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koishi-sempai wrote on 2016-12-20 23:40
The fact is, combat in Mabinogi is expensive (both gold and time and RL money wise), imbalanced, and compared to newer games on stronger engines, both difficult and frustrating and unengaging for most people. Who has time to grind stats for a year just to be relevant? Who has the patience to do multiple grindy life skills just to get past content that was obsolete 4 years ago?
Yes it has a certain niche appeal, but the fact is, only 1% of players per server will ever do the high end content, maybe 10% of the players are even strong enough to do Adv/ Hard Mode no modifier Alban, and let's not even talk about Rabbie Phantasm. Meanwhile, a nifty music system update brings several hundred people plus back in a weekend. Why? Because the average player can actually access this content, it's fun, it brings people together in a social manner. And it has its own limitations, sure, the hype will die down a bit, but the fact is, Mabinogi is a social game, the directors who tried to push it in a more combat oriented direction made a big mistake, and that's what the game should emphasize.
Rabbie Phantasm? Who the fuck cares. Unless you have Korean work ethic or have been playing for a decade you're never going to have the stats for it. Most people don't have the time or inclination to train, and the people who do aren't going to hardcore minmax. How many people even took advantage of the summer daily RBs and training events? Not enough, for sure. And even if you can run it, who wants to speedrun the same dungeon over and over again for a 1% chance of an enchant that boosts your dmg output by 1%? Only a small subset of people.
The way to revive Mabi is more updates like Music Q that focus on the social aspect of the game, and emphasize the fashion aspects of the game that aren't as NX based, as well as making life skills more rewarding. DevCat should just accept that combat is not the game's strong suit, and focus on releasing more content for people who want to have fun, make friends and explore.
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Kingofrunes wrote on 2016-12-21 01:01
I agree. I'd return if there was much less focus on combat oriented things and more outfits/clothing weren't locked behind gachapons. Not to mention the dying system is in a massive need of an overhaul. Too much clothing to keep being locked behind constant buying of dyes. It should be like other games where you buy the dye once and can use it as much as you need to.
Cooking and Music were by far my favorite things in Mabinogi when I did play. Unfourantely they got stale after awhile and the life skills are too grindy with little to no benefit for that grind. Most of the time you don't get rewarded for your time and effort.
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Kaeporo wrote on 2016-12-21 01:21
Renovation was the nail in combat's coffin. Final Hit and Bash are the most ridiculous display of power creep i've ever seen in any game. Instead of limiting the ridiculous prowess of players, DevCat choose to break enemies even further with advanced heavy stander and massively buffed stats which led to a gross oversimplification of the combat system. All sub-optimal strategies were instantly sidelined and the depth was removed.
They should have made elemental affinity and passive defenses more important. They should have created new shadow missions, theater missions, and lord missions that provide suitable challenges for players of all levels. Alternatively, they could have added gachapon-style rewards to existing minigames like Forest Purification and Renes Egg Guarding.
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Mabinogi always had three things going for it. Combat, life skills, and music. Those formed its identity. The fashion element was also important but it's basically always been locked behind a paywall. Music is essentially meaningless now - having been reduced to little more than 1-2 seconds of Battlefield Overture. Combat is Final Hit spam. Life skills...have never been good. If they were valuable, they're now devalued...and the sheer amount of grind involved killed any enjoyment from using them.
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...but none of these are even remotely important compared to the effects of events and gachapon. I opposed them for years and it looks like they've now completely eclipsed meaningful content. I've been gone for around a year and a half (if not longer) and they've only managed to push out two major updates...which i'm sure by now have been entirely invalidated by gachapon. Life skills aren't the solution. They'll just die the same way combat rewards died.
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koishi-sempai wrote on 2016-12-21 01:30
Mabi combat was broken from the beginning, it was juts a different kind of broken. Even in its heyday, the average player was just not interested. Yeah, power creep is a problem but the roots of the issue lie in the core mechanics and systems. The only solution was to lock the game combat wise in G12 and leave it there.
Furthermore, the main issue is the sheer investment it always took.
My overall point is that Mabi should never had tried to make combat a primary aspect of the game; gachapon or no gachapon, power creep or no power creep, the typical Mabi player would have moved on because Mabinogi combat isn't really engaging to the average player (sure I like it but I don't represent a majority) with few exceptions past its initial novelty compared to tab target MMOs in 2007. Mabinogi could have skewed its updates 80% social/20% combat (instead of the reverse it's actually done) and carved out a real niche with a loyal playerbase.
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Kingofrunes wrote on 2016-12-21 01:38
As Kaeporo pointed out and I made a poke at, gachapons and events are Mabinogi's biggest problems. They are more concerned about milking the playerbase for all they are worth instead of pushing out meaningful updates that would actually benefit the game.
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koishi-sempai wrote on 2016-12-21 01:42
I think that's secondary; the core issue is that they push out for the most part, heavy combat oriented updates that at most 10% of the playerbase is actually interested in doing consistently.
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Kaeporo wrote on 2016-12-21 01:55
Quote from koishi-sempai;1298750:
Even in its heyday, the average player was just not interested.
because Mabinogi combat isn't really engaging to the average player
These are far from accurate. As I recall, the majority of players were found doing the following:
1. Running daily missions, usually in groups.
2. Grinding for experience, gold, or ducats.
3. Training skills, usually solo.
4. Talking, trading or spamming events - usually in Dunbarton.
DevCat cannot create meaningful content out of mere discussion and as we've seen, events and gachapon absolutely skewered the value of life skills and combat - "social activities" often hurt the replayability. The only series way I can imagine them improving the social aspect would be to add some team-based components to life skills and improving the guild system.
Give me an example of a "social activity" that isn't an event and i'll show you an activity that'll be abandoned once its rewards have been exhausted. It has to stick around to be worth the development time...and most "social event areas" turned into immediate ghost towns on their second or third run unless they updated the prizes.
Furthermore, the main issue is the sheer investment it always took.
This applies to literally every aspect of Mabinogi.
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I'll assume that you're still playing.
I would be less concerned about an 80/20 split and more concerned about the fact that we've gotten (1) new skill in two years.
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Ninjam wrote on 2016-12-21 03:21
The only thing I wish for is more variety in missions and stuff. Dungeon update was nice for spreading out the difficulty to keep up with power creep, but they need to make major changes to the enemies mostly.
The power creep won't matter that much if everything is overpowered, as long as the enemies keep up, and in more than just stats. I want more things like ciar dungeon in the beginning. Arrows were my bane as a newbie, and charge and evasion gave us ways to avoid them that still kept the difficulty and made it fun and challenging. Give enemies that counter usage of final hit and bash with heavy stander level 3, give us bosses we can't bash to death, things like that.
Shadow missions, when they were first released, were amazing. A lot of them have unique, fun goals and challenges. If magic shield skills were a bit better, if enemy variety and ai could have kept up, if they gave us more varied, challenging missions the game would be great despite the power creep. They have plenty of difficulty options in shadow missions, that was something I loved, because it made things acessable regardless of the player's statistics.
Mabingi's balance in the beginning was pretty good, there was the rock-paper-scizors element to combat that made it great. They added ways to break it with magic and archery, but at the same time there were ways to counter those for enemies with various levels of mana deflector and natural shield. If they continued making unique counters to each new skill it would be great. They could be things like making bosses immune to bash, making enemies spawn in different ways that defeat the cooldown of final hit, for magic and ranged give some enemies master-level magic shield skills they use in response to player archery and ranged, things like that would be really cool and add some new life into the game, especially if given in a series of levels like shadow missions have that are easy to choose.
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Twin wrote on 2016-12-26 03:27
I'ma be blunt here. That is not a good idea. Why? Because a mmo , escpecailly of mabinogi's type is like a ladder. That ladder is composited of 5 key sections
Combat System / Balancing
PvP
PvE
Life / Fashion / Exploration / Story
Economy
Breaking ANY of these steps limit Mabi from reaching top height. Any good a good content creator should put massive quality when possible into these areas. Not focus on one.
As successful games like black desert showed, if developers have enough vision, you can create replay content to keep MANY interested . Some of the popular activites are guild war / node war , conquest war / and pvp. They capalizae on this by making the stake greatly rewarding and giving the winners fame with simple stuff like guild ranking / tax payment of contorlled area to guild.That money also goes to guild paychecks which can be HIGH,,Where is the cool st uffl ike that in Mabi? all you get for winning this guild battle is a title for 4 days or someting.
With Mabinogi's combat and weapon FREEDOM, it should be a bigger competteor with better games like BDO,GW2. But instead of capalizing on its success, it chooses todo dumb things . Like Make one or two melee weapons good while others variations suck. MAKE WEIRD WEAPON LOGIC (HUMANS CAN'T HOLD A WOODEN HAMMER BUT CAN HOLD A SLOWER METAL HAMMER / ELVES CAN'T E BACLK, LIVES IN THE DESERT< does not supose to beall caps, to lazy to edi)neglect the pvp sense tottally and mlik the game before canning it for peria chronicles
There are also a ton of other issues with Mabi on a fundamental level that other games are geting gud on. Kaeporo already mentioned the other other issues
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Chiyuri wrote on 2016-12-26 14:33
Quote from koishi-sempai;1298750:
Mabi combat was broken from the beginning, it was juts a different kind of broken. Even in its heyday, the average player was just not interested. Yeah, power creep is a problem but the roots of the issue lie in the core mechanics and systems. The only solution was to lock the game combat wise in G12 and leave it there.
Furthermore, the main issue is the sheer investment it always took.
My overall point is that Mabi should never had tried to make combat a primary aspect of the game; gachapon or no gachapon, power creep or no power creep, the typical Mabi player would have moved on because Mabinogi combat isn't really engaging to the average player (sure I like it but I don't represent a majority) with few exceptions past its initial novelty compared to tab target MMOs in 2007. Mabinogi could have skewed its updates 80% social/20% combat (instead of the reverse it's actually done) and carved out a real niche with a loyal playerbase.
Actually I kinda like the combat at the beginning. It felt like a strategic Rock-Paper-Scissor kind of combat. We had developed plenty of techniques to fight off monsters like Ice Counter or 2+1 Attack or Zero Shot, Lightning Barrier and more.
Nowadays it;s all about spamming the most powerful skill until you or the enemy die.
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Fabian wrote on 2016-12-27 03:25
I don't know. The combat/leveling system and the story were what drew me to Mabinogi. I couldn't care less about Music, but it's a plus in my book. As for Final Hit/Bash ruining the game, as Kaeporo and others mentioned, I disagree. Before those, it was a windmill spam fest, or as most people will know it for: spin2win. I can't tell how many times I died due to being in deadly due to windmill spam. I, for one, am glad that stage of the game is over. At least with FH, I don't die to rats/spend all my gold in repairs.
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Twin wrote on 2016-12-28 08:07
Quote from Fabian;1298786:
I don't know. The combat/leveling system and the story were what drew me to Mabinogi. I couldn't care less about Music, but it's a plus in my book. As for Final Hit/Bash ruining the game, as Kaeporo and others mentioned, I disagree. Before those, it was a windmill spam fest, or as most people will know it for: spin2win. I can't tell how many times I died due to being in deadly due to windmill spam. I, for one, am glad that stage of the game is over. At least with FH, I don't die to rats/spend all my gold in repairs.
While im not one to knock on others combat choices, you do have to acknowledged why final hit and bash are toxic skills. Its because they elimate all enemy retaliation pretty hard. that means it will be hard to create challenge enemies with difficult. So i can understand why nexon creates mobs with busted stats instead. but the issue there is, most don't find mobs with walls of HP fun. just tedious but thats your only option because skills are fundamentally screwed.
With my old idea i posted awhile ago, a number of that stuff was address. From weapon and skill vareity. So it would be much easier to create a fun pv e meta with that. Without throwing 100 guys on the screen and saying GL
Quote from Konrad;1297363:
Keep in mind that most of broken OP skills that ignore mabi's basic combat mechanics just counter equally broken mobs who were there first. The real problems with this game lie very deep inside.
^This guy gets whats up
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koishi-sempai wrote on 2016-12-31 21:36
The thing is, Mabi has NEVER gotten combat right. There's always been a Tier 0 busted strat. Range was Tier 0 from beta through G12, though there was a point where things was balanced, sorta. Then you had golems. Then you had max damage creep making WM incredibly efficient, coupled with the buff that removed the HP penalty. Then there was Puppetry and Gunner which dominated the meta.
But I'm not even talking about balance. I'm talking about the fact that only a small minority of the people who played this game ever seriously got into the combat aspects, and of that minority, most of the combat updates were geared towards giving the minority of that minority something to do. Thus, the massive grindsinks the game forces players into to progress past a certain point.
If we averaged each server by TTL, excepting alts and FOB new players <1 week, we'd probably come out to TTL 3-4k after almost a decade of the server being open. Most players will never complete the endgame content of 2-3 years ago, let alone today's endgame content.
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Aubog007 wrote on 2017-01-02 00:40
It's pretty bad when most of the combat strategies then and now rely on abusing broken game mechanics and AI.
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Twin wrote on 2017-01-03 05:19
Quote from koishi-sempai;1298807:
The thing is, Mabi has NEVER gotten combat right. There's always been a Tier 0 busted strat. Range was Tier 0 from beta through G12, though there was a point where things was balanced, sorta. Then you had golems. Then you had max damage creep making WM incredibly efficient, coupled with the buff that removed the HP penalty. Then there was Puppetry and Gunner which dominated the meta.
But I'm not even talking about balance. I'm talking about the fact that only a small minority of the people who played this game ever seriously got into the combat aspects, and of that minority, most of the combat updates were geared towards giving the minority of that minority something to do. Thus, the massive grindsinks the game forces players into to progress past a certain point.
If we averaged each server by TTL, excepting alts and FOB new players <1 week, we'd probably come out to TTL 3-4k after almost a decade of the server being open. Most players will never complete the endgame content of 2-3 years ago, let alone today's endgame content.
I'd like to focus on your response in bold.
Mabinogi's combat is what made this game for most. When i speak among players, they often say mabi has a really original and fun combat system. And other games just doesn't compare. That is true because of the base is created.
What peoople dislike is how broken pvp is (more so in g16s2) while pre fighter iswas drastically better. despite some n1 _ ar lightning bolt meta. it also hurts that pvp has no replay content aside from duel that guy or fight with your guild in a field
What is also annoying is how pve ignores the combat system. you'll never find someoone who likes fighting mobs like that one -eyed thing from peaca int.
Quote from Aubog007;1298810:
It's pretty bad when most of the combat strategies then and now rely on abusing broken game mechanics and AI.
It sadly gotten worse over time. And more embarrassing. Mabinogi almst requres no skill or thought now. Just a lot of damage / money