LeMU.waterbottle

Or maybe it’s not that tragic; the mas­sively unpop­u­lar changes in Mabinogi NA’s pre­mium pack­age pol­icy seems to stand firm in the sea of crit­i­cism and dis­con­tent.  I have naively thought that, maybe, Nexon isn’t that regres­sive and maybe, just maybe, given time, the in-game items that have since become unob­tain­able will be brought back.  Since I’m con­vinced that things will not get bet­ter any time soon, I shall ded­i­cate this post to my favorite attrac­tive micro-transaction sys­tem for all times that no longer exists.

To make this as con­struc­tive as pos­si­ble, I strongly rec­om­mend a Mabinogi player like you–whether you’ve been caught in the wave or not–to read this neat lit­tle essay first.  It gives a good intro­duc­tion on the sit­u­a­tion and focus on impor­tant impacts which new ser­vice could inflict to the com­mu­nity.  Though (by the look of it) the essay is writ­ten some­time right after the announce of the new ser­vice, hence the more the­o­ret­i­cal word­ing.  Allow me to elab­o­rate the argu­ment by list­ing some casual obser­va­tions on how the Mari server has changed since the G9 update.

con­tinue reading…

http://mabinogi.nexon.net/Notice/View.aspx?boardNo=100&contentNo=0062J&pageIndex=1

Basi­cally if I’m read­ing the news cor­rectly, all play­ers will be able to receive a free item spec­i­fied by Nexon from the Item Shop once the fea­ture is up run­ning… which will be later.  Now, for the com­ing three days includ­ing today, all play­ers can grab a free 2x exp pot for 2 hours.

Although such fea­ture may seem odd at first glance, but I believe it is a part of the new Cash Shop sys­tem that will be imple­mented in Feb­ru­ary.  Given the Korean prece­dence on revamp­ing their monthly ser­vice and the con­tro­ver­sial split of Nao’s revivial ser­vice from Fan­tasy Life pack­age, the com­ing change to NA Mabinogi’s Cash Shop has drawn atten­tion and fear for the pos­si­ble “pay per Nao” to be imple­mented just like the Korean Mabi.

Any­way, from the look of it, when the free item give­away fea­ture up run­ning, I highly doubt that the dou­ble exp potion can be gifted more than once per week… so act now and grab the three free 2x exp pots before it’s too late!

Offi­cial Sites: Nexon Korea(Korean), NHN Japan(Japan­ese), 盛大网络(Simpl. Chi­nese)
Developer’s site: EYEDENTITY Games(Eng­lish)

Even though news says that Dragon Nest will sched­ule to hit world­wide mar­ket in 2009, actu­ally believ­ing a KRPG to hit world­wide mar­ket within a year of its offi­cial release requires a leap of faith that I did not have… fur­ther­more, it’s Nexon we are talk­ing about, lol.  With this game being one of my 2009’s must-play action online RPG, I’m quite embar­rassed to learn the news of Shanda has already started closed beta test­ing… yet it is impos­si­ble for me to get into the closed beta any­way since Shanda only accepted testers using China Tel­com.  Mean­while, Hangame Japan’s offi­cial web­site for the game only has a splash flash ani­ma­tion (plus a devel­op­ment blog), and Nexon NA, accord­ing to presently still uncon­firmable sources, may announce their plan on the last day of 2009.  The rumor is con­vinc­ing to a degree due to the fact if the “sched­ule” means real busi­ness to Nexon NA, then they’d have to say some­thing before year 2009 is over, lol.  Any­how, assume the rumor is true, Dragon Nest is most likely the first of new gen­er­a­tion of Korean online RPG to hit North Amer­i­can market.

Steparu’s Dragon Nest CBT1 (on Korean server) review is very resource­ful if you want to know more about DN’s gameplay.  The review cov­ered three of the four classes cur­rently in the game (with game­play videos)… unfortunately I couldn’t find an in-depth cleric bat­tle video on youtube.  Hangame’s DN blogis in the process of releas­ing some inter­est­ing details on dif­fer­ent classes and their skills… they’ve done war­rior and mage; need archer and cleric now.

I noticed a num­ber of sim­i­lar­i­ties between this game and Tar­taros Online… such as the size of party, instanced bat­tle zone, and very lim­ited char­ac­ter bank.  Yet many other fac­tors assured that DN will be a whole dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence com­pare to Tar­taros.  First and fore­most, DN aims with a crosshair like in 1st or 3rd per­son shooter games; Tartaro’s aim is only two-dimensional, or sim­ply said, pure direc­tional.  Thus, DN requires a much more pre­cise aim­ing than Tar­taros.  The sec­ond dif­fer­ence from my obser­va­tion is that in Dragon Nest, hos­tile encoun­ters more often result in a more pro­logned engage­ment com­pare to Tar­taros.  It is more about keep from able to attack one­self than sim­ply mob­bing them… and prob­a­bly because of the more restricted use of potions, peo­ple can’t spam AoE skills too much in DN as they can in Tartaros.

Back to chi­nese server’s closed beta.  Appar­ently a GM is post­ing beta test­ing logs (#1, #2, #3).  Ignor­ing the text doesn’t do much harm since only a few lines have things to do with the actual test­ing.  Do atten­tion to the screen­shots though… as they appear to be in some kind of abnor­mally fan­tas­tic graphic qual­ity that makes me won­der is it prob­a­ble to play the game in such detailed mode.

As a loyal cus­tomer of Nexon NA who have spent over sev­eral hun­dreds of dol­lars on Mabinogi’s ser­vices and items, I feel com­pelled to record down the lat­est attempted by dear Nexon’s strive for the ulti­mate fail within its his­tory of run­ning Mabinogi.

It started with this week’s Tues­day, the day Nexon con­ducted its pre-scheduled 9-hour server main­te­nance.  The sched­uled down­time inci­den­tally started Thurs­day 0 am to 9 am local time… or maybe it’s not inci­den­tal after all.  It must be the insight­ful decision-making higher-ups per­sons in Nexon knew the date of when my Fall sem­seter starts, thus encour­age hum­ble stu­dents like me to sleep early and go to class with­out being tempted con­tinue to be glued in front our computers.

I was almost moved to tears… almost.  Some peo­ple in Nexon are indeed smart!

But because Nexon is on the quest for achiev­ing the ulti­mate fail… and from pre­vi­ous pleas­ant sur­prised brought by Nexon, I made a pre­dic­tion that, this 9-hour main­te­nance would be extended… and that’s pre­cisly what hap­pened.  The hum­ble stu­dent came back to his effi­ciency unit apart­ment and once again, was pleas­antly sur­prised by the fact that the game server was still down.  This main­te­nance was not overun­til 6:45 local time, sub­se­quently, ascended to one of the longest main­te­nance of NA Mabinogi, if not the longest.

con­tinue reading…

Although I’m still “immersed” in the hotly paced sum­mer semes­ter classes, I was sur­prised in joy to see an arti­cle com­par­ing three action online RPG that just freshly came out (still in Korea, or course).  I am pre­dict­ing that this marks the new era of online RPG devel­op­ment that leaves the old bor­ing hack’n’slash game­play set­tle in his­tory of MMO games.

Mabinogi: Heroes, some­thing I could not over­look as a Mabi player. 

Mabinogi: Heroes

Heroes looks like an ambi­tious game set­ting out to cre­ate noth­in­g­less than new sub­genre to the new wave of kmmorpg… and it is also obvi­ous that Heroes is more “main­stream” to the West­ern player base than Mabinogi.  Unfor­tu­nately, it is not for my taste, lol.  Just to sum­ma­rize my dis­sent in one sen­tence: Heroes appears to be more than an action game than an mmorpg worth to invest time, energy, and cash.  But then even the “real­is­tic action” part of Heroes has other com­peti­tors, such as Con­ti­nent of the Ninth (C9).

Con­ti­nent of the Ninth

C9 is just pure awesomeness—at least that’s my impres­sion from its trail­ers.  Yes, C9’s actions are more fantasy-inclined than that of Heroes… which is the norm~ It is extremely rare for me to find a game it fits my per­sonal taste per­fectly as C9—not even Blade & Soul.  But again, I’m talk­ing right now before actu­ally play­ing and before it is out of Korea; we’ll see how well it shall shine.

Dragon Nest

Last in the list is Dragon Nest.  Now it’s safe to say that Eye Den­tity Games not only make inter­est­ing games but also inter­est­ing games which on the oppo­site sides of the “cute vs. not for faint of the heart” spec­trum.  Heroes might be the offi­cial suc­ces­sor of Mabinogi on term of story and world view, I’d say that peo­ple who like Mabinogi’s style of gam­ing will prob­a­bly Dragon nest a bet­ter fit—at least I am.  This game is very con­trol ori­ented; espe­cially mob con­trol… in fact, you AoE like crazy, like you can see in the video where the archer shoots out arrow at the speed of a semi-auto machine gun and can Wind­mill (Mabi style (?) dam­age dealt by this skill = bare hand dam­age? Lol dev­cat).  As devcat’s other games, Dragon Nest has lim­i­ta­tion such as gen­der depend on class, no sig­nif­i­cant char­ac­ter cus­tomiza­tion etc… maybe things will get bet­ter when it fully releases, thus I reserve my opin­ion for this game.

That’s the end of the list… click this for the tar­geted article.

edit: fail typo –_– Dragon Nest is devel­oped by Eye Den­tity Games, not devcat.