MabiPro: The Authentic Old-School Mabinogi Experience

How does the MabiPro community move on from this lesson?

We've seen how a good idea can go wrong, how a potential idea for 'goodwill' and 'charity' can become an absolute mess. Where do we go from here? How has this impacted future events?


I understand the raw idea of this event was finding 12 fragments to make 1 gachapon, which in essence was a good idea since this encourages grinding, but the pages being trade-able was a bad idea because everyone can pool their pages to 1 person. I assume this is what happened and people took advantage of this, naturally. Ontop of this were the AFK and Alts, they could receive presents as long as they had the inventory. Making the level cap was a good idea, as this discourages an increase in new accounts to soak them up.

Spoiler Alert:

What needs to happen for future events is this:
-For event gachapons, we need a list of possible rewards (as well as a modified list). This will allow one to decide if they should remain dedicated enough.
-No event item should be tradable (I.E the pages to gather). Being able to pool resources like this was only the downfall of the event.
-To counter the inflation of 'expensive items' (I.E clothing, rare crafting materials) there needs to be a list of more common items present at all times (I.E Dyes, lower-tier crafting materials, etc.). Having a chunk of the 20-coin gacha in each event pool would be an easy copy-paste due to, from what I've seen, the low-end items it grants.
-Do not allow players to afk these sort of events. In order to accept these presents, they must be around to click 'accept.' My idea is like fishing, a menu pops up stating a delivery is coming and one must sign off for it. If no one is available, it get's deleted.
-Keep that minimum level cap. Events should be for those dedicated enough to play for more than 2 weeks. Allow anyone to participate, but the grand-prize should have a level cap (sorry new players).

I loved the event. I loved the idea of a community coming together, working together, and achieving a very merry christmas. Frankly I'm disgusted on how it turned out, not at the GMs, but at how the community reacted to split-second decisions made to assist the economy of the server in the long-run. GMs did nothing wrong with this event; they handled it properly at a time of crisis by making sacrifice and crisis-level decisions. This should be something we want because it shows how much they care about us. Upsets me on how everyone gave so much backlash on a last-second decision.

What do you guys think? Where should we go from here? Leave only constructive arguments, suggestions, and discuss the topic at hand. This is not a place to dump whatever petty anger some of you still have.

1. I don't agree with the ''need'' of a reward list. You can give reasons in favour for having one and against, and I personally think it is a very subjective matter. Reasons in favour, as you said, to determine whether you want to actually work hard for it. Reasons against include having an element of surprise and being able to work with the community (or parts of it) to figure out what is in it (like we have done before with stuff like the peaca event, zombie event etc.) In this particular event that just happened this wasn't really the case since every1 opened ALL rewards at once, but normal events rewards are handed out per run you do, and people compile lists over time.
Furthermore, this has been a topic that has come up often before, and the GMs seem to also think that making it a community effort to figure out what is in event rewards/gachas etc. and having the element of surprise is better than everyone knowing what is inside.
2. Don't think the pooling of resources was necessarily the downfall. It increased the problem of ease of how many chests were obtained, but it actually promoted people working together and get rewarded(which was good in my opinion instead of it just being about every individual player). So, if it was known beforehand how easy it was to obtain these chests, actions could have been taken to circumvent there dropping too many (even with sharing pages allowed).
3. True, however most of the time these ''common item lists'' have been present in most events
4. The fishing menu solution is a good start, however it is still easy to be doing an SM on your main, get the popup, and quickly click ''yes'' on your alts as well. Furthermore, auto clickers can automatically accept such dialogue, although I guess that might be detectable by GMs and bannable. (also, consider poor blacksmiths/tailors that are doing finishes, and get ruined every time by popups, or important dungeons/SMs). But atleast a system like this will prevent people from staying online overnight, while at work or any moment they aren't actually playing.
5. If you keep the level cap, people will just lvl their alts to that cap and have their alts ready for every next event. If you increase it to prevent this, there will be a bigger gap each event that new players need to overcome. Furthermore, the 60 cap for this event was easily reachable by any alt that is 2 weeks + old, since alts can just level to 30, rebirth and go to 30 again (this is assuming people didn't already have their alts levelled).

The use of alts definitely make it difficult for these kind of events to exists. I highly doubt the use of alts will ever stop, nor multiclient, but as long as this exists then it will make it impossible to do these events without some form of drastic measures in play. Reading the comments on the '10 requirement to open' made a lot of points for those who casually play: they don't play as hard as others. To some they were content with having 10-15 to open, then that suddenly turn into just 1.

The event should not had tradable pages. This absolutely was apart of this event's issues. You are suppose to be making a sacrifice of 12 small presents for 1 big present for you and the server. There wasn't any sacrifice if people can get presents faster sending their pages to those finishing a set.

The level cap and menu pop-up is ment to be means of restriction to over inflation. If the pages aren't tradable then the spam wouldn't be real. I contribute maybe 3 gachapons, asking only for 1-2 pages to finish two sets. Not sure who has the time to collect as many as they did unless large groups were pooling,

Can't think of anything else because of multiclient.

I was thinking about this event for a while, and I think the best changes to it would have been if the pool was a generic single item, the entire server donated them to a pool, and their account would receive the boxes upon accepting them at the end of the event based on the size of the final pool - regardless if they were online or not at the time. Of course, the number of items required to count for a box would have to be very high - something like 100-200 at the same droprate we saw with the 12 pages. This was it would also be easier to scale back how many items = a gacha. As a bonus, it would be nice if there was also a ranked list at the end of who donated and the top 3/5/10 got a bonus. Also, keeping pages for yourself was a good idea but I doubt many actually did it that much, since you quickly saw what tier of items were inside so maybe it would be more enticing if they also only got a gacha at the end of the event.

This way, we don't get a ton of people afking, multiclienting wouldn't be an issue - instead it would be if you chose to make 3 accounts or not, and people who can't play that much don't feel left out since the event should have been about giving anyway. With the event the way it was, it felt like an obligation to stay online and that choosing not to log in was opting yourself not to receive anything more. However I still think the concept is worth keeping but as a general rule of thumb afk events tend to always be a bad idea. I feel like they only started to become a thing because people were afking so much anyway in mmos but I don't think that kind of activity calls for an event. Of course there are drawbacks, such as causing what is essentially leeching. However - people who are grinding anyway might as well be rewarded for it and have the opportunity to give others benefit from their grinding, the server wouldn't be filled with alts and afkers, and no one feels left out.

Entire idea is good. I suppose the question is how does one "trim the fat" that is alts from event rewards. The ranked list (say top 100) could get a bonus, while everyone else gets the reward, but that means alts are included. Even if there is a restriction of 'donate a minimum of X,' some people are bold enough to go ahead and do that on an alt, just to have them in the pool of recipients.

There needs to be a method that prevents people from alt abusing, while allowing everyone to benefit from an event like this. Otherwise we will still end up with 33k+ gachapons awaiting to be opened.

Last thing I will say, if they kept the same method of page hunting (i.e kept the 12 pages, turning them in for the gachapon) rather than give everyone else a gachapon, they got a small reward (not as small as turning in a single page, but not as great as the main prize). Giving everyone gachapons was a bad move, but giving everyone a small reward and the main prize to the giver. That way those who deserve it are rewarded and everyone else doesn't feel as left out.