Quote from Cucurbita;210924:
Its not temporary at all.
Ever since Chapter 2 started the game has slowly begun to lose the elements that made Mabinogi a unique and fun mmo and spiraled down a ****storm of failure eventually turning itself into what is known as a GENERIC MMO.
People are only starting to realize this now because the changes are starting to become really obvious at this point.
This game just got better and better IMO as more generations have been added. I mean yeah, obviously there was that new/fresh feeling during early generations but when Iria came out and I finally got to make my elf and explore Iria is when the game just kind of exploded and began to wow me personally. I also noticed a huge increase in Mabinogi's popularity after Iria so I would say a lot of people would agree. It seems like it's gotten even better, every generation brings tons of great content and changes from what I can tell. I dunno why you gotta be all "BACK IN MY DAY THINGS WERE BETTER"; different but not better, for sure. It certainly hasn't "spiraled down".
Now if you're talking PURELY about the community... well, I've never been that impressed with the ingame communities for Nexon games. But Nexon is good at getting all kinds of people to play their games, I do feel like most of the community is a bunch of mouth breathing fat Asian kids e-dating each other, rather than appreciating Mabinogi as a good MMORPG.
Quote from Yogurticecream;211044:
The game itself was flawed fundamentally from the start. The ideas and concept were good, but the execution of everything leaves much to desire.
Complaint #1: The game is too grindy in almost every aspect.
Complaint #2: Many beneficial activities have to be solo-ed.
Complaint #3: There are too few things in Mabinogi that can be done for pure fun and laughter instead of for money, items, fame and power.
By pure fun, I mean things like jam session or just playing a song you like.
While I support complaint 3, some people do find it fun to make their character stronger. And using this strength to support your friends while doing dungeons/missions, etc. can be fun also. But more "casual" activities would be nice, problem is like you said people are mainly going for power. Even with playing music, you've got the incentive of added DEX, or that's what I was looking at when I got R1 Music Playing on my elf.
No issues with complaint 2.
Complaint 1... a couple of skills are too grindy. Windmill is pretty excessive, and I haven't touched Blacksmithing/Weaving/Tailoring but I've heard bad things. Refining wasn't bad.
I think the main issue about the Windmill grind is that new players get encouraged to rank this first "or you'll never be able to", so it's like you stuck ranking this skill you don't really know about instead of just experiencing the game... Windmill is a great skill but I think if they made the training requirements less CP related so that newbies could rank it later on, that'd be nice... it could still be difficult to rank up without having to be based on CP.