Mabinogi is a game that I have played for years, literally. I spent most of my gaming time in high-school playing it, and I even played it here and there a few years at college. It is a game that is very close to my heart and that I have had a passion for well after I stopped playing it due to its individuality.

It is a game that I loved so much I was completely blinded by the direction I knew it was taking; a sunk-cost fallacy in the truest sense. I started, by coincidence, only a day or two after the Alexina server was created. This server no longer exists, because the playerbase has dwindled and they have since merged many of the servers together, Alexina being the last one. That being said, my playtime on it (not time I spent playing, but the timeframe) is probably something akin to 8 years to a decade.

Don't get me wrong, even in the start, this game was far from polished/perfect. Server (channel) crashes were common-place, and were genuinely devastating due to sparse character saves. For everything I am about to say, the updates were also not fast, and as someone who liked melee, the combat might seem kind of stagnant. I do believe they could've done more with the game itself, even if I did, in it's state then with all those glaring flaws and stagnation, thought it was good enough to overlook all of what most people would consider totally unacceptable from a studio.

When I referred to this game's individuality, I generally speaking am referring to its combat system. Many MMOs use tab-targeted systems for combat, including every lower budget knock off trying to replicate a fraction of WoW's success. Some, typically more recent ones akin to games like Black Desert or TERA, use free or aim-assisted action combat. Typically this has you beating on enemies whilst dodging their attacks, or simply taking damage as you dish out combos.
In Mabinogi, on the other hand, every attack stuns to a varying degree. They combined this with a knock-back, knock-down system and "loading times" for skills which created a strategically involved form of combat where players must consider distance, load times, mutli-aggro, stun, splash damage and even other players trying to co-operate with you. Pets could be summoned as mounts or to aid you in battle as well, allowing you to control what or when they attack, or crafting AI behaviors for them to perform specific combos or react to things in a certain way. There truly was nothing else like it; and it's difficult to articulate how multi-faceted it was or felt; even for someone verbose like me. These feelings are past-tense for a reason.

There were many other things that made it somewhat unique, like its no restrictive class, endless progression system. Your character could always grow stronger by using skills for every "class" or "talent" or branch of available skills in the game. For instance, becoming a capped out Carpenter gave you more points of Strength, so you would hit harder as a meleer. Dexterity could be gained through things like handicraft or tailoring, which also conversely affected things like the ranged damage, wounding (non-healable with magic/potions), or balance, which affected how likely you were to hit on the high end of your damage range. However, all that becomes superfluous if the system they are meant to support collapses. As I said: "past-tense."

I'm not going to state as fact that this was all some years long plan to simply butcher the original experience, because if I remember correctly, the director of this game has changed a few times. From Naak Kim to some others; but regardless, this is a Nexon game. It was pay-to-win. It always was, in some sense of the phrase. However, despite the gachapons(loot boxes) they sold and a few other things; it simply got egregiously worse. It never stopped getting worse. It got hysterically worse even after I stopped playing.

By prefacing this with that statement, I can pinpoint an extremely specific time where everything started to go downhill. The release of the "Crystal Reindeer" pet. I'll elaborate:
Remember how earlier, I said that this game revolved around strategic distance, stun, knockback and knockdowns? Due to load times, it was possible to place yourself in risky or unrecoverable situation in a fight. When the Crystal Reindeer was summoned as all pets are, the entire surrounding area gets hit with an instantaneous snow/crystal attack. If an enemy was comboing you, or was about to initiate one; this would stun them, saving you from taking any damage whatsoever, and allowing you to retaliate.
The only saving grace of this pet was that this effect happened only upon summoning, and unsummoning it put it on a 60 second cooldown (which is a long time, relative to fight length). Players counter-acted this by buying dozens of them. This was not the last of its kind. There was the deer, then there was a flaming horse, dragons, clouds that heal you, undead dragons that stun everything in a huge area and reduce everything's defense. I colloquially named them "splodey pets"

After this point, there was a "Genesis" update where they changed the combat system to "make it faster" and to give players an edge against what would essentially become "Trash mobs" which typically composed most of the combat in the game. I put that in quotes because those selfsame enemies were originally still capable of killing you if you weren't careful, because players didn't have a ton of HP. This change essentially made it so that while you can still stun enemies, they basically can't stun you. All your skill loading times were basically set to instantaneous, aside from casting magic. They added cooldowns to all skills, which previously had none, including "bread and butter" skills that more or less composed your openers and normal attacks. This removed the depth of what comprised feasible combos. If a very powerful skill loaded instantly, you could just weave it into weaker attacks while enemies were stunned. Nothing could ever really back you into a corner unless you were dealing with cooldowns.

This shift in meta was compounded by the removal of i-frames from skills commonly used by players to avoid taking damage in a game where a single combo from an enemy was enough to reduce your HP to 0. Then, it was compounded by enemies becoming complete and utter damage sponges. Then it was compounded by an absolutely bonkers amount of power-creep; which brings me right back to my original statement of "years long plan" where the remedy to many of these situations was (you guessed it): Cash shop items. Reforges, to multiply your damage. Combo cards which arbitrarily/multiplicatively increase the damage of skills when you use them in a certain order. The undead dragons I mentioned earlier. Items that help you upgrade your items without risking them being destroyed by RNG (There was ALOT of RNG involved in enchanting and upgrading weapons.) Items that made certain arbitrarily untradeable items tradeable again, so that you don't have to go through that painstaking process yourself when your friend's quit, or if you want to sell something, discontinued or otherwise on its booming RMT market for several thousand dollars.

So, essentially, and to summarize a bit; my speculative theory was that Nexon took a beautiful, unique game and piecemeal destroyed its strategic core. First, by the inclusion of splodey pets. Then, by making combat "faster" and removing the ability of players to truly depend on those more skill and planning based strategic methods of defending themselves against enemies who are stronger. With strategy no longer an option to persevere, all that was left was damage. Damage they would sell you right out of their cash shop, and then further necessitate by making enemies impossibly tanky in a neverending double helix of enemies gradually getting more insane amounts of health while players deal more outrageous amounts of damage.

That endless progression system which facilitated solo-play remained intact as well, until they decided to add "Apostle" enemies which could essentially force grab you without you having any way to avoid it via skills or distance; and forcing other players to rescue you. Or the Duke, who is a vampire that can kill you by looking at you from out of render-distance in the buggiest way possible. Later on, they tried to entice their grief stricken playerbase by updating every existing system to give players the resource (AP) needed to upgrade skills, or train them; which had since become totally inconsequential compared to the gear grind.

Beneath all that, there is likely some semblance of the game I used to love. One of the reasons I likely stayed as long as I did was the community. As a game as dated as this was, it didn't necessarily include matchmaking the way most games have SBMM, Duty Finder and queues. Everything was much more personal, you started to remember the names of people who you'd met, or people who were notable for being a good blacksmith, someone who is good at enchanting, etc. Even before the server had progressed to that point, people would make campfires in town and play MML music they had written into scores on various instruments, or play in bands. When you couldn't teleport or fly everywhere, you'd meet people waiting at the Moongates just like you might chat with someone waiting to board the same plane as you, or a train in the real world. You couldn't buy everything and everything wasn't as convenient, some NPCs moved around, or only operated at certain hours of its 36 minute day, but it was immersive as a result. Even the more negative interactions between players, like PvP had people forming rivalries with substance you typically don't find in today's MMOs. You'd remember the jerk that killed you, or maybe camped you in the games Elf vs. Giant PvP which took place anywhere even if you didn't really lose anything when you died. People would get up over and over again and beat the hell out of eachother without gaining anything from it for hours.

You loved it so much you eventually learned everything about it like I did. And when you were done, all that was left was to show the newer people how amazing it was so they could try and learn to love it the way you did before life took them somewhere else. I made some of my best friends on this game; and I still love the memory of what it was, but it isn't the same, and likely never will be. The heart of what it was has been ripped out and replaced with an insatiable, money-consuming singularity.

You can find the preserved, old experience on a private server, but they have a single digit player count, and suffer from that stagnation I mentioned earlier. For someone like me who played it for years, it has no new experiences left to offer outside of the training I'd already completed and the fights I've already fought. Especially as a meleer, even with lances and fighter; it is dated and old. There were dozens of missed opportunities for new skillsets with different weapon types they never added, not in private nor on the live server. Rapiers, Axes, Hammers, etc are all still only offer different passives.