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MMORPG are unique as a genre of projects to work on from normal RPG because they run as a service over a long period of time. They are different because there is not a definite end state, and players will always want more content and features. Of course, they are also different because of the social interactions your players can have, creating indefinite amounts of possibilities for special interactions and experiences in the world. Indefinite Service Indefinite Updates Indefinite Experiences These 3 factors when considered into the design and development plan can create a sustainable MMORPG. Diving into the past, most of us avid MMORPG players have encountered one of these scenarios. Being a long time player of a game but slowly realizing its no longer the game you loved. Being a long time player and leaving the game, coming back and seeing its no longer the game you loved. Anticipating a game from trailers for years, forgetting about a game, and jumping in half a decade later to realize its not what the trailers portrayed it to be. A lot of games lose sight of the original design over the years, this can be due to change in designers and people working on the game. This can be due to publisher intervention. This can be due to changes in monetization model. This can be due to a large variety of reasons that may even have been necessary for the longevity of the game. This common occurrence with MMORPG almost make it seem that this is the inevitable destination for all games in the genre. But if we look at the examples of games decades old that are still around and maintain a strong following, and the prevalence of Classic MMORPG private servers, we can see that this isn't true. There are dozens of popular Ragnarok Online private servers with thousands of daily active users while Ragnarok Online 2 is shutting down its team and the game has less active players than Nin Online which is made by mostly 2 individuals. Changing Developers / Designers When a game is bought by a new parent company, sometimes they come with deals where the creators or lead designers have to continue working on the game for a duration. Sometimes they replace them straight away. Whichever the case, while documentation can help, if you change the person behind the helm of a games development. You will get changes to the vision of the game. Lack of knowledge of what made the game great from a fundamental level can be detrimental, and even having that knowledge, it's still really hard to continue the development the way it was originally intended. Obscure decisions can seem random or error-like to a person jumping in midway through a game's development lifetime. Even experienced developers will struggle to weigh in everything that comprises a game's design when suddenly thrown a giant game design document and a world filled with more different kinds of players than they've met in their lives. The way Nin Online has counteracted this problem thus far is just by keeping the same lead designer on the helm for its current lifespan. While I intend to continue being the one leading the games development in the long term, it may one day be inevitable that I will not. In such a scenario, it will be very important that whomever continues the game knows not just the decisions for the game design - but the reasons for them - by heart. It is rare that a new designer can step into a project and make the game a better game while sticking to its original design. It's not something I've personally observed happen in all my research. I think companies undervalue the importance of keeping the individuals and overvalue the project they're buying. But besides just changing designers, I think individuals get bored of the project they were originally designing and turn their projects into something else over time, they start adopting market trends, listen to what players want rather than committing to good design in areas they shouldn't. Decisions like these compound into bad games and eventually cause the games to die or at least lose their initial target audiences. World of Warcraft is a great example of this Accessibility and Appeasing a Casual Playerbase Trend This next point is a very specific decision that has occurred within most of the MMORPG that some of us have enjoyed as kids. Making a game accessible has in mine and many people's opinions been the cause of decline for many MMORPG of the past. When a game changes its design to match the player instead of making the player match the game, you end up with a game that everyone can play, but nobody wants to play. When you subscribe to the notion that because you pay for something, you should have access to all its content, or that everyone should have access to everything in the game even if they don't have time to invest into it, you end up with a game where everything is worth nothing and you will never truly be proud of anything you do in-game. This is an echo of a video you can find on YouTube that's been trending lately. You can watch it here Power creep and updating balance https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Power_creep Game balancing is another issue that has to be considered for the entirety of a games development. While it is important to get player feedback, it's also important to constantly refer to original design documents and use formula, charts and diagrams to determine what works in theory. Determining whether something is imbalanced is hard. Personally for Nin Online, when something is deemed under powered by a group of players, I first have to consider all the variables that a single or even a large group of players might not notice. For example, if a Spell (Jutsu) is underpowered to a majority of level 50 players, I have to look at "what level is this jutsu" "what are the other jutsu in this kit" "what situations is this jutsu meant to be used in and not used in" "is it useful in situations that are niche and/or not currently experience-able In-game" "is there a combo that is not currently being used" "does the arena sizes and format of fights have anything to do with why this jutsu has been failing for these players" "are the players expecting something different than its original intention or is it simply not living up to its original intention" and more factors unique to each case. Once I've determined that it is under powered, next I have to consider whether to buff it, nerf/re-balance everything around it, or rework it entirely. Which in itself, comes with dozens of factors to consider. But most importantly, if I do rework it, does it still play into the design of its class (mastery), and if I change it, is it for the betterment of the class or for the short term enjoyment of the players. When part of the designers job becomes to please the player base in the short term - it leads to decisions that don't consider longevity and long term balance. It is very easy to just buff something, most of the time, this receives the least criticism. People hate being nerfed, and love being buffed. Buffing other peoples classes doesn't hurt you as much as nerfing yours. So naturally, the easy decision is always just buffing. This leads to a common problem in MMORPG - power creep. My way to avoid this is to constantly make hard decisions, being stringent on my design is a benefit I get to enjoy by being the sole decision maker of the game. In a typical AAA company, if you make decisions that outrage players, you lose your job. This leads to situations where you buff things endlessly without considering other aspects of the game. Hard decisions are hard to make, but necessary. Another hard thing to maintain is a perfect imbalance, which is the concept that having everything fair is not fun, and that every player should have something about their class they feel. Is special. Players will often take two very different things in different classes and say "why does this class have this but this class doesn't?". Sometimes the first reaction even as a designer to this is "oh yeah, you're right, that's not fair is it?" but when you take this a step further and continue to balance things in a way that makes each class a re-skin of one another, it takes away the fun people can find from being overpowered in some ways and overcoming their underpowered-ness in others. What we should be balancing is the bigger picture, and making sure each class has the opportunity to shine in their own way. Creating content and the importance of Social experiences in MMORPG Being able to push out content faster than it can be experienced is not just an impossibility for an MMORPG like Nin Online, which has a small team, it is simply not possible to create a quest faster than players can complete it, you can't create a boss faster than players can get bored of it. At least not in a modern game development scenario. It might be possible one day. But we've seen that games, Nin Online included, have been able to retain players for years or even decades, so we know that pushing out content is not directly equivalent to retaining your players. There are a few ways games can tackle this, first by designing your game with social experiences in mind, you create infinite possibilities for interactions. Building systems that encourage player interaction one by one, makes a game not about what you do, but who you do it with. Each player becomes "content" because they provide a new way the game can be experienced. This should be prevalent in all MMORPG - but its not. Its one of the biggest charms and allures of the genre, but yet its so often forgotten by large studios. Expanding the right content in the right amounts is also important for Nin Online at least. Sometimes adding a boss is top priority, but sometimes working on an entire new village is more important. Sometimes working on features for a very small group of players like imprisonment for Military Police Forces will benefit the game more than anything. Prioritizing the right thing at each point the games development is key for sustaining the games enjoyment. Sometimes advertising and marketing is purely the focus of mine because I want to introduce new players to give more potential experiences to everyone else. Game industry trends and One upping older content Sticking to design rather than the trends of other games is important, and once core gameplay systems are in place, there's often a point where MMORPG just seem to slap in features like achievements and in the case of WoW, Garrisons. Although they seem cool initially, sometimes these features can have negative effects on the pre-existing content. Adding too many instanced content can take away from the World aspects of the MMORPG and negate the large amounts of work poured into making an expansive world. While it can be used to encourage exploration and doing more in your world, achievements can also cheapen the idea of exploration in the world by listing out exactly what people can do in your world and by rewarding certain ways to play the game, you lessen the fun in doing things players are not given rewards for. "Quality of life" changes. While this term is actually used to describe changes that make doing menial tasks easier, like a UI change that makes inventories easier to scroll through. Sometimes developers mistake changes like adding more inventory slots as a quality of life change. While it does give players an easier time, it can also in turn make inventory management less important, which for some could be a kind of fun. Inventory management is a large part of classic RPGs and while modern RPGs tend to have limitless inventory space, I myself personally find the idea of not having infinite pockets more immersive and gives me a reason to return to world hubs to sell loot, which creates a new dynamic, which in turn increases my chances of meaningful social experiences. One of the largest parts of Nin Onlines game design is to create a large world and encourage players to never stay in the same spot too long, and encourage exploration. Not having an easy time in achieving makes achieving more valuable. Quality of Life is a popular buzzword, but is only useful in it's domain. An example of a Quality of Life's potential is having un-intuitive UI or un-intuitive systems that can be better if it had more visual cues. My point is that Quality of Life is a term thrown around everywhere and is used in out-of-context situations because of how general the term is. Eg. Increase the EXP rate because that would increase the Quality of Life of players in the game. Content Creep Content creep is not a real term, but I use it to identify the problem I see with games that focus on adding content for current player base, commonly the players who are very invested in the game and whom have maxed out their level cap. Focusing on retaining players rather than new players is important as well, and a fine balance has to be made so that you can retain your old player base while also making it increasingly more fun for new players. This will make it more likely that new players will join, which is also a good thing for the existing players, because as we established earlier, new players is in a large way, new experiences and new content in a social world. Sometimes going back to balance and ensure the old content is still viable when you've added new content is important, and I feel the biggest violation to this was Maplestory. By adding a dozen classes on top of the original 4-5, they invalidated the old classes, wasting the old content that old players loved and new players could've loved. Increasing Limitations in Technology Working within the limitations of your technology is also very important. A lot of older MMORPG had very great limitations on their hands, that players never even knew about. In the days of Ultima Online, they could only have a limited amount of houses before the server couldn't handle them. So they limited the amount and made them expire. In the days of World of Warcraft, they added instanced player housing, which made it so the server only loaded the data when they needed it. In the case of Nin Online, we try to stay away from instanced content because it removes the feeling of being in a perpetual world, and also because its not in our engine at the moment, but even if it was - I would struggle deciding on whether or not to use it. Because the idea of having actual property in the game sounds a lot more fun than everyone being able to own an instance that nobody else will enter. Because items are stored server side to prevent cheating, we also have a limited number of items we can create - so we have to avoid adding items, equipment or cosmetics that nobody will use. Everything has a weight on our server resources. Every cosmetic added for a small group of players is one less important equipment like a Flak Jacket or Sword. As time goes on and we improve our backend technology, it will increasingly be important to stick to the core game philosophies for design. Maplestory famously started condensing the original world that everybody loved by deleting maps and making the world smaller to make way for new content. Which is another example of forgetting how important the original design and content for new players who haven't tried the game is. I’ve also realized that as monitor technology has increased, pixel density has increased, and it has in turn made Nin Online characters really tiny, and you see too much of the world at once. While this is temporarily helped with the “Zoom” functionality in our settings, eventually, I will have to combat this with some sort of more long term solution or the game will become so radically changed it no longer looks like what is supposed to originally look like. Here is a video talking where they talk about the limitations of the technology back in Ultima Online and how they pushed it. Conclusion If we consider the 3 factors about MMORPG development stated at the start of this developers log, it creates a philosophy that helps make sure that the MMORPG you're designing continues to grow in size but maintains what makes it fun in the first place. This is all just a scratching the surface of a very large market trend that I've noticed over the past decade since my days playing MMORPGs like Maplestory, Ragnarok Online, MU Online, World of Warcraft when I was a kid, playing private servers of these games, and playing modern MMORPGs. If you search YouTube, you will find a larger movement of players of classic MMORPG or new players anticipating Classic WoWs release. This is also to explain to the players who are willing to listen that as a designer with the freedom to make difficult choices for the benefit of the game, instead of just pleasing people, I am going to make these decisions that will piss people off a lot, but it’s going to be for the sake of the games longevity to the best of my knowledge. And even though sometimes it seems like common sense that we should buff this or nerf that, sometimes - you just have to trust that the people making the game knows what best in a broad picture. Sometimes the players are right, and I’ve had so much changes to the original design made because of player suggestions, as well as minor changes like balancing based on what players have suggested. But I still do have to consider a myriad of things before just copy pasting ideas for balance changes, and it’s not an easy job when balancing for the future and what’s to come and not just for short term pleasing. Thanks for taking your time to read this wall of text! Inb4 nerf tai

Global Weather System! Something I've been planning to do for a long time. It now randomly rains in the world across all maps, and sometimes it's a thunderstorm. (Experimental) Village Broadcasts only usable from Aviaries. Leaf Aviary Added Leaf Aviary Added to Leaf Map Reduced the opaqueness of rain and sandstorm to be less jarring on the eyes.

I write all of this while I'm on the public transport on my phone, so there's going to be errors here and there it's pretty all over the place. But thanks for reading!

I feel as though you had good intentions for this but to use an aviary takes too much time before we can catch the enemy. It’s not because of lazy ness but let’s say a missing cloaked through larvae and killed the low levels at tigers to raise their bounty, most low levels do not realize the changes we have and how to use them and this will leave us oblivious that there is a threat near. Also if they did manage to use the aviary, the amount of time it took to use it the missing may have already ran to tanzaku hospital to avoid death because we all know they aren’t just going to wait there. This also gives akatsuki ninjas more time to use their rings and escape. Same goes for sand, their aviary is below the village. By the time all the ninjas are killed in danger zones, the distance they’ll have to run to alert their villagers is the same as leaving sand or enough time to escape and hide in long desert for example.

Added more animation while using Sealed Box. Rocky Caves renamed to Cursed Cave. Rocky Cave (3F) renamed to Cursed Laboratory. Added Level 30 Weapon Master (STR) Jutsu - Crescent Moon Beheading Reworked Dance of the Crescent Moon Hit animation. Dance of the Crescent Moon AoE hit range decreased to match animation.

Dear Ninja, For the longest time, I've wanted fans to become a Sand-only weapon. However, due to obligations to keep it free for everyone to hold cosmetically from a competition that gave out pink fans in 2014/15, I've been holding back that decision. I think it's time for this important change to be made, and so as of sometime in February, we will make it so fans are only usable by Sand ninja. It is for the sake of the betterment of the game that I'm making this decision, although it may inconvenience some and cause many to rage. But keeping fans for Sand Ninja and Sand Missing Ninja, will help keep the villages unique and help us head towards the goal of each village being different. Regards, Ueda

This is just an idea and something I want to hear your thoughts on. What if each village has an aviary and in order to broadcast messages to the village you need to be in the aviary.

That's what it looks like it's boiling down to. Aviary is useless because any important information won't be able to be relayed quick enough. Like Midnight said, someone kills a lowbie as close as larva, by the time the process is done the missing is gone. Also, we still got restrictions on v-chat (i.e. 50 characters 2 minutes for non-ranked). Trading isn't even good enough because of the restrictions, plus we don't even got an auction house. Aviary by itself is flawed, it needs more content to supplement it if it's to be implemented at all. What keeps happening is we are releasing content in this game fragmented which is breaking the game. For example taking away fans without adding different weapons to balance it out. You need a balance, not to just take that one action. By just taking stuff away with nothing to compromise with you're hurting the community. And yes, I'm butt hurt about spending months grinding for blue fan to see me not being able to use it out of the blue. Ik it seems like a separate topic, but when it comes to updates to this game it's completely relevant. Proximity chat inc.

We're putting this feature on trial for awhile, feel free to feedback positive or negatively about it. @Harmony I kind of like the idea, will consider it if this becomes permanent.

We should be able to buy messenger hawk/toad so we can relate information if we're away from the village. Just a small addition you can add to the aviery would be nice if it came with a summoning animation aswell

The reality of the MMORPG genre is it fell prey to the rise of mobile games. Good portions of gaming fell when the industry found out you could make a ton more money by making your game way more accessible, then charge for every little thing in between. It's a sad reality to see, but I think there are people out there still making experiences both MMO and non-MMO worth while.

Medical Ninjas in the Naruto series are both some of our favorite characters and some of our most hated. On one end we have people hating on Sakura and Ino who's feats until the Great Ninja War seemed forced in there to give them some relevance, on the other hand you have Tsunade who everyone universally agrees is a bad ass because of her medical Ninjutsu feats. As I mentioned in the previous dev log. Not all Masteries are meant to be as good at PvP or PvE. Some Masteries trade these abilities greatly for utility. Some masteries trade long-term survivability for short term damage output. Nin Online's inspiration for what Medical Ninja should feel like comes from a bunch of different characters. Firstly, we have two sub-paths that we want players to balance between. Here's a list of characters that you should feel like as you go towards that path. Full support Medic - Rin Poison Attack Medic - Kabuto When you get combined Masteries, and advanced Masteries.. Full Support Medic (Advanced Medic /w CHK) - Tsunade level medical Ninjutsu Advanced Poison Ninjutsu (Advanced Medic /w INT) - Ibuse Medical and Taijutsu User (Medic + Taijutsu) - Tsunade In total this is 5 different modes of medics we want to balance for. There will be people who choose to take Medic + Water still, and it won't be that bad because you'd have limited amount of jutsu slots which you will fill up with not just Medic and Water jutsu, but also hidden jutsu, clan jutsu and summoning jutsu in the future. Full Support Medics are not supposed to feel as viable in combat as other ninja. Except when you use Chakra Scalpels. Essentially, you're supposed to feel like a one trick pony as a pure support medic, when it comes to damage output. You are the support of your team, and Chakra Scalpels should allow you to push out damage and defend yourself temporarily while your team is too preoccupied. So you are basically Rin. Poison Attack Medics are supposed to be less viable in combat than a typical class in terms of pure damage output, but relies on poisons to get an upper hand in extended fights, where you tire out the opponent. As of now, this and full support medics are a little far from its original design. Cursed Seals are artificial sage modes. It is when unnaturally implanted kinjutsu and senjutsu is granted to its user. I have a theory that it was originally intended for Sasuke to have gained what his affinity towards Hawks and a potentially scrapped Hawk sage mode to him early by orochimaru. Which explains why he gains Hawk-like features when he gained his Cursed Seal form (hawk eyes, wings and a beak like Mark on his face). This was probably scrapped in order for Jiraiya, Orochimaru and Tsunade to have the same Summons as Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura. All the Sound 4 have Summons and artificial sage modes where they gain marks, just like Naruto does when he enters sage mode. But as the game is inspired more by Naruto than Shippuden, this is what we're going for. Cursed Seals in Nin Online will be an optional addition instead of ordinary Summons and Sage Modes that will require you to leave your village and learn from an evil ninja. However, as this is very far off, and I know people love Cursed Seals and its a large part of the series, I include them as part of the attack medic's kit for now. But this is the full vision of what Cursed Seals will be eventually. Advanced Poison Ninja are based on Hanzo, Torune and some freaky Ninjutsu like Orochimaru. You will get deadlier poisons which do different things, slow your enemies, damage them, silence them etc. There were initially plans for poison immunities, but that has been scrapped because such easy hard counters are not fun. A medicine making system is planned for medical ninja to use ingredients to make pills which can then be sold or used by allies. In conclusion, while medical ninja are meant to be very different from what they currently are, and as time goes by, this will be what it becomes. In the meanwhile, I do want them to be as fun as possible and provide unique gameplay, like having cursed seals.

Please, don't remove PMs.. next step would be removing chat at all and then making it a singleplayer RPG. Taking RP too far..

As someone who always focused on playing mmorpg,s specifically,i can confirm many things you wrote about here,from personal experience. ,,Creating content and the importance of Social experiences in MMORP'' ,,Accessibility and Appeasing a Casual Playerbase Trend'' Especially those 2 things are huge problems these days.Players scream for more solo content,auction houses,instances,being able to play the whole game without help....and devs listen.This leads us directly to the,,casual playerbase trend''.A lot of people forgot how it feels to finally get that item that you tried to get for weeks,getting to max lvl for the first time after a long and tragic odyssey of grinding/questing,or finally having your set complete and cause chaos in BG,s or open world pvp encounters...or they simply never experienced those things in the first place. The,,traditional''gamer,in THIS context,barely exists anymore,we got to run from one game to another,because sooner or later,all of them have to adapt and become more casual friendly,add more and more content that is supposed to,,make life easier''for the playerbase but ends up taking away the last bit of social interaction the game had,and the same can be said about the games difficulty in general(wow dungeon finder and lvl boost and the option to buy gold legally,scrapped justice system for eso,purchasable weapons and armor without the need to contact a crafter first in mortal online,equalized gear for pvp in gw2 and now also some tera bg,s,no more CP bg,s for eso...).Everything has to be easy to get,easy to solve,easy to reach.Then players enjoy this illusion of pride,before they get bored and leave,or just hang out,,because their friends still play'',blaming the devs for making the game too easy,and their gear/achievements meaningless.Casuals are the new target audience for most companys these days,and while i dont have anything against casual players under normal circumstances,i just cant ignore the fact that,because of them,many games that i loved got butchered(or even shutdown)up to a point where they have been basically new games. In that sense,im glad youre aware of those issues and confident enough to do whats needed,not just whats wanted.In a mmo,your decisions,your achievements,your personality,your plans,everything should matter,every player is,like you already said before,,content''and thats a good thing.

Uchiha Madara and Obito used a fan though.... Madara was literally famous for wielding a fan in battle when he was alive.

Rogues do fine without Vchat anyways

It really should be sand wind, not sand in general. If we're out here changing to to make it more logical and fair, how it logical or fair that an earth/light from sand can continue to use a weapon not really meant for them, but a leaf earth/light can't. #StrWindOnly Edit: Lookit all these people suddenly yelling "remove knockback" now that they can't use it anymore. roflasdlasdlasgdg

I disagree, when you put a chat in this way where everyone in the village can see at any moment, this ends with any type of Rp , it's very annoying when someone in the low level, see you invading and everyone in village already know that you are there , if you are thinking in a way more real you would have to flee first and warn the rest. this change can create a lot of new roles in the game, an example would be guardians, that avoid to invaders or warn the village about the invasion.

I think the Aviary idea is solid. Village chat should never be used as some significant form of communication between villagers. Often times you will see village chat get filled with minor conversations that shouldn't really be there in the first place. I think with the change you could still accomplish trading, RP recruiting, etc. I think it will also add some spice to raiding because most times you can sit in a map and if you see someone pass by you just quickly mention it and everyone is on high alert. If you are required to actively participate to prep for an incoming raid it requires everyone from the highest to lowest to get involved. Kages could designate high ranking members to receive whispers in regards to raids or invaders. I think it's at least worth a try.

Yes! its so annoying when you head to enemy village for make missions but meet 10 lvl on the way and all village know about you.

I think it would be a great idea to try out, but only for a trial period, and then have it reverted if it is problematic.

The main issue a lot of people have with fan is not that Leaf can use it but the fact that an element mastery which is full of instant casts and god knows what can equip a fan and stop casts without having to use their CC jutsu to do so, they can also use the fan knockback to land their instant cast jutsu more easily. STR Fan is at least balanced by the fact it has a lot of selfstuns so the fan knockback and cast stopping isn't that much of an issue. Fan knockback/cast stopping should be limited to the fan mastery. Fan is missing a lvl 35 jutsu which could easily be made into a buff jutsu which makes your melee knockback/cast stop. The logic behind the jutsu would be that the user starts focusing more strength into their swings causing their melee attacks to start knocking back.

Should not stop at just making it Sand-only. But also make it Sand Wind only. There will be people with random masteries in sand such as Fire/Water or something like that with 20 str points just to use a Fan still.

Remove the knockback from the 20 str fans and boom easy fix.

Seems to directly go against the type of game you're trying to make. This isn't a story driven action game. It's a roleplaying game based on the realism of a ninja world I grasped. Saying, "You were born in the leaf village so you physically cant use this weapon." seems weird to me. (This coming from someone that this update wont effect lol) Edit: If you want diversity among villages it shouldn't come from items that anyone can pick up and learn how to use lmao. Maybe it should come from secret jutsu passed down by generations of families within the villages? Blu,

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.