We are concerned with an elliptic problem which describes a mean field equation of the equilibrium turbulence of vortices with variable intensities. In the first part of the paper, we describe the blow-up picture and highlight the differences from the standard mean field equation as we observe non-quantization phenomenon. In the second part, we discuss the Moser–Trudinger inequality in terms of the blow-up masses and get the existence of solutions in a non-coercive regime by means of a variational argument, which is based on some improved Moser–Trudinger inequalities.
