My brother told me about it when it was coming out of open beta so I gave it a try. Back then I was a huge Touhou nerd and there was a fair amount of people from the Touhou community playing in Tarlach (the Emain Seal Breakers are Cirno and Patchouli for example) so I enjoyed socializing there. I did end up quitting for a while when these guys stopped as well, but came back with the introduction of free rebirths. At that time, I had just finished Ar Tonelico 2 and absolutely loved the character Jacqli, so I made a new character named after her in Mabinogi when I started again. My goal was to make my character as similar as possible to the original, which meant she was going to focus on magic (since she was widely considered to be the strongest mage in that universe). Along the way, I also picked up making MML and when I got tired of training skills or grinding AP, I had fun making MML. It was great because in the Ar Tonelico universe, mages cast magic by singing. It meshed with well my character goal.
What's funny is that by the time I stopped playing a lot, I was starting to get known as one of the strongest mages in Tarlach AND a good bard. I guess I accomplished my goal after all this time.