Before I start, I'd like to mention that I haven't been a consistent player by any means, although I've been pretty dedicated since I had first stumbled upon promotional pre-release materials (the rest is history). Everything below is organized oddly; the block of text immediately below contains my suggestions, everything after is the analysis that breaks down my reasoning for them (some complaints incoming). And the sad part is that everything below might sound like "too much work," but each step is only a small one to making a lot of the aspects of the game whose potential was never realized worthwhile.
Iria's vastness is awesome, but could use content. As many have suggested, large scale commerce would be awesome, especially if it's implemented to give 3x the rewards "per step" than what normal commerce would. It might even present the option for a pirate situation in transporting goods from Uladh to Iria that someone mentioned above. Hopefully it'd also scale up the prices for continental Uladh commerce.
Distinguish reward systems and enhance rewards, better scaling exp/gold gains. Roughly no matter what you do, most things in Mabi give a roughly equivalent rate of gains in gold, exp, and other, unless you're at the point that you can spam Conflict or you're lucky in the realm of reselling/merchanting. Exploration has retained a fairly active flow of people just due to the fact that it rewards AP from its own exploration system, but many other systems are falling out because people reach the point where they don't require AP or other things as much. Almost none of the activities in Mabi reward life skill materials, especially in a consistent matter, and there's plenty of discontinued items from gacha that could be recycled as rewards (e.g. Spellbooks). More on this later, with regards to the new raids.
Make Alby Int for Four provide 1AP on completion, without limit. While the effect wouldn't be profound, it might inspire a lot more large scale spamming of the dungeon for those at a high level and waiting on their rebirth, and provide a more steady flow of AR8s into the economy. Do this with a couple other fairly uncommonly-run dungeons.
With life skills, they need to be re-done and re-capped. Hear me out; these rapidly became useful for nothing more than stats. That mentality is a little backwards, especially for anyone who actually finds an interest in production/merchanting, and may not want anything to do with dungeons. If Tailoring was re-capped at F, and each patch made all the just-released clothing available at the newly-released E, that'd be a heck of an incentive to rank it. Really, this should've been the case since the beginning. Make it possible to customize clothing to a degree; special insignias or custom cuts and padding on clothing and armor. Also, to reward the tailor/smith/etc., make it so that things they make for themselves to wear can have extra features (on the penalty of making it custom to them only) to advertise themselves for being a pro tailor. Expand the "Entrust" system from Enchanting to the other skills to discourage scamming of materials and encourage player-production economy. And, please, streamline all the skills by revamping and uncapping production. I recently did Metal Conversion, manually at 1x training, while training Metallurgy at 2x (r3->r1). Not cool. Why doesn't everything have an autoproduction feature by now, and why can't I just click what to make with anything and autoload materials into the window?
Nothing should be gachapon-exclusive. SMs would be more worth running and we'd have a lot of happy mages if Ladeca and Eweca spellbooks weren't only from some old gachapon, and are all but extinct from what I can tell.
New SMs/minigames. I can't honestly guess how many times I've run some SMs/Rafting/Ballooning in my life, but now that everyone seems caught up on their generation quests, I'm getting tired of too much of the same. Make these new SMs seasonal, make them week-long, make them permanent, I don't care. But I would like some new puzzles to take on with friends, not stupid multiaggro clusterfucks that I'm supposed to spam AoE pets or rank an esoteric skill to accomplish solo. Just as an example, they could release one mission for a week themed around an assassination of a fomor elite. You proceed to the belltower in Tara in a solo mission, taking out quick-aggro scouts that will alert others if not dispatched within a time limit (30 seconds of aggro), and upon reaching the belltower, click a bow left there for you and enter first person for a second to take a shot at the target. Badass and succinct.
With raids and all end-game content, the chance of receiving junk rewards needs to be abolished. Seriously. There's never a chance of me NOT consuming dura and exp for a lot of it, why is there a chance of me NOT receiving something worth my time?
While we're on raids, the large-scale ones need to be redesigned. We had great ideas with shadow mission setups and some past events, why couldn't we get more creative with BDR than just setting up a mass mob spawn in the middle of nowhere that hardly requires tactics. I'd suggest creating a lobby system that would then send small groups of players to instanced parts of Iria, each with quest roles. (Let's pretend for a second that Black Dragon is actually in Muyu instead of Longa). Say one of them gets teleported to a narrow mountain ridge somewhere south of Muyu, and is told to "stop the stampede of korsek raptors from getting to the main party!" Others are in a small area beneath the canopy of Karu's trees, focusing on attacking a foot of the dragon (Make this thing BIG). Others are in another small instance ABOVE the canopy of Karu forest that has them facing the head from hot air balloon, with one person in charge of steering and avoiding attacks (create roles for the lower-levels!). Create a diagram that shows how the individual groups are doing, and if one falls, the players doing other extraneous roles will be ported into their instance to take up their stead (say the ballooners go down, the people protecting against korsek raptors will see the spawns disappear and be ported to the balloon to replace them). A small synchronized diagram on everyone's display can show the overall body of the dragon as it gets redder and closer to defeat, and if there's a very large group of people (the whole server) the instances can repeat. Like, say each instance takes a max of 8 people, if there's 24 people, they'd divide evenly into three instances (a head, a food, and a raptor delay team). If there's more, just repeat instances (two parties might fight the dragon's head, both of their damages are taken into account for the overall raid, but they won't see each other while fighting to lower lag levels). My whole point is that it is not hard to make a seamless experience even when split into multiple instances between different parties.
Roleplays have always been a big thing in this game, if not off-to-the-side in small cliques of the community. It'd be nice to see gameplay aspects that can further enhance this. A lot of people took well to the Rath banquet in this regard. There's nothing to suggest user-generated content isn't a good thing. And for godssakes', more interiors for city houses and homesteads. Also, ingame music scroll library with a rating system, that people can search and smoothly copy/paste scrolls from. If I wanted to search a Beethoven piece, I'd do my little search, see a 1-star rating and be able to see that it's a grief attempt with the scroll actually just being silence or an annoying repeating sound, and see a 5-star rating and download that (ideally).
And, seriously, fire the guy writing the lines for the story. The "mascot characters" Yvona and Shamala -seemed- interesting enough, but upon talking to them, their unnecessarily abrasive and tsundere-like personalities were total turn offs. I didn't waste a second with keyword conversing with them. On the whole, that's not even the tip of the iceburg with regards to the writing ingame.
Scale AP gains dramatically for the new user. OR, better yet, create a system that lets a user choose a one-time target destiny or talent. Based on their choice, the staple skills of that talent are free to rank, AP wise, and still retain their skill training requirements. A battle alchemist, for example, won't face those AP costs when ranking Water Cannon and Flame Burst, MIGHT still have AP costs on other higher-level/non-staple skills (Life Drain / Heat Buster), but WILL (hopefully) NOT get a reduction on Shock costs or accommodation in obtaining that skill either. But, you know, increasing drop rates on AR/Shock pages wouldn't be a bad thing either.
Revamp the beginner quests and new user experience (I found an elven girl that had been playing for a month while commercing; she didn't have Windmill, Smash, or Defense. They throw too many quests all at once at a player), and re-do the cutscenes/storylines for the game. Someone was willing to transcribe G1's script in whole (
http://wiki.mabinogiworld.com/view/Scri ... he_Goddess) for FREE onto the wiki, how can they not PAY someone to fix any of the many mistakes and the lackluster text across the storyline quests?
Create actual books for lease in the ingame LIBRARY. Lore is not a bad thing! Also, stick to it!
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What really happens with a lot of MMOs is they suffer from an unsustainable business model. The main ingredients to any MMO is userbase, content, and pacing. The userbase is one of the most volatile aspects of any game, as single unfortunate experiences can kill individual players' interests, and a lack of expenditure can bankrupt the game. Content is self-explanatory; it is a composite of the game's graphics, story, and gameplay to create an enjoyable experience that is (ideally) unique, engaging, and fulfilling. Pacing is the scheduling for release of any game's content, the goal of the perfect schedule being to sustain interest from the players in the game over a prolonged span of time. Pacing isn't necessarily present as "content-withholding" in a couple examples of MMOs, but generally new content generation (even new heroes for MOBA games) falls under this tag.
In Mabi, the userbase suffers from the biggest problem. There's a massive split between veteran players and new recruits into the game, and there's no fun or glory to be had in commercing with a guy that spawns monsters that should only be faced by endgame players, and hits for THREE DIGITS more than whatever you're hitting. It was always a fear of mine that I'd grow completely out of touch with the rest of the playerbase once I hit a certain level, and for that reason a massive AP pool started to develop, as I focused only on the basics (as an archer, the very basics of life skills (Refining r1) and combat (Lightningbolt r5 for stun, r1 Mag for damage, r9/rA Ranged for stamina efficient zeroshot, etc). Those playing with me saw a satisfying endgame that could be achieved in less than a year of dedication to the game. With destinies coming out (now talents) and little else to do, I ended up putting all that AP to use. The damage I do now is 10x what my mid-game self might've expected to ever reach, and 50x what a newbie would probably qualify as even being possible. Now, if they would assess what it would take to get to whatever level I'm at now, it'd be a dedicated multiple-year undertaking. After all that, I've pretty much realized that my fear came true; I can't so much as dungeon with a new player using my main and expect them to have a fun time. And, for me personally, I've found it hard to really enjoy pairing up with people near or above my own level, like there's a common mentality between all of them of spamming and grinding, rather than just sitting back and chatting (about everything and anything) as the earlier generations of Mabinogi had gotten me used to doing. There's maybe two people I still enjoy playing with that I've known for over 2 years, and there's none of my friends from the pre-Iria era that I see on at all.
Content-wise, everyone has reiterated that the engine is dated, and I'd like to add that there's little window for user-generated content and the general quality of promotional art and music ingame has varied greatly, usually for the worse. As mentioned above, skills have some serious dissonance between AP cost and training requirements that there's no "smart approach" to training them, it's just a matter of grinding that AP and grinding those requirements and hoping you've made the best decision in what to rank first. Some even require some esoteric knowledge prior to ranking to be rankable at all; Refining and Windmill being the most infamous examples. The game attempts to remedy this by scaling content, making AP easier to obtain and skills easier to train, but receives only harsh objections from those that had to earn it with only ~80 AP per rebirth. The storyline has gotten ridiculous, and between the new combat system and new skillsets, we're left with very little that reminds us of the original game. Worst of all, the new "endgame" raids and dungeons. Dragon Raids are a total mess; the combination of lag with the stupid "hurl mobs of mobs and everything else" mentality devolve Mabinogi combat into "click to damage and run when things get messy". And then, best of all, the main takeaways (Dragon Eyeball) are so rare they compete with Shock page drops, and you'll only qualify by maxing score (Which, in an especially egregious example, may involve an archer dropping their bow and smashing the black dragon FIFTY TIMES in perfect view of 20 aggro-happy Korsek Raptors). By the end of it, you've thrown so many potions, EXP, Durability, and Demigod exp at the thing that there's no way you can justify the reward, commonly a small stack of potions or full stack of Cheap Leather whose very presence in your inventory is an act of spite.
And finally, pacing. The thing that killed Euro's Mabi was releasing so much at once, the game has also outlasted its expected lifetime and recycled its team so thoroughly that it's had to resort to the generation of completely OP and unnecessary content now, not even worth reviewing.