Shakaya and Co. (my OC blog)

HENLO

What started out as a small adventuring guild, grew into a large social guild, then died as Tarlach's population dwindled. Now, it's time to rebirth, and we'd like to get back to our roots. A humble guild, exploring new content together, while playing a couple side-games as well. This is Capulet. 

We're a close-knit community that mostly functions through Discord. Joining our Discord server is mandatory to join our guild, but you don't have to use a mic or join voice calls at all if you're uncomfortable with that. But our guild rules, announcements, events, etc. is all organized on Discord, so we need ya to at least be in the server.

We play a couple different games together. Our main squeeze, our #1, our soulmate, our forever home, is Mabinogi. However, we also have a branch of our guild on Vindictus, and we host our own Minecraft server as well (though it is hosted on a microcomputer so it can be a lil' buggy sometimes, but we're working on it!) 

On Mabi, our goal is to grow large enough to have successful guild raids (focusing on crusader raids mostly). You don't need to be really good at raiding to join, but we'd like to request that you have g19 finished (or be actively working on the gen quickly) before you apply. This isn't the only thing we do together on Mabi, if you have anything you need help grinding we're happy to help, but crusaders are what we do most often.

For Vindi, we approach this game very casually. We're happy to run things with lower levels and newer players, however we also want to get to doing end-game raids soon too. A few of us recently got to level 100, and most of us are either returning oldies or brand new to the game. We schedule guild runs on Vindi about twice a week, but if you need help with quests or grinding just ask on our Discord anytime and you'll be able to find someone to log on and join you! 

On Minecraft, our server is vanilla survival, with very minimal mods. We're focused on just exploring the content of the game together, and for some of us it's our first time doing a proper play-through of this game. We'd like to build a castle together eventually, and we haven't explored The End yet, so if you join soon you'll be there for some of those fun first experiences!

If you'd like to join the guild, please add Shakaya as a friend (IGN is the same on both Mabi and Vindi). I'll talk with you in-game and invite you to some guild runs for you to mingle with everyone first before you officially join. If all of us seem to get along well then your application will be accepted!

The most important thing to our guild is friendship. Be kind, hang out, have fun, follow the guild rules, and let the adventure begin.

So I wanted to make an official-y type post on just updates on what I’m doing on Mabi, the guild, & life stuff. I haven’t been very active on this blog for a while. I’d like to post more, but I’m not promising regular content or anything. If you’re an old friend that’s trying to get back in contact with me, hit me up on Discord or in-game, don’t try to message me on tumblr, lol.

So, first things first, i’m the realest my guild is recruiting again!! 🥳 Last month we had a couple of guild screenshot sessions so we could have pictures for the recruitment posts, and I was really surprised with how many people showed up! I’ve been trying to re-ignite guild activity since last October, and I’m happy to say we’ve been successful in rebuilding a healthy core for our guild, but even more people than who I was expecting showed up to that guild event, and it made me really happy!

The goal for our recruitment is to get our activity back to what it was around 2008~2012. I don’t want to be as big as we were around 2014~2015 ever again, my anxiety still hasn’t recovered enough for that. But I’ve been feeling really nostalgic as we started playing Vindictus and Minecraft again in addition to getting back to Mabinogi. We’re also playing a Dungeons & Dragons campaign again, too! (and looking into starting a 2nd cmapaign when we get more new members) It’s really feeling like old times again, and I’m so glad that we’re rebuilding like this! 💖

For my own character, I’ve made a lot of progress after 2 master plan events!! I mastered 5 talents in 2020, got all my pets and partners to level 200, got a ton of levels for myself as well, actually started making progress on my spirit weapons, completed my Languhiris Chaser armor set, got 4 level 30 echostones, made the celtic howling chains, I now have 5 step 6 weapons, and I used the generation booster event to not only get caught up on gens, but I also got 2 level 30 erg weapons (with the help of my husbando and his alts lel). Sorry for the flex but I’m just really happy with my progress! I’m not completely useless in end game content anymore!! I’m still not good enough to DPS in the newest stuff, but I’m not a squishy mess that’s dying right and left anymore!!

For the next few months until 2021′s summer master plan starts, my goals now are to focus on my crusader subskills (getting all of them to level 15), to get my crusader level high enough to have 2 crusader skills with max points distributed into subskills at the same time, to work on grandmastering all the talents I have at master, to actually train my squires, and to turn all of my pets (that haven’t been sacrificed) into Fynn pets! 🎉

It’s really nice to actually be playing this game again, instead of only doing events for prizes and not much else. Focusing on all of this is helping me cope with where my mental health has been with the pandemic happening. It’s been a big struggle for me. I haven’t had the energy to really put time into things that are productive for me in the real world. But my online friends have kept me social, and setting goals for my character has given me something to look forward to every day, even though I rarely leave the house. It’s something that feels productive for me, and I’m able to still work towards these goals even when I’m having depressive lows.

But now I’m just being too mushy oop

So~ getting back to updates about the guild!  The old guild website ( https://capumagu.webs.com/ ) is still not being maintained at this moment in time. Webs has been increasing the price of its service plans more and more every year (heck, I joined the site when it was still called freewebs.com, but they changed the name for obvious reasons). The site was free when I first made it. Then I started paying maybe $40 a year. Then they bumped it up to $60 a year, which was annoying but still do-able. Then it got bumped up to $80 a year for the same basic service, and that’s when I decided to stop paying for a website.

We don’t really need a website anymore, anyways. The days of only having a skype group are over. We have facebook, twitter, and youtube, and we have a nicely organized Discord server that ties everything together, which was what the website’s purpose was. So, there’s really no reason to keep paying for that. If I can figure out how to downgrade my account to a free website, then maybe it’ll come back, but that’ll probably take a lot of days just sitting through crappy customer service with employees that’ll try to convince me to just start paying for a site again. So for the time being, the Capulet Maguhzine is down.

I would like to get back to posting on our guild’s facebook and youtube again. This whole time I’ve been inactive, I’ve still recorded vids and taken pictures of the guild events we’ve had, but I just haven’t edited and posted them yet. So when I finally do start posting again it’s going to be a nostalgia trip. ♡ That’s a goal I’d like to set for myself once COVID is over. Once I’ve been able to recover my physical and mental health, I’ll hopefully be able to feel creative more often again. I’ve never made super great quality content, but I do put love & effort into these posts, and I need to be in a good mental space to do that.

I don’t really have much else to say. I guess I can link the guild’s social media. If anyone’s bothered to read this far, you might want it, maybe? Though, if no one reads this I don’t mind. It just feels good to post blarbs. It’s good for my sanity. 😂

It’s been a few years since I was fully invested in Mabinogi. I’ve mostly been playing The Sims while my guild was dead. I used to be so involved with my guild and the Tarlach server, and that’s the biggest thing that’s changed.

I used to be a New User Ambassador: a volunteer position that Sabina started to direct newbies to people willing to spend lots of time helping them. I did the best I could to find newbies and help the Tarlach server when it needed it, like when we rebuilt the housing districts with other helpful guilds when trolls kept destroying all the houses in them. But, when Sabina left Nexon, her New User Ambassador program was disbanded. When that happened, I was burnt out from not only all the help I put out, but also from running the Tarlach Fair on top of it all. So when the NUA program was officially disbanded, I quit going out of my way to help strangers.

I used to be one of the many head organizers the Tarlach Fair has had. When I was just a regular staff member back in 2012~2014 the fair was everything to me when I discovered it. I volunteered to help out with every event I could possibly squeeze into my day. My guild and I created the Wild West Shoot Out event for the fair. It was an insanely fun time. But then when Evaline stepped down, I was put in charge since no one else was willing to put the time into it.

Being the main person in charge of organizing everything for the fair shattered my social confidence. Older staff members didn’t listen to me the way they listened to Evaline. Some Master Judges didn’t even show up to run their own events on fair day. People didn’t go to staff meetings in-game anymore. We had to move all our organization plans to skype/discord because no one bothered to show up in game like they used to, and many staff members also ignored me there as well, even when I DM’d them, and they had agreed to run their event for the next fair already! Not only that, but there was a lot of negative feed back that I got from running the fair as well, on top of dealing with trolls. There was positive feed back too, but the amount of negativity I got broke me.

After 2016 I gave up on Tarlach’s community and went into hiding. I only socialized with my guild. There was one point that my guildies wanted to do a concert using Festia’s stage for the whole server, and while picking out the jams and practicing for it was really fun, when we finally put on the concert I was shaking the entire time. I was not ready to be out in public spaces online again.

When we got the server merge it was much of the same as well. I picked up the organization of an abandoned goodbye party for the Tarlach server, because the original host cancelled it when the GMs planned a screenshot session one afternoon close to the merge date. I felt like we needed at least one evening goodbye party, though, because a lot of people aren’t available during Nexon’s work hours. So I bootlegged the party, but I had to ask other guild members to bugle for me because the thought of people seeing my name attached to the bugle gave me so much anxiety.

Now, it’s 2020, and I’ve calmed down from it all. I have no plans whatsoever to ever return to hosting anything for our new Nao server. My guild is lively again, after being dead for quite some time, thanks to members returning since they have more free time with social distancing happening. I want to actually play this game again, but I’m going to be playing it the way I used to, back in 2008~2011. Just me, my guild, and the content this game has to offer. No more helping strangers. No more planning community events of any sort. Thankfully, someone else from a different server is running the Nao Fair, so I have no guilt of leaving a tradition behind.

I’m just enjoying myself again. Enjoying time with my guild again. I’m looking forward to rebuilding Capulet even more in the future as well.

Also, speaking of changes, another change is that we no longer have a guild website. I quit paying for the service to that. We only organize on facebook, discord, and twitter now. I’ve neglected our youtube for a long time as well, but one day I’ll get to posting on there again, eventually.

Day 30: What is the best thing you love about Mabinogi?

The most important thing that I love about Mabi is the community. That’s what keeps me playing the most out of anything. I think the heavy focus on slice-of-life content in the beginning of this game’s lifespan really developed a sense of community that I’ve never seen in any other game. When my guild and the server I’m on are healthy, that’s when I’m the most active. That’s what draws me into Mabi more than anything else.

I recently fully came back after being on a semi-hiatus for quite some time. When the Tarlach server was at its worst, so was my guild. Because of that I had little motivation to play anymore. I would still log on for events, but that’s all I would do. The minimum effort needed to get my prize and then I’d log off.

Then we got the server merge, and my friends came back to Mabi for a while, but after a couple weeks of checking things out on our new Nao server, they went back to their lives. I was excited for a little bit, but once everyone I knew left again, I went back to only playing for events.

But now, everyone is back again because of COVID-19. A lot of my friends are either working from home, or are finishing up their college semester online, and actually have free time again. I’m sad that such a tragic event had to happen to bring them back, but I’m really happy to see them again. This whole past month the guild has been more alive than I’ve seen it in years, and that rekindled my love for Mabi as well. I’m actually working on my character again and I’ve set the goal for myself to be able to run the new end-game tech dungeons by the time summer is over.

Day 29: What do you think the next major storyline will be like?

Hello my lovelies! I would like to bring your attention to this post that I've made on our guild's forum, which is about shifting the focus of our guild for the time being.

2017 April Fool’s Event