At its core concept, mabinogi is a good game, on paper it is a good game.
1. its too old, i dont mean that as in "hey guys its been 10 years shut her down" i mean that as in from the UI to how movement is handled, mabinogi is a relic.
click to move. WASD movement seemingly only supported in very limited areas, movement via minimap if you need to go semi-afk or using auto path to go fully AFK.
the chat is basically non existant, people do chat, however it dissapears so fast on my screen half the time i think i have it minimized when i dont.... the whispers when someone messages me pulls up on the right hand side bottom corner there is no reason for me to look at these spaces as its dead screen space.
for those that have been playing mabi for the past 10-15 years on and off, you may see this as nitpicking, but almost every mmo at this point has adopted a similar UI layout for a reason, mabinogis ui and graphics were ok for the time it released in, but lets face it the game never took off and it's always been niche.
2. the catch up mechanics are TOO generous, i made a brand new account to see what the new player experience was like because well tbh i didn't want to log in my old one, not like i really remember its info anyways.
in less than a day on a brand new F2P account all my skills are Rank 1, i have over 4,000 total level, all the old things we had to do to progress/make money early on well those are obselete just go and do blaanid, do your guide/tutorial quests and then anything under required knock those out as well,
and to make it worse, no i didnt grind for 24 hours straight, those that played back when mabi was new would know, mabi was a hellaciously grindy game partially because you had to rebirth to have the AP needed to upgrade your skills, you had to actually put some thought into how you built your character as you leveld to 200 and started getting into rebirth spam.
just everything mabi used to be is essentially removed by blaanids quest existing as well as the buffs i seem to have making things a lot easier/faster,
Mabi was always about the journey, not the destination, yeah some people wanted to rush to end game and have 20k rebirths and all their skills maxed out and that was chill.
im not sure what happened but nexon did this with maplestory as well, instead of trying to make the game better and to try to get it to actually bring in new players, they just decided "lets add this one quest get them 80% of the way through the game and then let them figure the rest out" when the rest at the point it ends is maybe a week or 2 of playtime and thats being generous.
because now the only thing to make someone log in every day is turning the game into daily log in chores, time-gating dungeon runs, limiting how often you can try to get the gear you need down to X amount of tries a week.
honestly, i don't even know what im expecting from writing this on a forum in 2026, nexons never really listened to the playerbase before at least not NA from what i can recall.
guess theres still that small sliver of hope that someone that cares will see this and sit back to see how they could tune the game to a state that would be friendly to both new players as well as respect the time of the older players.
because the formula they have in-game right now i can say might kill whats left of this games fanbase and it was niche as it is and the fast track progression will only make new players burn out faster.
you have no real retention wall.
im going to keep playing because it still has more playability in it than most of the newer games releasing these days, but in about 1-2 weeks ill probably have every skill maxed out have my stats at the stat cap and be sitting here like "well damn now im bored" i am avoiding using certain skip items as well just to have more quests to do to fill my time.
To any new players, if you want to enjoy the game how it was meant to be played simply don't do blaanids quest, even doing 25% of it will put you at a point where everything feels too easy and the fun in the game just evaporates because everything dies in 1 hit
