LeMU.waterbottle

[00:51] * NxBoo slaps hime around a bit with a large trout

Tonight Mabinogi is under­go­ing update to G14S4, and NxBoo has been faith­fully answer­ing ques­tions from play­ers in the afore­men­tioned IRC chan­nel.  This is my first time attend­ing to Q&A chat ses­sion and I can see it is a clever move to sched­ule it dur­ing patch time to gain more eyes and ears.  The ques­tions are taken both from an offi­cial forum thread and a queue in IRC in which par­tic­i­pants (or rather, audi­ences) can sub­mit ques­tions for Nexon to answer.

It turned out well; there is an exhaus­tive list of ques­tions that has been answered.  I’m going to com­pile the chat log into points of inter­est… alter­na­tively Mabi World wiki has a page up with arguably a pret­tier for­mat.  Some silly ques­tions and dupli­cate ones are omitted.

con­tinue reading…

Once again I stand on the pin­na­cle of my list of desired achieve­ments in Mabinogi.  Hav­ing fin­ished up to G14S2 main­stream quests in chrono­log­i­cal order, there just aren’t much more “inter­est­ing stuff” in this game that I really fancy about.  If I were myself a year ago I’d prob­a­bly put “grind for skill X to rank Y” on top of my list… but now it is a dif­fer­ent time.

Thus I present this video memo­ri­al­iz­ing one of the most excit­ing and immersible bat­tle I’ve ever expe­ri­enced in Mabinogi.  Spoiler alert as usual: con­tain G12 end boss spoiler…

Watch on youtube for more detailed com­ments on each part of the boss fight.

All I want to say now is dev­cat sure got some­thing right when they made G12 and in gen­eral, Chap­ter 3.  Because of the Shadow Mis­sions this game is no longer Solonogi; and because of alchemy the game largely revi­tal­ized itself and gained a num­ber of new play­ers, which I admit is a clever plan that worked out well for both the new blood and the old vets.

But then all the Shake­speare stuff in G13 and beyond are under­whelm­ing to the point of my sus­pen­sion of them being filler con­tent.  Let’s just say G13 and G14 so far are the embod­i­ment of what not to do when retelling a well-known, clas­sic story.  Hope­fully G15 will be doing a bet­ter job, though I doubt I’ll stay that long

orig­i­nal thread

So it’s almost exactly one year ago I made my last Mabinogi related post.  It shouldn’t be any­thing spe­cial about the date, other than ful­fill­ing a pre­dic­tion that I can never really quit this game for good.  One year is enough time for a new player of an MMO to turn into a bit­ter critic, and appar­ently for Mabinogi and Nexon NA, one year is not long enough to for­get and forgive.

It was orig­i­nally an attempt to make use of my charged nx before they expire.  So I bought ser­vice again, and decided to com­plete G10 to G12 main­stream quest chain.  I have done that, as for now, and much more.  I once again became a pay­ing cus­tomer to Nexon NA as I bought more nx, plan­ning to do a bit of lev­el­ing and expe­ri­ence the new skills and stuff along the way.

Now, refer­ring to the inci­dent depicted by the above image: few days after I came back, game-breaking mods were leaked to pub­lic.  It first started as the whistle-blowers posted on offi­cial Nexon forum the method of enabling mabi­pake addons, which quickly empow­ered a num­ber of peo­ple to abuse GM func­tions, such as use of GM hide in a par­tic­u­lar way that would crashes nearby play­ers’ game client.

Basi­cally the tim­ing of this exploit inci­dent coin­cided with my return really left me won­der­ing: could there be a worse time to come back and try to have some fun?  Most likely the answer is going to be “no”, but it does not mat­ter much now.

Once again peo­ple are reminded that the ele­phant is always in the room, just this time, it ran over and stepped on too many peo­ple to be ignored.  This finally acquired Nexon’s sacred atten­tion to their player­base and tried to do some dam­age con­trol, although in an utterly incom­pe­tent way–the server stayed up despite the dup­ing method is steadily avail­able to any­one who wants to do it.

“Nexon” and “Dev­Cat” have been syn­onyms to “incom­pe­tence” in my dic­tio­nary for a long time, and the cur­rent inci­dent proves more so.  Finally a patch came out, and the crash­ing around pub­lic areas have stopped, so I assumed at least some­thing is fixed.  But dup­ing of cer­tain items, relo­cat­ing NPC, and many other exploits existed since birth of this game are still work­ing pro­vided once bypass the piece of poop called Hack­Shield, which itself is a hack to one’s com­puter and a shield with strength of paper.

So, yeah, back to busi­ness, and the ele­phant is still in the room.

It appears that I have played Mabinogi on the wrong side of the hori­zon.  The above incred­i­bly com­posed cos­play is the alleged event win­ner in Mabinogi Tai­wan.  This piece is cer­tainly among the most fab­u­lous multi-character cos­play I’ve ever come across… and yes indeed, my Umineko fan­bo­ism also prevails.

Though I am not play­ing Mabinogi any­more at this moment, I am con­stantly look­ing for signs of that would reju­ve­nate my faith in dev­cat so one day I may once again be moti­vated enough to resume my Fan­tasy Life.  I made three conditionals:

• When I have time
• When dev­cat revamps party sys­tem so the game is no longer “Solonogi”
• When dev­cat fixes abuses/exploits in end-game stuff (such as black­smith near-perfect)

So I say to myself, if two of the three above con­di­tions are met, I’ll be back to the game; sadly I don’t see that hap­pen any­time soon.  Or… worse, dev­cat became demented–for intro­duc­ing Ham­let into C4G13’s main­stream.  Yes, Ham­let, Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

con­tinue reading…

I don’t need to upload a lot of videos to be fully frus­trated by YouTube’s seem­ingly irratic and unpre­dictable video con­ver­sion method.  Often times the same clip will look like crap, and some­times bet­ter than crap, when it is appeared on YouTube.  So, I did an exper­i­ment to find out what exactly are the encod­ing options that appeases YouTube.

Soft­ware used: FRAPS, Live Movie Maker.  Orig­i­nally, I would use the “old” Win­dows Movie Maker for more func­tion­al­ity… but my WMM can­not load FRAPS videos cor­rectly orz.  Really, I don’t see how LMM is con­ve­nient or com­pe­tent other than… out­putting videos in for­mats that can appear in HD in YouTube.

Test cases:

• Direct upload from LMM
• Using a cus­tom pro­file sim­i­lar to LMM’s 1080p profile
• Using LMM’s built-in 1080p profile
• Using another cus­tom pro­file sim­i­lar to LMM’s 1080p profile
• Using a cus­tom pro­file sim­i­lar to LMM’s 720p profile

con­tinue reading…

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…