A Good Week

For all the work it takes to play Mabinogi (including my academic obligations to it), there is nothing like the rewards I reaped this past week (which is welcome because I am on Spring Break and want nothing but to relax).

First off, I re-raised the gold necessary to buy a replacement set of Spaika Armor, and this time I managed to walk away from Elen without selling it back to her! I am particulalry happy with the color choice and the defensive improvement I've gotten over my trusty Mongo's Traveller's Suit, so there has been no buyer's remorse I had feared in earlier posts.
Striking a pose in my new armor (finally!)
This blog was originally intended to be a convenient electronic (read: lazy) way for me to complete my Virtual World's class' weekly game journal assignment. Most other students opted to write or type theirs up and hand it in at the end of the quarter; I merely sent a link here to my professor. I never considered the fact this is posted on the real Internet and that someone may be reading this thing, so imagine my surprise when my friend Mistresraven PM'ed me about meeting a "fan" of my work. He found her (apparently) by recognizing her avatar in the pictures I've posted here. She probably told him that she could summon me at her leisure, and he could meet me if he wanted. Thus, I got to meet this fellow, Freaky555:

Continuing the good times, I've gotten a chance this week to hang out with most of my friends individually in Mabinogi, and it gave me a chance to get to know them on a more personal basis. For example, I relaxed with Kazukikun recently for a couple hours just fishing the ocean and yakking it up:

And then this happened:
What will happen next? Tune in next time for the thrilling conclusion to Warren's MMO Adventures!

Mabinogi Million Misclick

Since started playing Mabinogi to write a paper about its economy, I had to sell commodities on the player market. Over the past 10 weeks I've been diligently keeping track of what I've sold, how much I sold it for, and to whom. In the paper I turned in about 2 weeks ago, I included my records up to that point in the appendix. As you know, I set my sights on earning enough gold to buy Spaika Silver Plate Armor which costs 700k, so my sales didn't stop at the 476,960 gold mark (which is when I turned in the paper). In fact, my sales didn't stop until I had 1 million gold in my pocket.

A retelling of my quest can be found here. It is a Word document hosted over on Archive.org. Blogger isn't friendly with tables, so posting my sales record this way was the only reasonable workaround.

In the end, my total revenue was 991,150 gold, which is about 9k shy of the million. However, from quests and gold drops, I actually had collected closer to 1.1 million when considering the rest of the money I had lying around.


To celebrate my accomplishment, I bought the Spaika Armor for 735k (35k being game tax) and was very please with myself for about a minute. That's when I accidentally sold the armor back to the NPC for 50,000 gold for a net loss of 685,000. In other words I just reset myself back to mid February.

I am speechless, really. I have no idea how to feel about losing that much money (and time and effort). I wasn't robbed, but I got literally zero value out of that 685,000 gold. I wrote a post earlier about Mabinogi not doing a good enough job at getting me to spend my money, but I suppose their UI is plenty capable of destroying it for me. Just...unbelieveable.

Prophecy Realized

It's a bit difficult to see in this picture, but that is Dunbarton's main square packed with player shops. In a previous post titled "Iria Released," I discussed a prediction I made in my Mabinogi economic research paper, forseeing that the player market would expand out from its Tir Chonaill roots and finally relocate to a spot in the center of the map. Now that Iria has shifted the player base closer towards it (that is, more players are using Port Ceann in the south to reach Iria), Tir Chonaill no longer has the most foot traffic in the game.

When I made my prediction, I had assumed players would be running to and from the port to all places in Uladh (the original continent) when they returned from Iria. Dunbarton, at the center of the continent, is an ideal town to make a base camp for travelers as they branch out to the other locales. But the real reason so many players visit Dunbarton now is because of the Continent Warp feature, which allows players in Iria to warp to Uladh and vice versa. Players warping out of Iria get dropped in Dunbarton, so naturally a market has sprung up to take advantage of the new high-volume transportation route. I'm not sure if the bustling marketplace is a result of the forces I predicted, or if it exists solely because of the warping. I'll continue to believe I was correct, though, until proven otherwise.

During my first week in Mabinogi, I was fortunate to meet and befriend Vampireai who kindly helped me learn the ins and outs of the game (I've blogged about it here). Her generosity towards a newbie like me has instilled in me a desire to lend a hand to other newbies. I think I've made it obvious how much better my Mabinogi experience improved after I met her, and I feel the least I could do is mentor another newbie now that I am well-established.

I came across a player standing in front of a town elder NPC, asking for help on how to proceed with the storyline. "Ah, I can help him..." I thought. I told him about quests and how to make some money, and even showed him to his first dungeon. Since I had been questing with Vampireai (she was playing her main character Mistresraven), the two of us kind of played a mom and pop role, teaching him how to "walk" in Mabinogi together. It gave me a new respect for the patience she had with me during my first days, since guiding our newbie through things I now take for granted was like watching a documentary of myself stumbling around under Vampireai's wing. It was embarassing, in many ways, to realize how useless I had been as I stood side by side with my mentor mentoring another newbie. Regardless of that I actually enjoyed the experience. Thus, we had met Weizennger:

Uncle Scrooge Effect

After finally raising the 700k for the Spaika Silver Plate Armor I've been chasing over the last month and a half, I suddenly can't bring myself to spend the money. It's probably a sentimental attachement to the gold collecting in the bank. If I just turned around and blew it all on a piece of armor, I'd be taking a huge risk. What if I have buyer's remorse? The idea that I bought unsatisfactory armor with my life's savings is paralyzing.

It also hasn't helped that my guild leader, whom I've assumed was loaded, commented that she had never held more than 300k at once (though I'm sure she's raised much, much more in total). Suddenly I feel like a millionaire in the game--it's just that I'm not. Yet. Now I find myself on a quest to not just stop at my 700k, but stretch it out to the mythical 1 million gold mark.

I'm gonna term this behavior as the "Uncle Scrooge Effect," in honor of Uncle Scrooge from Duck Tales. He had TONS of money and never spent any of it. He didn't have money for the purpose of buying material things. No, the mere posession of large amounts of money satisfied his soul. I think I am the same way. Spending my fortune on even the spiffiest of gear wouldn't give me the ease of mind that sitting on (essentially) infinite money can (and is).

It kind of makes me wonder if the developers need to do a better job of separating me from my gold, because if I won't buy the most expensive items, then my money isn't being sunken out of the world. Castronova is a proponent of MMO's that prioritize high cash flow over hoarding fortunes. In theory this keeps inflation in check while allowing vibrant player markets to emerge. The best way to do this is to constantly be introducing new (and especially consumable) items to the world so players are always buying the next big thing. Mabinogi thus far is not enticing me to spend.

In the meantime, my friend Vampireai has made a giant with whom she wants to turn into a blacksmithing character. She's a little too weak to make mining runs in the Bangor dungeon alone, so I've been accompanying her. Since neither of us can make use of silver and gold ores, I proposed we pool our rare ores to give us better selling power in the market. Well, it worked. With larger numbers of ore, I was able to hustle them off for prices equal to the gold farmers'. I made about 40k, and her share was about 25k. She was pleased to have the cash to buy an upgraded hammer. I was pleased to have a business partner.

The new force in the mining game

Iria Released

Heading to the new world
Pioneers of Iria was released for Mabinogi this past weekend and introduced the huge continent of Iria to the game. For my Virtual Worlds class I wrote a paper about the game's economy and the implications Iria would have on it. I speculated that MUDflation would get worse, the market would relocate to a more central location (Dunbarton or Bangor), and more players would join in on the market if it went free to own a shop.

After spending the weekend watching the ensuing madness, the exodus of players from the Uladh continent to Iria has led me some preliminary conclusions:

1) MUDflation will get worse. For the time being there is a treasure-hunt event going on where hidden chests are scattered across the Iria continent. It is clear that the items being given away are very valuable. In one day of digging up chests, I found 2 sets of armor worth 20k and 44k, a bear robe worth 10-15k, and a wolf robe that I was told was worth upwards of 70k. Ultimately these valuable items will introduce more currency into the world (by selling these to NPC's) which will cause a rise in inflation. It will also flood the newbie market with higher-power gear, either because they dug it up themselves or they bought it from the veterans who've had these equpiment prior to Iria's release and now feel the need to upgrade their arsenal beyond the common player.

2) The player market will move out of Tir Chonaill in the extreme north of Uladh to a more central location. Iria has already shown signs of drawing the market out of Tir Chonaill for several reasons. First of all, the entire Uladh continent is less populated than ever because so many players have crossed the ocean to wander Iria. Since a majority of players have moved, a healthy number of player shops have popped up at the Iria base camp selling not only the items being excavated out in the plains, but also support items like potions and food. This tells me that the base camp market is quickly maturing and may supplant Tir Chonaill as the premier hub of economic activity. The second reason Iria will relocate the player market is because of the "continent transfer" feature that was just introduced. Players in Iria who want to return to Uladh can teleport back to Dunbarton instantly. More than likely this will give rise to a Dunbarton market that takes advantage of the sudden traffic.

3) More players will participate in the player market, but not because the service is free. It was rumored that shop ownership would go free, but that is not quite the case. For players under total level 30, the extra storage fee is waived which means no real cash is required to open a shop (the shop requires having the extra storage). However, only the newest players to Mabinogi are under total level 30, so in reality only a handful of shops will open because of this. The more likely reason more players will participate in the market is because of the introduction of personal shop attendants, which are NPC's that will look over your personal shop while you're exploring. This helps players who own extra storage but do not own a pet (to watch their shop) open a shop by hiring an NPC. Combined these policy changes should open the doors for a modest number of additional users to participate in the market.

In other Iria news, I've started wearing the wolf robe I mentioned earlier. It's pretty awesome, I think, and gives me slightly more credibility than the more casual shirt/shorts combination I had been wearing. Iria also introduced the ability to dual wield swords instead of forcing the 1-handed sword+shield or single 2-handed sword paradigm. The ability to strike enemies 5-6 times in the same timespan that I could normally strike 2-3 times has more than doubled my power. I'm slightly worried that this has unbalanced the game, since there is no obvious drawback to dual wielding.

Iria also introduced the Giant and Elf races to Mabinogi. Giants specialize in using huge weapons (like trees) and giving humans rides on their shoulders. Elves specialize in ranged attacks with bow weapons and running extremely fast. It remains to be seen whether they obsolete the generic human race, but the giants definately dwarf my (formerly) very tall character!