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Are the server-populations now dwindled or dwindling ? That might explain why hardly anybody is ever on-line on any of my friend-lists for any of my characters if it's not just a result of them removing me from their list for my own absence/inactivity (that opponent called the «real-world» can certainly throw a lot of interference into our lives and free time available).
With ANY «business» models, the PRIMARY function that keeps any «business» ALIVE is advertising, and I mean CONSTANT advertising. Mabinogi has simply fallen behind in its advertising efforts. This game already has more-than-enough activities available to keep players occupied all day, and I mean ALL DAY long, and it has also been my observations and experiences that games are better off expanding and advancing slowly, gradually introducing one new thing to try out (such as a new skill/quest/etc or flavour/alternative to said skill/quest/etc only a maximum of once a week), rather than dumping out too much content too quickly with hardly an «established» player-base.
Unfortunately, I just don't have the free time available these days to explain all of how/why, but I CAN post a link to a video that helps to explain the things that may help the Mabinogi «advertisers» to understand what they may need to do in order to keep generating «fresh» NEW players to replace those who fall-off (compared to other games/MMORPGs Mabinogi actually does have a fairly decent «retention-rate» such that many of its players eventually return at some point or another).
With that above video posted, for purposes of generating a «playerbase» that is community friendly, the «demographics» that the «marketing team» should want to advertise to are going to depend on the RELATED types of contents that a «consumer» is already consuming. For example, a number of «animé-sites» exist where people watch those new animé-episodes that get released weekly. Mabinogi is animé-themed, therefore, getting Mabinogi-banners to be visible/advertised on such sites that release Manga, Animé, etc., can be one good start. For more «control» over the «type» of demographics to whom the game is advertised, you would want to pick specific animé-genres that tend to attract the more community friendly type, rather than being displayed along pages where the animé-genre might be of a darker mood that «gets one's rocks off» for the «enjoyment» of watching the «suffering» of others (but to the credit of most Eastern-hemisphere cultures they often tend to promote moral-ideologies in their «entertainment» story-lines), although controlling which particular TYPE of manga/animé/game-genre that Mabinogi-ads might appear beside may not necessarily be an option since those sites tend to set their advertising spaces to the very web-site itself rather than having them apportioned.
YOU people, within the community, can also make your own efforts to advertise, even at your own local-community. For this NEXT «method» for «advertising» that I am about to explain, the Mabinogi «Marketing Team» need only to create advertising banners/posters, with various Mabinogi-themes, and make them into such that they can just be printed out and posted onto Bulletin-Boards or other such places that allow it (for example, I once posted an advertisement for a game that I used to play on a McDonald's bulletin-board, stacked a few sheets together with the thumb-tacks, and they actually kept it up there in order to make sure that it remained visible, and me simply doing that was able to get several new players into that game, although I avoid that old game's particular genre now). You can do the same or similar, just by getting creative, whether a music-themed or chef-themed or swimsuit-themed or raid-themed MMORPG-poster, and of course all «marketers» know to put onto such «banners/posters» a «call-to-action» such as «Play Now! Visit mabinogi.nexon.net» (Calls-to-Action are basically a Marketer's/Entrepreneur's Jargon for: «Now that you have seen our advertisement, instead of just looking at this ad, come and try out our product so that we can win you into becoming one of our customers!»).
I'm going to give YOU (yes, ALL of you reading this, including the «Mabinogi Marketing Team» if they even exist), yes, YOU, a «challenge» that should be fairly simple. I will even provide my OWN «example» for how I «quickly» decided to find an already existing Mabinogi image on-line and then «caption» it into an «advertising» poster that can then be printed out onto brochure/flyer/gloss-paper that you can try to find places of high-visibility (like the bulletin-boards of grocery stores, department-stores, local community buildings, although there are a number of places that do require their approval before they'll post your ad, most of them should allow you to post for free, for many «business» people like to put their «business-cards» onto these boards, too). Anyway, without further ado, here is the link to an image that I decided to grab after a brief search for something I might deem as appropriate...
...followed by my «edited» version to make it «advertisement-oriented» for its public marketing campaign. Due to the «theme» being Shakespeare-stories, this type of flier/promotional-poster would be best posted up in or around locations like book-stores and libraries. When advertising on-line, for purposes of targeting potentially game-minded Shakespeare-fans, said banner/poster can be made to be displayed (linking back to the mabinogi.nexon.net web-site of course) amongst literature-forums, web-sites that are dedicated to Shakespeare-articles, displayed along on-line book-stores that sell Shakespeare-books/stories, etc. All kinds of ways to market and advertise. If your game-director don't know how to advertise or its importance, then don't even bother trying to make massive changes to your game-system, because just as merely building a ship does not automatically make them come, neither does converting said ship into some fancy space-craft make them come either; you MUST «advertise» CONSTANTLY if you do not wish to waste unnecessary resources on the over-head-costs of servers that are no longer even being kept active.
Feel free to «flood» the «Mabinogi team» with a link back to this post that I made BUT, BEFORE you do that, I recommend that you first create a Mabinogi advertisement-poster of your own, such as how I did (example above this paragraph), even going so far as to have it printed out onto brochure/flier paper and posting it somewhere in your local town (and even multiple copies in multiple buildings of surrounding towns if you are so inclined), take a digital-photo of where your Mabinogi-advertising poster is being displayed, and include an «attachment» for them to be able to see it for themselves. The purpose of this is to show them that you are «serious» with wanting to help re-populate the servers with more players, and I GUARANTEE you (yes, you, and YOU, ALL of you), that CONSTANT «advertising» DOES work and have an effect to keeping the «business» running. I am also MORE than «qualified» to be making these claims/suggestions, for one of my past associates ended up going from some financially undisciplined broke dude who was always in debt and pestering me for money to now running his own businesses and even owning his own house and a building for his primary business, and a current local-associate wants me to practically run his Kennel business (other than the feeding and taking care of the dogs each day since he already has other people hired for that purpose) because of how much knowledge I have about being able to run a business efficiently (but it's also taking up a lot of my time since I am also that business' current web-master and there's a lot of work I need to do in order to have it re-designed and structured properly unless I decide to hire well-qualified employees to do so but nobody in this local-area seems to have any professional-level skills so I'll probably just hire someone from the Phillipines to do the time-consuming portions of the work for me after I've set things up to where they have access to being able to do the menial repetitive-tasks for me whilst I get the main tasks completed; or maybe have them also do the main tasks after I show them how, I just don't want them to be using platforms like Word-Press for a professional business web-site since Word-Press is not really the best choice for business web-sites for a variety of reasons, but I digress; this is also win-win for me and them since I'd only have to pay out something like 200$US/month for QUALITY FULL-TIME work from someone within the Phillipines who's look for a job, and they'd also be happy to have a job that pays them more than nearly any other job available to them in the current world-wide economic-environment, and they also tend to be hard-workers who WANT to work and are able to take pride in providing QUALITY work so that their boss will continue to hire them and keep them employed; this is in STARK contrast to the «workers» that MIGHT exist around our current local-region). Anyway, I have taken a lot of time out of my day to be able to provide this information, PRICELESS information that I actually SHOULD be charging at least 1500$US to reveal, so don't «waste» the «time» and «effort» that I took to write this all out. I'm sure you guys can do even MORE «professional» jobs than this than I did, but I am on limited time, and this is meant to be a «basic» example I provide anyway due to my time-constraints (I am literally able to write a full-and-complete actual «book» on advertising/marketing/entrepreneurship/business by now, amongst many other topics of course, and I still often get comments from people telling me that they'd buy my book/s if I ever published any).
Anyway, with all that said, good luck with «restoring/[re-]populating the populations» for all of the servers. Have [some creative] fun!
@HardMuscle (Grandpa-Muscle) : Okay, I am caught up on the example-thread now, and I guess for now we can just ASCII our own formats. I am still going through my own learning curves on getting caught up with CSS, HTML5, and even started looking at how to code an entire forum of my own, but those efforts have been disrupted lately due to being forced to deal with other matters until I can get back to my studying of web-coding. Would it be possible for them to set specific limit-types that prevent breakage ? For example, something like max_width_allowed=1000 or permitted_width_range=0-1000 & max_width_percentage_allowed=100 & other such things that might be coded/designed to keep things from breaking, perhaps ? ................................................................................................................................................................ It just occurred to me, you might not know a lot of features were temporarily disabled. Including 'Simple Html' which allowed us to use 'Inline styles', opening the door to unlimited aesthetic potential per post. Such as the 'CSS3 Radial-Gradient' I demoed on my first post.☺
