Ueda

Dear Ninja, Manda's Lair only allows one team of up to 4 ninja to enter at once. All ninja must be level 30-40. Find a team with a good strategy and challenge Manda in the deepest corner of the Abandoned Lair, past all the mazes. Once you enter, you'll be greeted by Manda, who spits poison into the air and sends his spawn out at you in all directions. Manda has a 10% chance of dropping a new, rare sword or cosmetic. Fight amongst yourselves who keeps it! This has been something that I've been working on, on and off, for a very long time. It's the culmination of a bunch of very big features combined into one that has allowed for me to create this. I'll be talking about the features that have been added to the engine over the past year that has allowed for us to finally do our first team boss fight in a development log soon! But for now, enjoy! Regards, Rory

Added Ravaging Earth Spikes new hit animation.

Fixed exploit that allowed non-ranked ninja to enter Leaf village standby station. Fixed mapping bugs.

The Council Member Elections has ended! The new Leaf village council will be @Leevi Sasayaki @Atrane @Arashi They will discuss and come up with a candidate for Hokage as soon as possible. Thank you for participating @Fritzo!

Added Charm Item Icons Added Bleed Debuff Icons Added Slow Debuff Icons Added Charm Buff Icon

Sand Military Police Force & Leaf Military Police Force are now fully functional! Fixed overfilling dialogue messages with Kaito's Tool Shop.

Mmm you need to start writing in paragraphs. Destiny is different. They charge people lump sums of money to play the game. So it is in their best interest for the game to eventually go stale so they can release a sequel to rake in more money. Nin Online is free to play. Nobody needs to pay. If you want to join and play for free, that's totally fine you're not at a single disadvantage for doing so aside from occasional fashion contests. How we make money is by continually having new players join and buy cosmetics to look cool while they RP. If you think that people who have actual game development experience required to work on an online rpg are going to come to me and throw their time at a game which won't fit on their resume and won't benefit them in any way, then you're delusional. The game doesn't earn enough money to rationale one person working on it. It's a service provided to fans by fans of the Naruto series even if it's monetized and trying to stay afloat. It takes me months to train a developer to get basic things done, and it takes years for people to get good enough to sprite for the game. It also takes hours of free labor, which is not something most people who can make a game like this will do for free. I'm not into training developers for months for them to contribute a few hours of work and then leave. If they want to work on the game and they have actual skill, they are already in the team eg. Sezu, Seth, Masterant, Sefunmi. We're already so god damn lucky to have so many Naruto fans willing to contribute to the game in their free time. But time is money and I don't expect anything more from them. Coding doesn't work that way. Every system is intertwined in an online game, everything is networked, everything is way over the paygrade of an average script kiddie. The people you find on BYOND willing to code games are not going to get any shit done. Seth has been programming for what 10 years now and it's still hard to get things done when he's working on the game almost daily. If you think adding a fishing system is so pathetically easy, go do it yourself, go make an MMORPG with the amount of content and features as Nin Online and then try to code in an additional fishing system. People underestimate the difficulty of making a game, especially an online game. Everything you add is connected and every feature becomes exponentially harder to add because of things optimization and how connected everything line of code is. I could choose NOT to release any future content updates and it is really my own choice. Because I am a human being with my own life and career and everyone on my team, so when you say you're not trying to be rude but then shit on the amount of work it takes to make the game and the effort being put in, it's a very big insult. Kingsisle Entertainment behind Wizard101 is not a small company, they have a large team of full time employees. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/KingsIsle-Entertainment-Salaries-E246079.htm Pokemon is one of the most expensive game franchises in existence, and the studio behind their main games have 143 full time employees on payroll. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Freak If you're not into RP or the community driven aspects of Nin Online, then go play this https://naruto.oasgames.com/en/ I'm not competing with them for the speed at which I can add useless content. This is an RP game. Not going to bother responding to the rest of your long ass one paragraph post because it's already disrespectful and ignorant beyond belief and I don't think you understand anything about game development. Go find any other online game made by 2 people and volunteers earning little to nothing.

Well that's the amount of non-pvp content we have now. Never have I ever claimed that I'm trying to make a game that will keep people happy forever. People will come and go, there's nothing I can do to unnaturally retain players that way. The amount of content we can create is limited by our manpower, and that in turn is limited by the amount of money we can make from a game that isn't trying to milk people of their money and only sells optional cosmetic items. When there's more content, some people will come back, and then they will go again when it's over. Nin isn't ever going to reach a point where people who are here for the content are going to infinitely be pleased because it takes months for a campaign that lasts barely a day to be made. The reason why I still do it is because it enhances the limited experience I intend to create for each player there. People who will stay longer will be people who just want a community. Because the only dynamic content that can keep people entertained won't be made by me, it's by the community who create interesting RP scenarios which we already see happening.

If you're gonna avoid your ban, at least don't repeat mistakes or cause more trouble.. come on.

Registrations closed The voting will take place in-game in the coming week. It will span across a week and take place in the Hokage office!

Leaf village Council Elections Registration If you want to be a candidate for the council, please reply to this post with the account you want to register with. The account has to contain atleast 10,000 ryo and will be deducted as payment for registration. Must be a Leaf ninja of atleast Genin rank. The registration will end on 7th June 12PM EST. Do not attempt to register if you do not meet the requirements or you will be punished. Regards, Rory

June 2018 PromotionsLeaf VillageChunin: @Nitche Ryokaku @Jellal Kuraen @Kamakura Suwa Sand Village Chunin: @Ketsueki BlackKage @Ketsueki Akoosh @Deviax Adenium

Major Balance Change Decrease stat -> damage scaling by 30% across the board. Enemies/NPCs are also affected dealing less damage and having less HP. Free stat resets available from now until 30 Jun 2018! Cell Regeneration healing amount fixed, base healing at Rank 1 will actually be 90 as stated in the description instead of 165.

Fixed Saita saying Hokage instead of Kazekage in Academy Scrolls daily mission.

Oh god. You need to split your posts into paragraphs. I'll reply in point form. 1. It wasn't an exploit at all. It was the only viable way to play because it was the only way you could get to level 50 the quickest. Playing in any other way would be stupid because the game punishes you for not doing it by making you level slower. Which is the big point in my OP. 2. You contradict yourself when you say that that you don't want to be stuck at level 40 for weeks because missions suck, but at the same time acknowledge that the fun part of a good game isn't leveling up, it's playing the game itself. Which is something I heavily agree with. That's why missions are there to relieve the problem of it just being a grind to 50, by providing variety, which is all addressed in my OP. Your idea that you can only have fun in Nin Online when you're level 50 is exactly that, your own idea. Nin Online is not designed that way. PvP is designed to be fun at every level, if you're 40, you can PvP with your full kit without a second mastery with people at your own level, you're just not doing that. You want to be 50 and PvPing with people lower than you or people at 50 because you don't like being 40 and being killed by people at 50. But tell me a game where people like to die, no game is designed that way, most people wanting to be max level is a normal human thing. 3. The point of waging war is to cause factions to hate each other because the tension drives better RP. Having true peace between two villages when there is only two villages means there's nothing going on. What's the point in making multiple villages, multiple factions in a open world pvp game if there's no fighting. 4. Of course we want to create more things to do while you level up. The thing is - that has nothing to do with daily missions and this is a post about daily missions. The point of this article is to explain reasons why we limit daily missions and pace out the leveling. The game isn't designed for you to grind to 50 and I've said numerous times throughout the existence of the game that I want to spend time working on the features that aren't just PvP and missions. But that is just nothing to do with this topic so it's not in this article.

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

Nothing to do with you. Traps have been blocked around entrances for months. This wasn't a change today. This is exactly what this article addresses. Why we don't punish people for doing exactly what you said. We just discourage it. And the reason why traps aren't allowed at entrances is as addressed as well. " It is not fun to be surprised by traps when you walk into a door with no counter play possible." And it's also mentioned in my last post how when something is fixed, people will complain. "Solving one problem creates another."

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

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.

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).

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.

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!

Registration for Council Member elect is 1,000 ryo!

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