bulletin board, and to an extent the renown system. To me the renown system is just another addition of a daily system. The game's been about gradual progression from the start rather than powering through stuff with rebirths and over time added more systems to reinforce this like daily SMs, daily seals, squires to an extent, and the somewhat recent festia. So it's not that exciting on it's own, but the way it handles itself is much better than some of the other systems in place.

Barring the success of daily SMs, most of the other daily content is basically solonogi. The new head of dev really is pushing for more group play and accessibility across any total level/gear range in the recent updates. Festia was similar but not as successful since the mini games aren't the funnest, but also because it's reward system isn't very satisfying. Opening garbage in a majority of your boxes isn't very motivating if the actions you did to reach the box opening weren't that fun either. What makes renown work is that the rewards are tangibly visible as you go along. I think this is one of the big differences between Festia and the Renown tab.

Then it just comes down to freestyle jam being so undeniably fun since hearing good music is conducive to attracting your attention. Then you see the source of the music and see there's an easy way to join a part of something you like. Then you just keep listening to music while casually playing a mini game if you're not going to talk to the pile of people playing the music to keep you occupied while listening to the music. Then you realize you're getting renown and it's kind of cool and you're hooked, so you'll try to rank the other renowns. All of which require other people to do, so you get involved with other people which creates communities. Comparatively to some of the content we've gotten over the last few years, it's an A grade system frankly.



Edit: Oh yeah, there's also my thread which said sort of similar stuff but was just much longer and boiled down to a simple poll for most people I guess, http://forums.mabinogi.nexon.net/discussion/616/musicq-is-a-good-fix

Title in point. I'll explain.

There are about three or four big reasons for this. We didn't get any OP new skills. The content is more easily accessible to almost every player on the total level spectrum. We are provided incentives to participate in the system in an artificial way, and then are kept coming back through non-artificial ways.

Not having any new OP skills means we don't get content that ages poorly while being obviously broken when it comes out. Some examples I can think of are puppetry and especially fighter. Skill sets that were broken for their time, but grew weaker due to power creep. Which is the other good thing, the update didn't add power creep. Anyway the content will age well which is obviously a good thing.

The content being accessible to basically everyone also reinforces this idea. We have a virtual keyboard to press buttons on which although I'm doubtful is that useful for composing, it does streamline and make the concept more friendly to people unfamiliar to it. The new bulletin board streamlines playing other people's "original" pieces. The freestyle jam is surprisingly easy to get into and enjoy.

Now if you'e been playing Mabinogi for a while, you'll know that it's been creating artificial incentives for quite a while. Some notorious examples are the dailies and events. Events often creating a sense of "if I miss this, I'm playing the game in a less efficient manner!" and a similar feeling in the dailies. "Since I can only do it once a day, every day I miss is lost value/efficiency!" These can eventually mount into a sort of chore for some players depending on how much they enjoy doing either.

MusicQ recycled this daily concept in the renown system, but I believe this is mostly good system because the end result will probably have you coming back because it's genuinely fun, not because of lost efficiency. But to obtain renown, you do repetitive tasks once a day. What's the difference you might ask? The difference begins with Brianna's renown training itself essentially. As long as you run some sort of combat instance based group content (e.g SMs, dungeons) you'll run into people sharing buffs unto you.

Then there's the big one which is Yvona's. This one is trainable just by participating in freestyle jams. Participating in one might be a pain for some people, but you still have the option of just playing alone in your homestead if you'd really like. I for one rejoice that we're first given incentive to do freestyle jam to earn valuable renown, then get sucked in by the make shift communities that are freestyle jams. People love their music and when you play a good song, people react. It is revitalization of more group based activity as opposed to solo game play. Sure it was around before, but to give people a reward for hanging out and make it easy to do so? It's almost like it's a game instead of a job!

Finally the last one is Nele's which is arguably the hardest to train, but I think it's fair. It feel like it's meant to be a bit more challenging to do compared to the others. Composing a MML even if it's "inspired" and sharing it on the bulletin board and gradually getting up voted for exp is another community centered concept. Which by the way to level up all of the renown you're either encouraged or forced to interact with people. Often times I hear the biggest reason people haven't quit the game or the most fond memories they have of it, are the people, and this is doing just that, creating the memories people need to love the game.



tl;dr good update pls update dungeons commerce in a similar fashion. do u think is good update?