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Dear Ninja, Here's another wall of text, this one talking about the core game designs and philosophy behind.. Daily Missions! Before there was daily missions, the only way to level up was to grind. Killing enemies repeatedly. When initially designing Nin Online, one of the hardest problems was trying to create a variety of ways for players to level up. One of the ideas was to make it so open-world PvP gave experience. Another idea was to reward medical ninja for healing players. This would turn out to be a big headache because of all the ways this would cause huge infinitely experience exploits. Preventing Exploits As simple as it sounds, giving experience to ninja for killing other ninja, or healing other ninja is not possible because it opens up better ways to train with no risk, opening up exploits where you can just stand outside a hospital and make one character kill another to level up, or you can pay high level ninja to let you kill them for hours to level up. Or you could just use a bot to do all those things. One of the things that having missions that limit the amount you can do such things is that you can't plan to just "cheat" the system to the top. The missions tell you to kill X players, and once you're done with that, your next goal is collect X bounty. This way, you can't just AFK near the hospital and bot for hours getting XP from killing people. We still want to reward players for open world pvp, but we don't want to do it carelessly or replace killing mobs, or actually doing missions. So we make the rewards part of the missions system. Where who and why you kill. Is it just any enemy? or is it somebody with a bounty? As time goes on, we can make it increasingly more specific. Eg. missions that tell you to kill 1 Mist village ninja. Kill 1 Sand village ninja. Kill 3 Missing Ninja. Kill 1 ninja from Level 10-30. These are all tasks that both reward for open world pvp, and prevent you from exploiting or just repeatedly paying the highest level player around to AFK and let you kill him for hours to level up. Variety While preventing infinite experience loops is an important function. It is far from the main purpose of the system. The main purpose in the system is to create variety in the game play experience and the journey to becoming a powerful ninja. Instead of a repetitive grind, the daily missions give you a random journey to go on. A mission like "Collect 30 Something" provides you with more options than just going out and killing for XP. If you have spare Ryo, you can buy it from somebody. Your journey then becomes meeting up with this player in a location to make the exchange happen. A mission like "Kill X Enemy Ninja" lets you take a break from the endless grind to interact with other players. Team up. Explore the larger world. Infiltrate the enemy villages. Although not encouraged, it also allows you to attempt to negotiate exchanges with enemy village ninja. A mission like "Collect X Bounty Rewards" let's you open up your bingo book and find players who are enemies of the village, then track them down based on where you think they'd likely be for their level range, or based on their village. A mission like "Time off!" puts you in a place where you can relax and where you have time to burn, to socialize. Although the reward is low, it is there, and doing nothing but socializing for a few minutes can be seen as a good break from grinding. If you're not up to it, then better luck on the RNG, but getting experience for doing little to nothing and just appreciating the world is a good break nevertheless. The balance in how much experience it should give you is important, and maybe we haven't quite got it right. It should be enough so that you have the choice between just grinding - or doing nothing and getting a lesser reward, but hey, the RNG village mission assigners told you to do it so might as well just chill for awhile. We also send enemies potentially your way, so it's not always completely peaceful. There's also tons of missions that provide short stories and ask you to go on small adventures like finding a missing cat, or retrieving a hawk. You may bump into other players during the time, or you can ask people for help on where they would likely be, creating a way for experienced players to help new players in a way besides letting people kill you for XP (back to Preventing Exploits). Variety in experience for these missions can be drastic, but the way we balance it is so that your journey to maximum level is only a matter of time. If you just complete your dailies, eventually you will get to maximum level. Sometimes that journey might give you more experience, or sometimes it will give you less. But it's balanced so that eventually your luck will get you there at the same rate as everyone else, so that you don't feel the pressure to just grind your way to max level. The Limit The limit on daily mission exists so that we can provide the option to abandon missions. We want ninja to complete their missions. But we also don't want them to be stuck on a mission forever when it's not possible for them to finish it if there's no players online. The way we balance missions to give you experienced fairly so that all missions are worth doing, is by limiting it. We don't want players just abandoning the low experience missions to reroll for high experience missions. If given a choice, nobody wants to do the lower experience missions because you start to see Time vs. Reward. Of course it's meaningless to take a break and do "Guard Duty" if the Documents Mission is just more productive. But thats not fun. Feeling as if the only viable way to play is if you abandon your guard duty to get documents just kills variety. Then you're stupid not to! Back in earlier versions of the game, we could already see this behavior when we allowed players to share missions (this was an experiment that Seth did). What happened was the entire game play became a matter of finding players with the high experience missions and begging them to share it with you. Because you'd be stupid not to! Why waste your time doing something like "Guard Duty", when you could do "Retrieve Documents" which gives you more experience in less time? But the entire balance of rewards is designed to take you to max level eventually. The high XP missions exist because the low XP missions exist. If the game let you choose to only do the currently high XP missions, then those high XP missions would have to be nerfed to the point where it still takes you about the same time to get to max level. We want ninja to take their time to get to max level, because at every level tier, there is opportunity for unique RP, unique battles and unique experiences. (But this topic is for another design development log!) Lore The final case for daily missions being the way they are is the lore. It's clear in the Naruto series that ninja just don't choose what missions they're assigned to. The story of any ninja in Nin Online shouldn't be "I completed Retrieve Documents 1000 times to become a Jonin". The variety in experiences is what made your ninja the powerful ninja he is. To paint a fuller picture, daily missions are supposed to be the grind that you don't see ninja in the Naruto series do. It's mentioned and shown many times in the series that when you're not watching team InoShikaCho doing a crazy mission arc, they are out serving the village in less epic ways. The Toad village Arc at level 30 in Nin Online is a storyline arc that took a long time to do, and creates a one-time off story arc that is something that would be showcased in the anime series. While daily missions are the missions you don't see. But in Nin Online, you play as one ninja all the way, you see his full picture. Him doing epic adventures, and also taking time off! Eventually what we want is for there to be an interesting Toad village arc-like story mission for every village at every 10 levels. I'm currently planning level 20 arcs for the Leaf village to be something like a Zabuza arc for example. Conclusion It's 7am in the morning and I'm sure I've missed out a lot of points. I might be all over the place with my explanation, and I'm sure it'll still leave some questions unanswered, or it might have completely went over your head and you still don't understand why Daily Missions are random and how the solve the grind mobs problem. In which case, I'll probably do a second version of this dev log when I'm less sleepy! Regards, Rory

Added No Trap tiles throughout Tanzaku Quarters entrance area. Increased XP Reward for "Time Off!?" and "Guilty Pleasure" daily missions. Removed Laceration/Bleeding from Scorpions and Wolves (this was a bug - yes).

Added kill counters for CBK and WW. Raised XP for Time Off!? earlier today I'll look into that last one

Please add kill counter for cbk and waging war. Raise exp gain for time off!? (Sand & Missing) and add a ryo reward for medicine supplies (Missing).

One of the reasons I think there should be a proper war/peace mechanic. For instance, if Leaf and Mist are at peace, Leaf ninja would not be given a "Kill 1 Mist ninja" mission and the Leaf Jonin wouldn't attack Mist ninja.

Hope there's a Sand arc released at the same time unlike how Leaf has the Hide and Seek to get a second jutsu free while Sand does not.

Hm, I feel like this change (especially the tiles around Tanzaku) is because of me. I was blocking the entrance for hours today and someone must have reported it. The reason is, missings spawn there to kill lowbies. The person who most likely reported me kept respawning there and trying to get past me, so they can kill people. I know, 'cause they killed my alt twice today, and ran back to Tanzaku both times. They kept calling people to help them fight me. They were cloaking before entering the map to try and ambush me, this is why I was trapping it, instead of just fighting them normally. It was always 2 of them and 1 of me. I would not have a reason to trap it if Tanzaku wasn't connected directly to one of the most populated lowbie maps in Leaf. I suggest moving the entrance to South Tigers instead. I don't understand the change, beartrap is already one of the most useless jutsus (especially for a 1v1), it's a 1 tile that can be avoided easily, people can just sub it, sub while in it, flicker out of it or just simply combo me while inside of it. The one use it has is pre-trapping maps, so people can't just cloak past you. It literally has no other use. Nobody will just walk into it if the whole passage isn't blocked. And if they do get trapped, they can just hit me. This is the 4th time beartrap gets changed in like 2(?) months, because 1 person complains about it. May aswell delete it from the game. The funny part about the whole story is, the person who was spawning in Tanzaku with the sole purpose of killing lowbies on the tigers map (which is a danger zone for some reason and they get free bounty there), was calling me evil and said I'm ruining his game.. Like, what? If you don't want to get blocked, don't respawn in Tanzaku just to kill lowbies.

Temporarily reduced cost of using Tanzaku Quarters hospital to 25 Ryo from 50 Ryo while we solve the repeat charging of ryo bug. Added White Hermit Robes!

Dear Ninja, In the spirit of June being Nin Online's 5th Anniversary month, we're releasing a time-exclusive cosmetic item! It is no other than the White Hermit Cape! You can preview them in-game. The White Hermit Cape will be on sale from 1st June - 30th June. As with any future time-exclusive cosmetics, after it's sale period, it will not be available for purchase anymore, but will be tradeable in-game so that it may be passed on. We hope that you continue playing Nin Online, and look forward to more updates soon! Regards, Rory

When I am selected as Kazekage I will improve Sand Villages healthcare and education etc. So far we’ve had a school system that is from the middle-ages. Children go to school by age of 15 and finish their studies by age of 16. Everyone can understand that by now its a every ninjas right to gain education that is on par with the missing-ninja, their feudal lord is truly on top of his game. What comes to healthcare mostly due to our small taxes most that return from their missions or battlefield are left on their own while still being battle-injured, that will be sorted out. About our allies I will promote all Neo-Akatsuki to full fledged Akatsuki members as a thanks for constructing reliable solar panel system to all accross Sand-Village which allows us to provide consistent electricity to all of our inhabitants. Leaf village will be awarded the Ninja-Nobel award for always trying to find a way for peace treaty which is a formidable perk to possess. We’ve bright future ahead of us if you vote for me, massive Exiles incoming. Light

Update from February. We've eliminated placing traps on warp tiles and around important areas in the game, and we've also stopped rewarding players for spam killing people for their mission requirements. Here's my response to Waging War / Bounty mission complaints. Read this article from February. Then the message below. Solving one problem creates another. Now the player killers want to be rewarded for spam killing. Understandably, when something that was doable before due to oversight/incompleteness, it's not fun when it becomes harder. But that's inevitable. It's way less fun to be spam killed for somebody else's mission requirements.

That's never been what the test server is for. The test server is to test major feature (not content) additions that could break the game or create exploits.

This council was active for the entire 6 months not only logging to deal with meetings but to play and help the village on all aspects. the only member that went inactive for some time was Hawt because he moved and had no internet connection.