OdinM

Having a hard time being sympathetic.

I'm a mage. And an elf. Once upon a time I was awesome. Now I'm just a pack mule in most parties

Unfortunately the new skillsets methodically power creep in order to get people using them in preference to the older ones. And it has left more than a few of the older skillsets completely outclassed. And Reforges are an in your face pay2win mechanic to the point that I will not use them at all. My power is my own, I don't rely on fancy equipment to achieve it. Almost no reforges and only a couple of items have gotten upgrade stones. In a way, I am very much still playing the game as it was at my peak, G14.

People can literally punch for higher damage than a fully charged thunder will do for each bolt, and deal that damage 5 and 10 times faster than I do. Assuming I can even charge up at all, newer endgame content like Rabbie Phantasm the mobs will not give me time to do it. Spamming sand burst and being dead in a corner was the bulk of my time down there.

Finity wrote: »

Something needs to be done with names. There are a lot of duplicate names, but whats the chance of all of them playing actively to this date?

Really high, in fact. I have the same character names on all 4 servers. And not just one set of characters, 2 different character names that were repeated in this way. A total of 8 characters between the 4 servers that will collide with each other. One set was clones of my main built in the same style so I could play with friends on a familiar skillset and playstyle, the other set long ago worked the farms in Tailtean on each channel to farm gold so I could have nice things.

So now, not only am I going to not only risk losing my name outright, but I am also going to have characters that I probably won't ever use again. Alts that were built the same way as my main, so that I could visit with friends on other servers yet still feel at home with a familiar play style.

The only hope I can see of redeeming this is to look at when a character was used last and what their total level is, then give out the name change items in waves based on that. So a high level character that has been in game every day for weeks is going to be 1st in line, while a character under level 1000 that is only used a couple of times a year doesn't get their name change until 3 months out.

Trying to make the items purchasable or allowing them to be obtained any other way is going to result in trolls abusing the system to perform name sniping, and make a lot of good players miserable for a long period of time while a griefer gets a few weeks of drama and amusement.

The name change items shouldn't become available for purchase until a couple of months after the airdrop. That way everyone who had a beloved character name they wanted to keep has the best chance of getting it back, prioritized by how active they are and how long they've played.

Harukari wrote: »

Once you are back into a corner and have to do a server merge, game is basically done.
People just don't realize this. Nothing good will come out of this. Just gonna be issue after issue after issue.
It may help for a couple of months or even a year. But people will still be afking, because events will still be same ol' afk for this item. People will get bored and leave again until new content rolls around, do that, and leave again, rinse repeat, game over.

Its much worse than that. New content won't save the game, there's already an overwhelming amount of content.

The issue is that in G14 the activities of the hackers caused economic hyperinflation. Even though Nexon has since taken action to burn most of the gold produced and has adjusted costs throughout the game, the economy suffers from high prices and low liquidity. New players can't afford the nice equipment, while old players carefully nurse along their old gear without ever needing to replace it. And since there is no incentive to move merchandise in order to pay for other things, items sit in the stores until people get tired of re-listing it. So there is no incentive to lower prices and clear our inventory, which means the prices remain unreasonably high.

On top of that, the skill trees are horribly unbalanced. In ye olde days, circa G3-G8 when I really enjoyed the game, you could build your character the way you wanted to, and you'd still end up with about the same DPS as all your friends. Like so your levels only really mattered for survivability in the dungeons, a level 130 who had only rebirthed twice could go play with their level 2000 friends and still be able to deal damage and fight the fomors. This is no longer the case, if you aren't level 15000 with R1 everything in whatever the newest skill tree is, your DPS is hopeless and you are just dragged along as a meatshield and pack mule. The enemies will be too hard for you to kill, and will kill you easily. Now I main an int magic mage, and indeed I still play very much like I did in G13 and G14- the height of my character's power and glory. 1200 int, yet somebody half my level has a bare fist DPS almost 4x that of my fully charged int magic. That's not right Nexon, that needs to be fixed. People want to play the game their way, that's what made Mabinogi so unique all those years ago. You weren't locked into a play style in order to comply with meta. We've got a really bad power creep problem now that has its roots in the Alchemy of G9, but has continued to get worse and worse with every new skill tree added except Bard- which is not an offense focused skill tree.

I've invited many friends to come play this, so that I could go back to a simpler time when the game was good and I was willing to save the goddess Morrighan. But every time within a month they tell me that the game is frustrating and boring, and they no longer want to keep playing it. Mabinogi was unique for me because it was the first game of all the MMOs I've ever played that had an engaging story from day 1 and I really wanted to be that hero and save the goddess, going on to save the world. That engagement isn't there anymore. Mabinogi is now like any other generic Korean MMORPG, Oh good you're here lets kill things and get stronger. Yay. If I wanted that I would have continued to play Ragnarok Online.

So no. I fear the worst with this merger. That the game's time has come, after 10 years of ups and downs.

I'll continue to wear the memories of a better time, until the end finally comes. Because I am a mage, and a mage I will always be.

So I've been asking people I know about this, and I hate to be the one to rain on the parade, but I think this is going to be game over.

More than half the people I know in game have made it clear that they intend to uninstall in the week that this is going to take place. That they'll be done with Mabinogi and never again look back. Instead of 3 mostly-empty servers, we're going to have 1 mostly-empty server because less than half the population of each server is going to be willing to continue playing after the merge. Unfortunately Nexon's reputation suggests that we're going to have a week to a month of chaos and disorder as people try to get their names back and get used to doing things again with the new population.

Its been a very enjoyable 10 years. But the game I knew and loved ended in G14 when the hackers killed the economy and community. Since then its only been a hollow shell of what it was. I log in once and a while to try and enjoy it again, only to be reminded why I stopped.

kairisoadori wrote: »

But OdinM Mabinogi should of had things like this fixed ages ago it isnt like they changed servers providers or did anything insane with the server i hope like having Ferghus fix it again and games like final fantasy xiv hasnt done an update over 3 hours in over 5 years even when we take new expansions into account overall

Server hardware doesn't last forever. Its been about 5 years since the last time I remember them talking about making hardware changes. That's a good lifespan for hardware in this usage, taking a beating every day from hundreds if not thousands of regular players. Wears out the hard drives, you couldn't even put normal SSDs here because they would get eaten and fail after a few months exposure. Specialty database server rated SSDs would be required to withstand the punishing of handling the game database.

The provider change that took place was Nexon NA changing who their internet provider was. That change didn't replace any server hardware, it only changed what connection they were using to link the servers to the rest of the world.

There are administrative techniques to reduce how long the downtimes are for situations like this, but they require structural changes to be made when the server is set up in the first place. Its entirely possible that such changes are not compatible with Mabinogi, or at least Nexon has their reasons for not making use of them. Probably the additional complexity required, and the staffing required to maintain the resulting server. Lets face it, having the game down is only inconvenient, its not the end of the world. Different story when your server runs a large corporation and a server outage means thousands of dollars a second in lost profits.