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Dear Ninja, It's been a really long time since I've posted a development log. This is going to be the first one of 2018.. don't expect a lot of these though! It takes up time to write these and prepare pictures and stuff, so most of the time, I'm just going to implement them into the game quietly. But as we move into the next development phase, I thought it'd be interesting to share some plans for the future. The current development timeline is.. Mastery Combinations The recent balance changes was to make way for new jutsu based on hybrid stats builds. This is the start of level 50+ content, jutsu styles like Medical + Taijutsu giving Tsunade/Sakura aka. Inner Strength style. Inner Strength style will be scaled based on Agility and Chakra stat. We will release these combinations one by one starting with Inner Strength, then Taijutsu and Sword + Elemental Masteries, eg. Water + Sword to get Suigetsu/Zabuza style jutsu. Lightning + Taijutsu will give you Raikage style jutsu. Elemental Kekkai Genkai will take a backseat for now (eg. Wood Release). Second Non-ninja village Takumi village is a smaller, non-ninja village. There are multiple of these planned for each country. Takumi village is in the land of rivers, ran by the Daimyo of the land. The next one is a slightly larger casino/gambling village inspired by Tanzaku Quarters (the village they found Tsunade in), which will feature ways to lose all your savings! Forbidden Techniques I get this question about jutsu like Rasengan or Hiraishin Technique a lot. "What mastery is it going to be?". It's been one of the trickiest thing to balance, but I think I've managed to find a way to balance such techniques without being over powered. The latest addition of limited jutsu slot is one of the changes made to accommodate such a balance. With limited slots, just learning every jutsu becomes impossible. Combined with the rarity of these scrolls, you will find that even though very few ninja will have Rasengan for example, it will not break the game because they will be sacrificing another jutsu to make way for their Forbidden techniques. It will still be a challenge to fine tune these jutsu to not be over powered, but still feel valuable and pay homage to their anime counterparts, but I have no doubt we're going in the right direction! Specialized Masteries Once you reach level 50, you will be given the choice to specialize in your previous mastery to unlock Advanced Jutsu for that mastery. Eg. Taijutsu + Specialize will give you 8 Gates style Taijutsu. Fire + Specialize will give you Advanced Fire Ninjutsu which will feature even more crazy AoE. Specialized Masteries continue to scale with damage. Land of Iron This one has been in the works for the longest time. But it was postponed due to it being something from Shippuden. So it felt like it had to be level 50+ content. Once the new jutsu are released, it should be about time to implement all the art done for it. Mist village A slightly more distant goal, the hope is to release the legendary bloody mist sometime within the year. I hope this gets you excited for the year ahead! There's also probably going to be a lot of smaller misc. things added through the year. As always, it's not going to be easy mass producing high quality art, so I hope for your support in this journey. Regards, Rory

http://i.imgur.com/v52VMFA.png Dear Ninja, Today we fixed one of the biggest server crashes plaguing the games development, and with it comes a lot of lessons for the future of the game's development. We now know some things to look out for and avoid when coding the game, and we now have the means to debug crashes like this in the future. The reason this particular crash was so unsolvable was that it wasn't actually crashing the server. It was creating an infinite loop in calling server game logic. Which didn't crash the server and provide any debug information, and our current server was not able to give any debug information when attempting to debug through the latest version of Visual Studio. It turns out that our dated technology required the use of dated copies of Windows and a dated copy of Visual Studio to give us the debug information we needed, and I would not have been able to discover this without @Seth. It also took @Robin's knowledge in debugging methods to figure out what was causing it. I've spent the last couple of weeks blindly testing the server to see what would cause crashes, it took me and Seth stress testing parts of the game blindly, as we collected useful data and information from players about what they felt was causing the crashes. While I cannot disclose the exact cause as of yet for the game's server security, I would like to say that some of the information given did in fact make sense once the bug was found. The discovery took the efforts of Seth, Robin and myself convening over a long period of time analyzing the course of action to solve the bug. I also would like to thank Pokemon Planet's creator, Brody, for also providing assistance, and advising possible courses of action as well @Abhi for agreeing to put aside time from his busy exam schedule to look into it when I called him. Lastly I'd like to thank all the players who have been patient and sending me reports on possible causes for the crashes over the last week. Thank you to Nintendave @Bolan Vongola @Dayum Mirana @Riley @Sukki Ohiya @Jellal Kuraen @Oriax @Itachi Himitsu @Lumy @Shissei @MrChubb The Hozuki @Origami Heart User_name @Lain and whoever else gave useful feedback and encouragement, you're all top notch beta testers. This may not be the last problem causing crashes, but we now have the means to debug any similar problems (which there might be). Hopefully this means a much more stable Nin Online server immediately, or in the weeks to come. However, I would like to apologize in advance that the goals of 2018 (Adv. Masteries / Mist) may come a bit later than end of the year. I was initially going to rush out a lot of content by the end of 2018, but I've decided that in the spirit of Christmas, I'll be working on making the server stable and doing a Christmas event again, because we haven't had holiday events this year. Regards, Rory Edit (26/10/2021): For historical purposes, this crash was due to body flicker technique warping players randomly to a spot around the target. But if the target was at a corner of the map, it was looking for a spot outside the bounds of the index, and because this was a while loop, it was creating an infinite loop of finding a potential spot. It's such a simple issue in hindsight, but impossible to find with the kind of reports we were receiving and the lack of any debug information. There were all kinds of checks in place, but a while loop was still not a good option for this.

Re-enabled Bosses & NPCs with Jutsu Hokage and Kazekage can now learn imprison technique from their command rooms. Fixed a major server crash (yay!)

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

Hell yeah!! *Resets Itachi to get pure fire*