discussion Personal thoughts of the game.

[Hageshi]

Hey, it's been 2 years, 7 months and ~11 days since I first heard and downloaded Nin Online. So far it's been a wavy experience, filled with very long days of playing and plentiful breaks. But what can I say, I have made some great friends and learned A LOT about the online world in general, and that some people can be real jerks.

I just wanted to vent out here, you can read it or not if you don't want to. 

1. First Point that I wanna make, the development of the game;

I know how people feel about Ueda behind the scenes, but as much I have said stuff myself, I believe he's trying his best (most of the time).

Though criticism (yes I know it's a scary word around here) I want to make, I dislike how "known bugs" are being neglected, personal experience with that, I'm sure some bugs have been around for lengthy years, but no one knows why they haven't been dealt with. Not important? Can't be fixed? Well I surely hope this new update brings more utilities that allow those bugs to be dealt with. 

No content/bad content? I don't believe any of the fresh stuff released around this year is "bad content" and I have my hopes high up there for these new systems to bring way more and more exciting stuff. As much as of controversial this topic is.

     2. Second Point Game Masters;

As I have had an (one very short) experience as one, I can say I just admire everyone who can last months on that position. 

Lead GM, Erox, is a very odd person who can have a very short temper, very cool dude too. His humor is questionable, at best. Though he fits quite well in the position between devs and the casual player. I have had my good share of disliking some of his decisions to punish/not punish someone, but I'll be honest, he just follows the rules/Rory's word and I can only respect it.

Antar is probably one of the very few genuinely nice people around this community. I had my big doubts he'll handle the weight of the position, but he baffled me. I hope he keeps up his stay.

    3. Third Point Discord;

Holy flap, Discord PvP must be one of the most fun wastes of time I have seen anywhere. It's one of the most engaging game community discords I've been in. Feels like a chaotic community center for everyone to throw sale at each other and just be themselves, I honestly love it. Late night voice chats, Village vs Village after a huge fight, all of those are what keep me going engaged when I have a bad day in-game. Moderation has certainly spiked but that hasn't stopped the people from adapting and keep going strong. 

    4. Fourth Point the community itself;

Uh what can I say? ALL kinds of people, nice, bad, weird kinks, genuine trash cans? All of them, but to be honest having such a colorful player base is what makes it special, best of which is that it's a tight place and everyone eventually gets to socialize with each other. The group dynamic that's around is a fun part of it, organizations, crews, etc. How groups like Taka, TA and others can influence the political systems themselves is amazing.

    5. Fifth Point Villages;

Yes, I have been in every village, more than once. What can I say? It's way different than being free in Takumi. In a sense, for me, all villages are the same. Tight, secrecy, hierarchy, if you can last long enough you can get far, but if you want to speak yourself, well good luck. I don't have much else to say about them, yes most of the time they deserve the sale they get, but people just play the game.

    6. Sixth Point PvP/PvE

I myself am a true, pure grinder. I have dropped hundreds of thousands of Ryo worth of rare stuff. And I genuinely dislike the competitive PvP, but sometimes enjoy messing around with spars and tournaments, team/solo hunts and such. I acknowledge I am not the best at PvP mostly because I don't want to be phased by the daily trash talk. 

I believe there's way more stuff that can go into balancing of the PvP mechanics, I can see when something is fair and isn't, but I'm on Ueda's side when he says that some masteries are just meant for different situations and not for 1v1. 

Yes, the PING situations is bad but adapting to it isn't hard, many skilled EU players stand up to skilled NA players with better ping, nothing we the community can do though.

_____________________________________________________________________________

I don't know or have what else to say, feel free to expand on your own thoughts down below, I just thought I'd make this small "rant", you can say something about me or whatever. It's more of an attempt to open some discussion. 

    - Thanks for reading 

 

[Nagamushi]

11 minutes ago, Hageshi said:

 

    - Thanks for reading 

 

No problemo sir 

[SMPF treasury Heist]

Champ

[M1zxry]

 Yea I agree with all of your points Hageshi. I've only been on nin online for about a year and 2-3months and holy sale it's been wild. I admire all staff for working so hard to make sure this game runs and events are held to entertain the player base. This game played a major part in getting me through quarantine, the people and friends I met in this game, the spats discord pvp, the rivalries made quarantine ALOT more entertaining and kept me sane. (for the most part >_>)
 I just wanna see this game grow more and more. The community can act like a pack of wild animals but like you said it's cool to see everyone from different parts of the globe be themselves and interact.
My major complaint tho is that levelling starts to feel so tedious and repetitive at lvl40 so those 10lvls feel like 20.

[Balcoin]

Almost made me cry

 

love you Hageshi

[Hageshi]

2 minutes ago, M1zxry said:

My major complaint tho is that levelling starts to feel so tedious and repetitive at lvl40 so those 10lvls feel like 20.

Cursed be that leveling. Though logging in daily for a couple of hours, getting engaged with the people around you is the best way to level if it takes a while.

[Shinigami]

Wholesome

[Ueda]

Fair analysis. I can't say that I'm always working hard, but I have to say that when I'm not taking a break to play a new game release like Cyberpunk in November last year (that was my last break longer than a couple of days), I'm usually working 8-18 hour days. A lot of what I've been doing is also invisible to the player base, but I've been actively writing documentation about all the work I do for Nin Online, and training material for people to take over work I do.

With regards to bugs, we have a lot of bugs that are known. Some are really obscure. Some are hard to replicate, others are hard to fix. 

We're constantly fixing bugs, and we definitely have a lot less bugs now than a year ago, and a year before that and I think I have a very good grasp on what bugs are most important at any point of time. A lot of the bugs that affect individuals on a very personal level like Slugs not healing, don't take precedence over bugs that completely make some individuals unable to play at all or bugs that are en masse affecting everyone.

Here's some bugs squished in the last update and why they were important

• Replaced client fonts.
  -This was done because Brazil server needed a font that could display latin characters, it affected an entire server of hundreds of players daily not being able to speak in the language they do.
• Improved Map Loading times by improving process and using better compression method.
  -Some players, primarily the ones who with slower connections, were experiencing very long map load times and would have a hard time playing the game on the new client, and possibly quit knowing that this was the only option since we deprecated the old client.
• Fixed jerky movement present on the Inochi client by rewriting movement client-side to use Linear Interpolation and time instead of pixel-by-pixel movement.
  -Affected everyone across the board, we received complaints about this every day the client was deprecated on the brazil server. So we wanted to fix this asap.
• Fixed Blurry Textures after Zooming Bug
  -Easy to fix, a few lines of code, but also one of the most common complaints about the new client.
• Possibly fixed the Client bug known as "After Images"
  -Bug that's existed since perhaps 2016-ish, and we finally got around to fixing while rewriting other code we were working on.
• Fixed some issues causing the new client to not work on some computers, related to outdated libraries and rare crashes, based on player crash reports.
  -Crashes are always important because they are the most frustrating kind of bug. Not even being able to play is even worse.
• Fixed a bug where Jutsu with cooldowns less then 1 second wouldn't be correctly processed
  -A very low level bug that was causing inconsistency and unresponsiveness when it comes to combat.
• Fix to Slow Cast Jutsu making walking move players backwards
  -Another long standing bug since introducing slow-cast, finally we have such little major issues that we can focus on stuff like this. Been reported for years.
• Fixed an exploitable bug where two trades could be opened at once
  -This was game breaking because it could be exploited to trick people into trading you items.
• Fixed a lot of issues where the Client would disconnect from the server unexpectedly.
  -Similar to crashing, randomly disconnecting is bad.
• Fixed an issue with resizing your client making the cursor invisible on the title bar of the game.
  -This was important for the temporary corps menu.

A lot of these were chosen to be focused on at this very moment because they were integral to deprecating the old client smoothly, while others have been long standing issues people have experienced.

We don't ignore bugs because we want to, but we definitely have a back log. We just have so many that what seems important to select players, we don't have the liberty of time to focus on. A lot of bugs were very hard to debug in Visual Basic 6. A lot of bugs were troublesome to fix twice with two clients to handle, so we were only fixing it on the new client. For example, pipe bubbles only coming out every alternate hit was a long standing bug, but we could only fix it on the new client. Definitely being in C# .NET now helps a lot as we finally have proper debugging tools.

[Hageshi]

Thanks Rory for coming around and replying, I saw the log as soon as you wrote it down in Patch Notes and as you may have seen my Discord DM I'm really happy about all those bug fixes.

As I said I have my hopes really high for all the new things you have in store with the new C#  

And about those work hours... hope you have a great holiday season break XD