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  1. - Suggestion to improve the global commerce of nin online. Well, as we all know, the online Nin trading system only focuses on farming and publishing your items within the game through chat and / or discord to reach a few people from other villages, but how about making it more optimal? as it matches. I propose to create a global trade npc with contact with all the villages that each player has accessibility to and publish their items with the NPC and everyone from different villages can see what you sell by having a complete tab of all the players selling their items to different prices and you have to choose a price to your liking when selling the item the system will charge you a tax after 1k onwards of 2% if you have gold 1% when your item is sold it will charge you the tax but as long as you want to remove the item from the store you will be refunded the money of the tax collected. - What will happen to the item and the money when it is purchased? Answer = The item will be transferred to the player who bought the item and the money has two options which are: 1. The money will be transferred directly to the player and a message will appear in the chat when you log to your account then it will say for example: "Your bonesword has been sold for+300000 ryo" and this ryo you can go to claim it at the merchant npc. 2. The above but instead of going to claim the Ryo with the npc that the Ryo appears directly in your inventory. - How does the tax system work and what would happen to the items when you put them in the npc store? That the NPC charge you a small tax that goes to 2%, for example, you go to the NPC and put your item in the store, the merchant will put a 2% fee, for example, you put your item at 300,000 ryos, they will charge you a 2% tax. Therefore, they will take away 6000 ryos in case the item is sold, which would be if they are 300,000, it would be 294,000 the final money. 1. Advantages if you're gold: The NPC will charge you only 1% tax The items when you deliver them to the NPC this will save it as a kind of bank but it is not a bank because after a certain time if the item is not purchased the merchant will return it to you and it will appear in your inventory again. 2. Advantages. I would encourage rp at the system level as this would help to make trade alliances as if it were a merchants guild that does not support any single village that concentrates on doing its business work for its own enrichment. 3. Eliminate 90% or 95% of the NinGeneral trade channel 4. That people can set the price they want and that others buy it under their own responsibility, thus bringing an economy of supply and demand. - Functional suggestion: To further strengthen the RP in the villages, the kage have the option of removing or not the npc from their village to cut commercial alliances: in the case that the villages do not want businesses in their village, the npc will have its predetermined place '' tanzaku ' 'You can also go to enemy villages that if they have said npc and conduct your business. - Here are some fan art of how the trading system with interface and npc would be implemented in the game. (By : LP20 the sexiest) - NPC in tanzaku (area where the npc will always be) - What the trading system would look like in the game: - A closer look at the trading system: - What would the npc look like in the villages: Leaf Village: Mist Village: Sand Village: Suggestion idea: @Inara Artwork art: @Lp20 Concept ideas: @Donatello Johnson@Kuhou@Kodigo@Butterfly@Krait@Ryutekzu@Prince Cabo (Please support this suggestion.)
    83 points
  2. Good morning to all ninonline. I would like to put this post to ask that an organization be put in missing to be able to play in conditions. We have been about 1 month since it was removed, we do not know what to do, we are a very large organization of approximately 34 - 37 members of which more than 20 players are active daily. We are only looking for an organization to be able to play all together, you cannot imagine how complicated it has been to play this month for us, we have had to emigrate to the villages of which x players have gone to each village waiting for the organizations to arrive one day. . We only ask for an organization as if it is put in one of the houses that we have bought, we do not care, we just want to play together. I am going to leave you some images and videos of who we are. here I leave a video of what Diablo is, what represents us here i let some photos to us: This photo was from a few days ago we are many more but right now for not having org they are playing in the other villages until we have it: with only 4 members we were able to get to the mizukage office : this was from when we started together: we even made a name on the BR server : today we fight leaf this is the result: This organization comes from the Hispanic community although lately we have been letting in anyone we know is trustworthy. We are an organization that grows every day and I believe that we would have to have an organization in order not to lose what we have built with effort. please let us play together! I beg you! @Ueda@Erox
    57 points
  3. After listening to @Ueda and @Serias talk about the vision of the game and the amount of effort that went into implementing the Hidden Mist Village and the Hidden Sand Village me and my friend @SpellWiz started brainstorming ideas and a village layout for the Hidden Cloud Village. This is what we came up with, because Rory and Serias appreicate any playermade content that could contribute to future development and success of NinOnline Basic line-art of cloud village layout I imagine use of flicker pads and bridges to traverse the village Exclusive Passive: Body Flicker range is increased by 2 tiles. Decently balanced mastery. Similar to Sand's perfect cloak. Due to the Cloud Village's structure, it's ninja have adapted to traverse the large gaps. Exclusive Combo Mastery: Laser [Water / Lightning] Ninja from the Cloud Village have passed down techniques that utilize Storm release to create focused lasers. Exclusive Alternate Mastery: Cloud-style Kenjutsu [Weapon Master] Agility-locked sword(s) with agility-based weapon master skills. Can use strength-based weapon master skills with the cloud-locked swords, and vice versa. Agility and strength-based weapon master skills share respective cooldowns. Any cloud-locked swords have lower base-damage than current swords, but higher attack speed. Level 10: Cloud-style Backlash Slash Free-aim-based skill. Charge and perform an upwards slash, interrupting casting jutsu on-hit. 1-2 tiles directly in-front of the user and 2-1 second standing-running cast-time based on level. Level 15: Cloud-style Reverse Beheading Free-aim-based skill. Spin instantly, dealing damage to all enemies within 1 tile. 1s - Instant cast-time based on level, 1 tile radius in all directions. Level 20: Cloud-style Riposte Free-aim-based skill. Users swiftly lunge forward creating an extended range of up to 3 tiles. 3-2 second running cast-time based on level. Level 25: Cloud-style Afterimage Strike Target-based skill. After seemingly splitting into 3 from the intense speed, users instantly move in-front of and attack their target up to 3 times instantly. 2-1 second running cast-time and 3-7 tile range based on level. The user briefly appears surrounding the target on all sides except directly behind them, and any spots unavailable reduce the amount of hits. Level 30: Cloud-style Deception Beheading Substitution-based skill. The user feigns Substitution Technique, preparing to counter. Before receiving an attack, they reappear right in-front of the attacker and launch a counterattack. Level 35: Cloud-style Crescent Moon Target-based skill. Makes the user instantly move in-front of their target and widely slash, creating a large crescent shape hitting all enemies within 2 tiles on all sides of the user, except directly behind. 2-1 second run-cast and 2-4 tile range based on level. Exclusive Summons: Drill Bird Walk/Flicker. Lunges forward to attack head-on with it's beak, creating an extended range. (2-6 tile range based on level) Not as ugly or huge as Pain's monster. Baku Stationary/Target-facing. Pulls in all enemies in a cone-shaped radius. (3-7 tile furthest-point range and 1-2 tile knockback towards summon based on level) Not as huge as Danzo's monster. Or a simpler elephant. Exclusive Organization: Kinkaku Force 5 Members. Aimed to be a heavy team-play based squad. Bashōsen (Fan): Weapon-slot item with jutsu-on-basic. Random large-scale element-based attack is released on auto-attack. High damage, as well as effects based on element. Cost 100 chakra per-cast. Gives 25 intellect. Kohaku no Jōhei (Pot): Weapon-slot item with jutsu-on-basic. On use, pulls target towards snared user. (Think 1 tile knockback towards the user, 2 tiles if target is below 50%) Consumes 100 chakra per-second. If a target is touching the user, while below 20% health, they are killed and instantly sent to their hospital and counted as a kill for the pot's user. Gives 25 fortitude. The next three are a testament to the "team-play" design of the organization Kōkinjō (Rope): Weapon-slot item with jutsu-on-basic. Upon the user successfully landing an auto attack on a target without "Word Soul Leak", "Word Soul Extract", "Word Soul Seal", nor "Word Soul Sentence" debuffs, 100 chakra is consumed and the target receives the "Word Soul Leak" debuff for 30 seconds. Gives 25 agility. Shichiseiken (Sword): Weapon-slot item with jutsu-on-basic. Upon the user successfully landing an auto attack on a target with "Word Soul Leak", 100 chakra is consumed, the target's "Word Soul Leak" is removed and they receive the "Word Soul Extract" debuff for 30 seconds. A linked, targetable and invincible, "Word Soul" mob is spawned at the location for the debuff's duration. Gives 25 strength. Benihisago (Gourd): Weapon-slot item with jutsu-on-basic. Only with a "Word Soul" mob as a target, on use the user pulls the target towards themselves. (Think 2 tile knockback towards the user) If the target touches the user, it is unspawned and whomever it is linked to has "Word Soul Leak" removed and receives the "Word Soul Seal" debuff for 30 seconds. After "Word Soul Seal's" duration you receive "Word Soul Sentence" for 30 seconds, during which you are pulled toward the gourd's user. (Think 2 tile knockback towards the user, 3 tiles if target is below 50%) Anyone touching the gourd's user while under the effects of "Word Soul Sentence" are killed and instantly sent to their hospital and counted as a kill for the gourd's user. Consumes 50 chakra per-second while pulling anyone. Insignificant chakra results in the inability to pull "Word Soul" mobs, as well as no one with "Word Soul Sentence" being pulled in. Those affected by "Word Soul Sentence" are only pulled while the gourd is equipped. Gives 25 chakra. Cloud Village is years-away content, and I expect literally nothing to come of this post besides simple chatting. For most things I have given example cast-times, ranges, etc. but more balancing would be required for any actual implementation. The organization items may sound a bit OP or over-tuned, but compared to puppets/ssm I would defend the suggestions. Specifically, the 3-man combo items would require 100 chakra each and 30 seconds to execute 1 person, which a 3-man squad should be able to do easier than using these items. The theory is 3-man comboing the healers and killing everyone else. Also, the Gourd user would be a target the entire time to stop the effects of "Word Soul Sentence." There's also the village layout; according to the devblogs, round buildings are especially tough...that's the entire village. Flicker pads is a personal preference, as I feel that it would be cool to traverse the village that way. Based off the basic line-drawings, a pure conversion to pixel-art and mapping wouldn't be possible, but the ideas are there.
    48 points
  4. Dear Ninja, It's been months since the last development log as usual. Since the game is already released, often times it makes more sense to just release things rather than spend time explaining what we will release or have released. The content speaks for itself! Since today has been a rather productive day already, I wanted to take some time off from patching the game to talk about the current plans for Advanced Masteries and the content on it's way. We have a lot planned and here's a short roadmap (with no ETAs). Planned Updates with no ETAs 12 Guardians Ninja for Leaf village This is the Leaf equivalent of 7 Swordsmen of the Mist and the Puppets Brigade for Sand. 12 Guardians will wear a sash that will increase their stats while worn. Finishing the remaining 3 Clan Outfits! Amazingly, thanks to the contribution of our artists and players who have mostly commissioned other artists to do custom clothings for their clans, we've completed 12 out of 15 of our clan's looks. Arbitrary Level Cap Increase from 50 -> 60 The level cap will first increase from 50 to 60, with some caveats. There will be no new content released along with this, and nobody is expected to grind this out. There will be a level 50 quest line coming in the next round of updates that may take awhile. Here's where things get a bit interesting. From level 2-50 you gain 5 stat points per level, however, once you past level 50, you gain 4 points per level. Once you past level 60, you gain 3 points per level. This is a complete explanation.. 2-50 - 5 points per level 51-60 - 4 points per level 61-70 - 3 points per level 71-80 - 2 points per level 81-90 - 1 point per level 91-100 - no points This may sound confusing, because why is it that it's becoming less rewarding to level past 50? This is to balance PvP at a mid-level rather than all the way at the end game. Or simply put, the stats rewards is purely based on this philosophy: "A lower level player should stand a chance against a high level player" Or in simpler terms "A level 50 should be able to fight a level 100 without feeling it impossible, a level 70 should have a fighting chance against a level 100 and a level 80 should find it very easy to outplay a level 100." Or in simpler terms "Gai Sensei should have a chance to defeat Madara" Or "Naruto should be able to fight Zabuza" The reason why I've decided to raise the level cap arbitrarily is because of this progression plan: 1-9: Academy Student Phase 10: 1st Mastery 30: Summon / Cursed Seal 35: Last Jutsu of 1st Mastery 50: 2nd Mastery 61: 1st Advanced Jutsu 75: Last Advanced Jutsu 90: "Max Level" So if at level 10, you pick Water Mastery, between level 10-35 you learn all your Water Jutsu. Between 35-50, if your time as a fully complete Water Ninja. But the moment you pick your 2nd Mastery at level 50, you don't have any time at all to learn Jutsu, instead you can have all the jutsu of your second mastery immediately. So if you learn Earth Mastery at level 50, and there isn't a buffer period from 50-60, there will essentially be no time between you going from Level 49 Water Ninja to Level 50 Water, Earth, Wood Ninja. So these levels are still fine to raise before adding Advanced Masteries. Land of Iron The Land of Iron will initially be rolled out as an extension of the game's world, with grindable enemies. But will not feature much else. Land of Iron Mission Arc The missions for this land of Iron will come after the place actually opens as purely a grind spot. Along with this, will come new drops, new clothings and perhaps new mini-games. Conclusion The purpose of this post was mainly to explain the coming increase in level cap and why Advanced Masteries / Combined Masteries will be absent in this level cap increase. None of these updates have an ETA on them, so they can come anytime between Soon™ and 2026. Somewhere inbetween may be the new Server revamp, Advanced Masteries, Combined Masteries. But I hope everyone enjoys today's updates! Regards, Ueda
    45 points
  5. Hayashi Attire Concept By: Yousei Reiketsu *Edited December 19, 2020* I was playing around with some concepts lately, After seeing a lot of the clans attires recently being imported into the servers I was inspired to attempt to make something neat of my own. The concept above derives from many vast inspirations. In this post Ill be breaking down each piece while providing additional backgrounds upon what slots are these concepts intended to fill, a brief description of them, as well as a little bit f background upon the process in which how these pieces came to be. Hope you enjoy them. Attire Components
    45 points
  6. Background: A man that got Abandoned by God since the Start. My name is Tormenta; adoptive son of @Hideo Hozuki, my biological parents fell in Battle, I never met them, they weren't the best humans either, my biological mother was a woman that was doing human-traffic, my biological father in the other hand was a schizophrenic that just wanted to open humans to "Study how their organs works" (Even though everyone knows it), the life with my stepdad Hideo was really harsh, on my childhood I was considered as a rogue ninja already since I was living with Mr Hideo, then I started to develop some sort of hate for the village that gave me the back. My childhood was really a surviving task everyday compared to other childs on the world; my whole day was doing hard jobs that forced me to get mature quickly, had to earn that bread everyday and Mr. Hideo was getting sick already, so, in my despair to help the man that gave me a place to call "Home", I started working as a thug for the big organisations that rules the underwold like Yakuza. With my good body, trained with the hard jobs and polished with the hard life, I started doing the dirty work, had an exepcional affinity fighting with the fists, made my way through using basic Taijutsu for quite some years, it helped me out to pay my stepfather's medical bills and for the very first time, eat real food. Then, the day that changed everything happened, the day I lost it all and then got something in return. Mr. Hideo passed away getting ambushed by the enemy faction's thugs, as I saw his body slamming the floor with a huge cut in his chest, I felt all the rest of my life falling apart with him. The man that raised me, the man I could call father, passed away in an horrible way, and he said the same thing He always used to say when I started in the criminal world life, "The one that kills with iron, dies by iron". He told me always to leave that kind of lifestyle and be a man of good, that whatever comes easy leaves easy, learned that the hard way. A new beginning. I left the criminal lifestyle, went to the Leaf to re-join as a former Ninja, kept following the way of the fist and trained the art of Gentle Fist; a style that goes all agaisn't my old style, one that is made to protect. Went to the medical school and studied the arts of Chakra infusion to heal others, in the Memory of Mr. Hideo. Started my own fishing business to earn money in a honest way. (Go and Like it ) Started guiding the new generations on the straight way, giving advices based on my past experiences, so they wouldn't do the same mistakes I did as a young one. Made my way back to my old town that saw me grow, now with a clearer view of the world, now with more experience about how everything works, now with more refined arts made to help, not to murder, now with a clear purpose; be the wise leader that the town needs.
    37 points
  7. Considering the danger zones as their own content (just as RP and Events would be considered a content category), it feels like there has been some neglect to what the zone offers, which can be seen in the recent decline of activity, specifically varied activity in the danger zones. By design, the danger zone accounts for all different forms of PvP, however as the game has evolved and the players' understanding with it, it feels like there is only one way to play inside these zones effectively, which at the moment is to bring as many numbers as possible (or not go out at all if you don't need to) and camp map swaps (which is by far the most effective strategy for winning fights). Personally I've played Nin for ~8 months actively, and during that time, played all kinds of content in the DZ (Solo hunting buffed/unbuffed, outnumbered fights, village raids, PvE, and missions to name a few). The problem: Gameplay is frustrating as it rewards clumped high numbers and mapswap camping, leaving other forms of DZ content neglected Current danger zones have very little incentive (I want to emphasise this, as it is different from the point below and will expand on it later) to go into There is no punishment or sense or urgency to push danger zones (players can effectively wait as long as they like before heading out) I will expand on each of these points, and offer a glossary of suggestions. Please note, this is not a criticism of dangers zones, it is more of a forum to suggest improvements to bring life to them. Please keep discussions on topic and take an objective viewpoint rather than a personal one so we can get points across Problem 1: High numbers (Clumped) + Mapswap camping Part 1: High numbers (Clumped) High numbers on their own are not an issue, infact they bring a more interesting outlook on the game. The problem is when large numbers are clumped. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is the 60 second death timer. The timer feels way too long considering the DZ maps are so small. A player can run from Dark spiders to South Tigers (a very significant coverage of the whole danger zone) in under 60 seconds. This becomes even more of a problem while fighting groups as once you are outnumbered, it does not matter how many people you kill as your kills can be revived with relative ease. Focusing medics is a viable strategy, however the punishment for running high medics in groups has no drawback since all groups are encouraged to have as many numbers as possible. Proposed solution: Reduce respawn timer in Danger zones from 60 seconds to 30 seconds. Safezone timers can stay 60 seconds. Part 2: Mapswap camping Mapswap camping is by far the most efficient strategy to kill any sized groups. For clarity, mapswap camping is when you are waiting on the edge of a narrow map, ready to unload all your jutsus when the enemy swaps into the map. The reason this works is because the enemy coming in cannot react while they swap in and many jutsus have no AoE limit. This inherently is not a problem, as it means with proper flanking, you can also corner the people camping the mapswap, if pushed from the other side, as shown below: The problem develops when you consider how dangers zones are layed out - there is a presence of corridors. A corridor is a map where once you have passed it, you cannot get back into any map above or below it until you pass it again. These are absolutely terrible for the danger zones and what facilitate mapswap camping as a viable strategy. The diagram below shows how corridors work: Each square represents a map in the danger zone. The red squares indicate corridors, and as shown, once you are holding one of these corridors, you cannot be flanked, and can effectively mapswap camp indefinitely, which leads to frustration and a stalemate from both sides. Proposed solution: Remove all corridors from DZ with the introduction of new maps. This would not only allow for outplay opportunity with big factions flanking one another, it would also allow for smaller hunting parties to use creative use of maps to evade opponents and bigger groups. IMO this is the single biggest change DZ's currently NEED. The diagram below shows an example of how new maps can be introduced to remove corridors: The full list of narrow corridors (these are the ones especially viable to be camped): Tanzaku Valley Leaf Tigers Mini Bottom CF Dark bridge Mist Bears 3 Mist Bears 4 Mist Foxes Mist Dragonflies Bears 2 Bandit Caves Bounty House (mainland) KB North Coyotes South Coyotes Takumi Tigers Takumi danger zone Problem 2: Current danger zones have very little incentive to go into Outside of missions (which become basically irrelevant once a player hits max level), bounty and the pure enjoyment for fighting, there is no incentive for the average player to enter a danger zone. This one I think can be fixed relatively quickly by offering more ryo incentives of going into danger zones without the requirement of players being in there. Proposed solution 1: @Ichika has already made a great post about this, I will link it here Proposed solution 2: Introduce a new mob map (suggestion would be the map left of snow wolves, but any new map equidistant from villages can suffice) where a relatively easy mob to kill (compare difficulty to between bears and hosts level). This mob drops an item exclusively used to sell to the shop for ryo (between 20-40 ryo) and commonly drops it (same way as hosts drop DNA). This would encourage players to actively leave the safezones to get consistent ryo rewards, at a higher risk - I use the word consistent because drops like DNA are not consistent, they must be sold to another player to make money. Problem 3: There is no punishment or sense or urgency to push danger zones (players can effectively wait as long as they like before heading out) There is no urgency at all to push danger zones. Compare this with for example raid points located at GD entrances, there is a sense of urgency where you must push, or lose something as a village. This applies to absolutely nothing inside the DZ (except gaining ground so they are not mapswap camped by another village :rofl:). Proposed solution: Honestly, I'm not sure. I would suggest something like raidpoints, but I'd like the community help on this suggestion. Conclusion The points mentioned above are in order of priority. I want to emphasise that these changes are very important to keep danger zones as enjoyable content. Many players enjoy nin specifically for content in danger zones and it's pretty much a part of every players gameplay. I hope you can give feedback on this forum post objectively and that relevant people like Rory and Erox as well as the other admin team not only see this, but give feedback on their thoughts about this, as well as the rest of the community. This post took a lot of effort to create, so please give me the same respect by keeping discussions on topic.
    37 points
  8. Dear Ninja, Embark on a journey to the northern section of the Land of Iron, where you will discover the capital of the land, Iron City. Ruled by a faction of Samurai that are oppressing the people, you will need to earn the trust of a group of rebels barricading the exit of the city and planning their attack! We're starting off 2021 with a new location, the Land of Iron. Arriving in the Nin Online world on 9 January 2021, Saturday. Expect the new location to come with a level 50-60 story arc, like the Land of Toads arc, that includes over a dozen new Quests, as well as new items, weapons, enemies, bosses and more! Hope you guys enjoy it! Regards, Ueda
    37 points
  9. Hello Ninja! My name is Wolf, I'm the new Developer working on Nin, My jobs currently consists of remaking the software powering Nin Online and then further upgrading it! Some of you may already know me, and may have even played on the new server I made.. The new test server which as I write this is online and fully playable, Is a completely rewritten server built with modern development tools. I wont go deep into the technical details about this now, But basically both performance and stability will hopefully be greatly improved, but most importantly it'll break us free from limitations placed on us by the old engine which is extremely dated. We plan to replace the server application as soon as we can. However an exact date is unknown as of now, as we have a few more issues to work out. This upgrade will not wipe any existing data, don't worry! The plan is to install this new server without affecting the game in any way besides improved performance initially, and then further improve it from there. If that's all old news to you, that the server is being remade, read on! This development log is actually not just about the server. We're also going to be previewing the new client in development using the Unity Engine! The new client is still heavily in development, but already has improvements from the current one. Some Clips: 7c40cfc8ecc51bd89b2bbb13b6413e3a.mp4 122c47da0c2fb868afbd46bb9a678085.mp4 122c47da0c2fb868afbd46bb9a678085.mp4 Some Pictures: Looking at these images and videos you may think its just a weird stripped down version of Nin Online, and that's kind of what it is at the moment. It has a long way to go, But this new client already includes some things the old client could never do, No spoilers But the biggest thing we've noted, is performance! This client idles on around 300+ fps on my machine in Leaf Village, to give you an idea just how much better that is, the old client runs at 40-50 fps on my machine. That being said, not everything is loaded at the moment. So whats done so far? It may look simple enough, display some graphics, make a character walk around, but this isn't what the client is doing.. The client can connect to the server, Load all the server data, see Maps, walk around, attack, See other players, see NPC's, fight NPC's, see animations and effects, and some other minor things. There's still a lot that isn't implemented such as NPC Dialogues, Projectiles, Chat, Inventory, Hotbar, Targetting, Jutsu and all the menus just to name a few. So don't expect this client to replace yours any time soon. Stay tuned for more updates coming soon! Regards, Wolf
    33 points
  10. Dear Ninja, The Problem In Mid-2019, when attempting to run a Inter-village Joint Chunin Exam, and subsequently a War Event, we found ourselves in a situation where we could not continue those events due to the server crashing because of the increased load on the server software/application. As some of you might know, Nin Online was built on top of an engine that was built in the 90s, using a programming language that is very outdated, Visual Basic 6 (VB6). Not for no reason, in 2013, this engine was the only viable choice to build a game like Nin Online available open source. The engine that Nin Online was built on was a fork of Mirage Source called Eclipse Engine, which was built by @Robin. From that point on, I knew that the growth of the player base would be unsustainable on our current VB6 server software, and started moving all of our resources into resolving this issue as a priority. The Conversion Project History It's been a long journey to get here, but we're finally in the final stages of using our new server software rewritten in a modern programming language. This is not the end of the project to enhance the server, infact, it's a new beginning. This long project has seen multiple attempts, the earliest works on it began in late 2018. But with the addition of a new member to our team, @TheWolf who has been working with us since February this year, we've managed to get it to a point we think it is capable of replacing our old server software completely. The project consisted of many stages, and we have a lot of people to thank for their contributions. Including @Seth for leading the charge for the project in the majority of 2019. At that stage, we were trying to convert the server from VB6 to VB.NET, but it ran into a lot of issues. Issues that we learned from and restarted in February 2020, with mainly Wolf and myself working to get it converted from VB6 to C# this time round. Seth also jumped in a couple of times to lend a hand in this new version, being more familiar with the Authentication Server's code base than anyone else. We also got a lot of advice and help from @Robin whom helped us each time the project ran into a dead end. As well as @Suirad for creating a whole application to convert our VB6 binary data into readable JSONs which we then converted to C# binaries format. The Benefits of this Project Immediately, we expect everyone to feel noticeable improvement to the game, less hanging, more smooth combat. But the real reason we needed to move is that VB6 was simply too limited in features, and it's outdated IDE made it hard for us to debug problems like the crashes that were happening with too many players online while hosting events, as it gave us little information to work with. Thanks to this new server software built in Visual Studio/C# we can use state of the art tools to solve these issues as well as continue to optimize the performance to scale better. On top of all of that, there was always the fear that eventually Windows would stop supporting Visual Basic 6 runtime although highly unlikely in the near term, it will down the line happen. So moving to a modern code base means we are future proof. This is just the start.. We are going to continue to optimize the server in radical ways which will bring about better performance! With this fancy new server, it'll be easier than ever to add more on top of it, including new features and revamping old ones. During the time which the server has been the main focus, I've also been working on content updates for when the New Server Software is finally operational, so expect some content updates soon! Wolf is also in the midst of rewriting the Game Client in Unity C# which will then mean that Nin Online will be fully modernized! TL;DR New server software is up now, it was a lot of work, this means Nin is more than 66.6% modernized now. only our client remains. That's in the works. Content updates coming soon. Regards, Ueda
    33 points
  11. February 2020 PromotionsLeaf Village Jonin: @Hawt Chunin: @Ichika @Hadashah @Dangan Sand Village Jonin: @Mana @Booty Gang Pinku Chunin: @Beat @Small @Peperoni Johnson Specialized Jonin: @Ayo for exemplary Medical Ninjutsu usage Mist Village Jonin: @Carolinne @Adult Sasuke Chunin: @Leiting @Amatizu @ExiledKyoho @Shiv
    31 points
  12. Village Special Abilities! Born and raised in the Leaf village, Leaf Ninja all have a Will of Fire, an undying determination to keep on fighting. When you faint, within the first 10 seconds of fainting, there is a 5% chance that you will get back up to fight again! Being a small village, the Sand village trains it's ninja to be adept in stealth over pure strength. All Sand Ninja are Born Assassins that are able to use Cloak of Invisibility perfectly. They can however, still be dispelled by someone with a high chakra ability - Sensory Technique. Trained by their element, the Mist village starts all of it's academy students fighting on top of water filled arenas where they learn to charge and maintain their chakra while standing on water.
    30 points
  13. What I am recommending is a alternative way to complete "player kill" missions such as WW / CBK in the form of a new Mob. This mob spawns in a dz near each of the villages, this mob auto attacks enemies who are not from that village, has mid tier difficulty (no insane dmg like the village bots), is considered a ww / cbk kill and spawns every 30 minutes. The Pro's: * An alternative way to do Waging War / Cold Blooded Killer missions when dz's are inactive. * Demotivates just killing alts as simply going to said map is a confirmed kill * Promotes entering danger zones even if you're not in a group, which in itself promotes less army's to enter danger zones as they're more likely to run into small / solo players trying to do ww / cbk *offers protection to lowbies farming in those areas The Con's: * Would very minimally dis-incentivize killing actual players, this would be very minimal though as the 30 minute timer still acts as a buffer to make killing real players more rewarding and the need to come near enemy villages would most likely still mean a net positive on PvP encounters. Thanks for reading.
    29 points
  14. Hey there! Im Fuze, some people know me from my youtube videos or maybe some of the work ive done for the game! Today i had some free time and tried this little concept out! Item rarities and different types of drops! How will this work? The base idea around this new mechanic would be that as you are grinding for these rare drops there would be a chance for the item to drop a different colored variant, pretty much the way @Antartalked about the shiny drops ! The items will have the same drop chance as the normal item and also no stat changes but as you move up to the prettier ones the drop percentage may decrease! Possible example Player A: (farms the bandit bosses for a while and manages to drop the black and white double arm bandages! Player A then goes on to sell the item for 100.000 ryo! (just an example) Later on Player B also manages to drop a pair of double arm bandages but not one of the rare variants so he goes on to sell it for 20.000 ryo! (just an example) Conclusion and final points of this post Giving the community focused economy a change and providing the players with more customizability! thanks for taking your time to read to my post, hope you like this idea and i am looking forward to seeing such changes ingame!
    29 points
  15. Before I start, can we please be civilized? If you disagree with something, it's completely fine just don't start dragging the person and their opinion. First of all we have the org problem. Our 12G buff is extremely underwhelming compared to what the other villages' orgs bring. They both have a lot of CC and in the 7sm's case, the stat buffs are quite literally broken. In the past few days, Sand literally proved that even with lower numbers their puppets can carry them to victory. I've been in 12G and I can assure you that most of us DO NOT want anything that is also BROKEN, we just want something to be able to compete with the other organizations mentioned above since clearly sheer numbers can't be the solution for everything. I'm sure fellow leafies have great ideas for a 12G ability. This screenshot shows how broken PB's puppets are and they're AOE. In maps like DB or KB, they make a HUGE difference. If you actually think this is fair then I don't know what to say at this point tbh. Secondly, our passive. Quite literally the most unreliable passive in the game. Don't get me wrong, WoF definitely saved me a couple of times and I doubt any leafies can say the contrary BUT since it's RnG you literally never know what's going to happen when you get it. It's literally a 5% chance but people still want to say that it's broken and the percentage is actually higher etc. The owner of the game literally said it himself. I think it's unnecessary to explain why WoF is bad at this point. Many leafies AND non leafies have said it. In a week I think I get like a total of 5 WoFs and I try to login every day, that should say a lot. I think it should be like a choice. You get 3 WoFs in a day (resets at daily reset) and basically you get up with 25% of your max HP and 15% of your max chakra. Or another idea: when your HP drops to like 200 HP, you get 50 hp back and a stat buff for 15 seconds. Please feel free to give other ideas too. If I missed something please add it @Ueda Please listen to us
    29 points
  16. I was hunting around trying to collect bounty and the main thing I notice is either, 1. It's a lowbie with no bounty, 2. It's 10+ people hunting together or 3. DZ is dead. So I had an idea, there can be a system implanted with this guy over here at the Land of Fire Bounty House. When you finish all your daily missions and talk to this guy right here he gives you 10 ryo, I think it would be nice if this guy right here gives you a Side Quest to complete which is to kill 10 ninjas and collect 500 bounty. Once you complete that quest, he gives you access to TP to a 1v1 sparring arena danger zone. Once he gives you access, there should be an NPC in every village which teleports you to the arena to fight. An NPC example can be someone like this right here, somewhere in your village The way it works is 1. You only get 3 fights a day to avoid people spamming it causing less activity in actual village raids/danger zone fights. 2. Each time you win you gain 10 rank points and each time you're defeated you lose 10 rank points, you can't go into the negative with the rank points and how the rank points work is, There's a leaderboard in every village which shows a list of who has the most rank points. (basically like how bounty book shows who has the most bounty, can look like this for example) Whoever is 1st place, 2nd place and 3rd place gets a rewarded. First place obviously gains the best reward, then 2nd place gets the 2nd best reward then 3rd gets the 3rd best reward etc etc. (The rewards can be things like event coupons where even people who were 10th place still get a coupon for participation, it doesn't have to be event coupons though it could be ryo, items, or even throw in a special rare item now and then like an event tourney would.) 3. You can't fight someone that has a much more higher rank point than you, EX: Someone has 0 rank points and another person has 100 rank points, you cannot fight them. The reason why you can't fight them because there's skill gap between the players and the players should not be able to pick on a weak player to get free points or else it would end up like this. If there's a queue that's filled with players with 100 rank points and one player with 0 rank points, if the player with 0 rank points doesn't meet anyone that has nearly the same amount of rank points he does (0-30) then he will end up fighting someone with a higher rank point, if the guy with 0 rank points wins then he gains 10 rank points, if he loses then he wasted one of his turns/doesn't lose points even if he had 10 points. If the guy with 100 rank points wins then he doesn't gain any points but he doesn't lose a turn, but if he's defeated then he loses 10 rank points but a turn is not wasted. If a fight like this happens then they can't fight twice to avoid farming for points. The whole point of the rank system is so that people can fight people on their skill level and the best of the best will be on top of the leaderboard obviously. The rank point system can more fights look like this, basically close unpredictable fights due to people fighting people on their skill level (or at least it helps make people fight people closer to their skill level) 4. Minimum level requirement is level 40 to join, there can be a separate one for lowbies (levels 20-40) but if they don't add a separate one I think level 40 is a good requirement to join. 5. The matchmaking can available for like 3 hours a day, Ex: 3am EST til 4am EST, 2pm EST til 3pm EST, 8pm EST til 9pm EST. The whole point of this is because if the matchmaking is on 24/7 then players most likely won't be matched up together as much, but if there's a certain time to do it then a crowd of players will probably be waiting until that timer starts so they can all join. 6. The way the Matchmaking works is once you talk the NPC, then the NPC teleports you to the arena where the fight will take place and you wait until a match has been found. While waiting you can see the other players who are waiting/fighting. This photo is an example. (This doesn't have to be the arena it's just an example) Once a match is found both players are teleported to arena with full chakra/hp and 10 second immunity for prep time (no they can't move around or start trapping up they are just stuck in one place facing each other with 10 second immunity like this) Org buffs are not allowed for obvious reasons, same with toad oils/chakra pills/summons. Basically the basic Nin tournament rules should apply to this right here as well. 7. Similar to the Best Dressed Ninja Contest where there's a winner every 15 days, The Leaderboard of the rank points can be reseted every month. The types of fights can be changed within the months as well, Ex: May 1v1s,June 2v2s,July 3v3s etc. Teams share the same rank points so if they find a new partner their rank points will be reseted. Ex: Ichika teams with Reality and win fights, they have 20 rank points, Ichika then starts a new team with Noboru but they start off with 0 points. I think the pros of this are: Fun event like the raid point feature that was added in the game not too long ago, Danger zone kills so if you got a bounty mission/waging war, you could do this event and maybe gain some bounty/kills, and it's competitive which makes players want to train hard to reach the top of the leaderboard. Shout out to @Sky @Haste @Scooby Doo for joining in on some of those screenshot examples.
    28 points
  17. My fellow Ninjas, the time of peace is upon us.. and I hate it. Villagers walking around their village without a care in the world, sand ninja are getting a year long tan at their GD. Leaf ninja are having picnics at their local square. Mist ninja can't see through the fog so they sit still at indoor market. WHATS THIS?! The Akatsuki leader has made a move!? @Lumy has come out of cave and seeks blood... who's blood? WHY LEAF OF COURSE! Hokage @Esty has called upon the legendary 12 guardians to protect the village and most importantly, their peace. But unfortunately, they haven't had much training and have grown weak. The Akatsuki break down the village gates and start massacring the villagers... On the eve of the lunar moon, the hidden leaf were attacked by the Akatsuki, Hokage Esty stood to protect them with the 12G's, but they can only take so much...Will they be saved? Or will the enemy villages witness the destruction of leaf?! For the next 2 days, L1/L2/TG/Wolves/Leaf GD are all danger zones! Leaf ninjas who kill enemies in these maps will receive DOUBLE bounty, enemy ninjas who kill leaf or other ninjas receive the normal amount of bounty. (Will rotate villages every week). ps - Change the rewards as you see fit just make sure there are incentives in place. (Coupons, exclusive items, loot boxes, higher drop rate, more exp) @Ueda @Erox The benefit of this event to take place is a huge one, players will actively start fighting as there are incentives in place. It'll be a fun RP event, a sort of building up to the war event later this month or next month. And I for one would love to see the effects of changing safe zones into danger zones. Right now, the danger zones are completely empty, for the majority of the time players just hide in safe zones and fight there as they lose nothing and it's killing the activity of the game. Thanks for reading and I hope you implement it soon.
    28 points
  18. Hello everyone my name is Nej, I decided to make an introduction post because I never had one of these and I have been inactive for a while due to not know what do to in the game. I am active now again and I recently reset my character to Mist after @Zabuza Momochi won Mizukage and I am loving my time spent there. I wish to be more RP indulged in the game and this is an attempt at it. I take time out of my day to help new comers all of the time and if someone here is thinking about going to the Hidden Mist Village, come through. I will heal you while you train and give you tips. If you wish to contact me my discord is Nej#9123 I hope everyone is having a great 2021 I love you all, see you in nin online... Also, RESET TO MIST.
    28 points
  19. A short introduction First of all, let's make sure things a clear so that there aren't any misconceptions regarding the state of RP (Roleplay) in NinOnline. The main focus of the game is on PvP, emphasized by several tournaments and an active community creating new builds and an existing meta. And while RP is encouraged, it is not the focus. But Nin has had a track record of attracting people that come for precisely that, which is why I want to help anyone that may struggle with this unique RP environment. Index The basics of RP The RP of NinOnline 2.1. How Gameplay and RP tie together 2.2. The current timeline Your very own shinobi 3.1. Where and how to start 3.2. Goals and ambitions 3.3. Organizations 3.4. Consistency 3.5. Preventing to become a Mary Sue Tips, tricks, and examples 4.1.1. Being part of a Conversation 4.1.2. Being part of a Conversation: Examples 4.2 How to properly use the /e and /emotes commands 4.3 The chunin exam 1. The basics or RP RP, or roleplaying, is the art of socially interacting with another, or multiple, participants through writing. While this seems simple enough, achieving an exciting and enjoyable experience is much harder in reality. Several factors come into play, starting with some "rules". Now, these are not set in stone, and more like guidelines that anyone who has some experience with it will agree are necessary to ensure a smooth experience, even if some of them seem mundane or obvious. But they are the basics after all. No. 1 - Ownership Probably the most important thing, you only get to decide about your character. More often than not, you will see RP that you can't wrap your head around. Maybe it's their backstory, their behaviour in a particular situation, or so on. But no matter how major or minor your complaint is, it is their character. Dictating what someone can and can't is an absolute no go. If you dislike someones RP, walk away from it. If that is not a possibility, keep interactions with that character limited. No one else gets to decide what kind of character, fitting for the setting obviously, you can play. But more on that later. No. 2 - Writing and grammar Obviously, this is important, but people often assume that just writing proper English is all. It isn't. While being able to understand what you wrote is mandatory, given the whole social interaction through the writing part, but there is more to it. What you write can be grammatically correct, but still wrong regarding context and setting, or create a specific image for your character. It will be tough for others to perceive you like a deep and emotional character if you only ever talk like Killer Bee. And sure some people find it fun or will use the universal excuse of "That's just how I RP!" but aren't willing to live with the consequences of others not treating them in a way they would like. So always remember, not only check how but what you write. No. 3 - Focus Another point often overlooked. You must take your time and commit to the session. Leaving in the middle or not responding in conversations are big killers for RP and can quickly ruin it for everyone. And while there is casual RP, if it is clear that time is needed you've got to be ready to offer it. No one will judge you if your connection interrupts or private reasons make your leave the PC. But being hungry and ditching to make a sandwich or leaving because of your ranked match that is starting in a different game is poor behaviour and will guarantee that you won't find many people that are willing to RP with you anytime soon. No. 4 - RP =/= Normal Gameplay The title may be a bit confusing, so let me go into detail. RP makes you go into a role, and within that role, you may have friends and enemies only tied to said RP. So if you have a grudge against someone based of RP, don't carry this out of RP. It, first of all, doesn't make any sense and can fuel toxic behaviour within a community. It is fine having a rival or something similar but knowing when to stop is essential to maintain healthy relationships. But at the same time, trying to befriend anyone can cause trouble as well. The different villages in NinOnline have unique rules on interactions with members from other villages. So always keep track of the current relations between villages, or you'll quickly end up with no allies. Besides, you can't use the information that you acquired outside of RP when interacting with others. But more about that later. Now if you follow these guidelines or at least keep them in mind, it should make the whole experience better for you and everyone involved. And with those out of the way, let's get in-depth about the hows and whys of NinOnlines unique RP. 2. The RP of NinOnline The setting of NinOnline, as before mentioned, is a world full of shinobi taking inspiration from the Naruto universe. That is what we will mainly go off since NinOnline has no set story by the developer or any specific lore in that sense and is entirely run by the community. Villages and official organizations are controlled by players. Now, what does that mean for RP? A lot of people are under the assumption that "if there is nothing set, I can be whatever I want!" which is not the case. Over the several years that I've been playing, I saw scientist creating clones, war heroes seeking revenge, mafia leaders and all of them just genin. The issue that comes with this is inconsistency and a weak character that doesn't fit and won't be taken seriously. Going after the standards set in Naruto is the only way to provide a fair environment for everyone. Now people make the argument of Sasuke being a prodigy from a young age, Orochimaru was a genius scientist, and so on. What a lot of people forget is all those characters where established within their universe and were able to prove those statements. Coming fresh out of the academy boasting level 1 and claiming you are anything like them is childish at best and pathetic at worst. The gameplay of NinOnline takes a crucial part in this and helps us to differentiate the good from the bad, literally. 2.1. How Gameplay and RP tie together NinOnline is a game, with stats and levels. It has rules and regulations on how things work and interact with each other. You can certainly have a solid RP character claiming he is "the greatest Tai user" for example. But if you lose to any run of the mill Tai user, your RP starts falling apart. This is where Nin vastly differentiates from regular RP since just writing isn't enough to solidify your character. Players will test your statements, all the time, and not being able to prove your claims results in no one taking you seriously. At the same time, this opens some doors for people that are uncertain about what kind of character they want to pursue. Instead of claiming to be the best, make it your goal to become it. Now your character has a set goal with no set time of completion, which allows for natural RP that will keep itself alive. You need to be able to tie your RP with the gameplay you provide since they go hand in hand. It may seem like a burden to some since they prefer to be the protagonist, the hero, the chosen one of their own story. But this isn't your story. It is your story within NinOnline, full of people with their personal stories and goals. And obviously, that means you may never be the best but at the very least gives a reason to try and become it. Now, of course, if your goal isn't to become the strongest in combat, the gameplay still affects your RP. Don't claim to be a hardened fighter and die to a few bites of wolves, and don't claim to have jutsu that can crush any enemy and barely scratch someone in a spar. Your actions are tied to your RP, which brings both good and bad. It limits what you can do but prevents people from just making up whatever they please. And if they still do you know who to avoid. Back to the topic of how the gameplay and RP are connected. NinOnline offers different commands on how to express emotions and actions, for both casual and RP. For casual use, you have the /emotes command which will list you with several options to express feelings by showing a little emoticon above your character, shown below. (Not including the emotes /clap, /slowclap, /321, /rock, /paper, /scissors) /! /? /<3 /n /r /... /go /y /' /cry /huh /wave /grr /!! /hi /gg /owo While these are valid to use, it always depends on the people you RP with and the situation you find yourself in. That's also why I refer to them as casual; additionally, they are used by the majority of the community for regular conversations and goofing around. Now the alternative and prefered way of showing emotions by dedicated RPers ist to use the /e command. Typing /e followed by a space and any message will look like this: (/e is daydreaming, /e is feeling immense pain, /e is worried, and so on) This way of expressing yourself is not only more engaging but also allows you to go deeper with emotions and states of mind that simply can't be done with the emoticon method. It is also a fantastic way to be part of a conversation without forcing yourself in or interrupting others, but more on that later. The final part would be RP missions. Those are unique missions hosted by a higher ranking shinobi of your village and provide you with tokens that can be turned in for experience points. The host of the missions has free reign over deciding who passed the task and thus, poor RP may result in a failure. It is also an excellent way for people to get into RP if they haven't had a chance to do it before and can be a great way of showing how the RP of NinOnline works. There are currently 4 RP missions, available at level 12, 17, 22, and 27 respectively. There are also the Chunin Exams or CE for short which are advertised to be heavily RP focused, but I will make a separate section just for those. 2.2. The current timeline Even though there is no defined storyline, NinOnline had its fair share of events, official and player-made that all contribute to an exciting environment for RPers. Wars happened between villages, uprisings, rebellions, corruption, and if someone takes time to dig deep in the forums they'll find a plethora of beads to build a character on and make something truly unique. But, as per usual, this brings a lot of challenges as well. While you may believe in the corruption of a council, it is not necessarily canon unless there is empirical evidence. So while you can still RP with the idea of a corrupt council, remember that it is purely your take on the situation around you and not fact. And thus we face another problem, going back to guideline number 4. What if you find out on discord or see screenshots that prove your point? Let's stick with the council example. If you find out that council members were bribed to vote for a specific candidate through any other means than RP, first and foremost has this information to be reported IF it is going against the rules of NinOnline, that's a given. Then you can use this information, mock them, and so on. Now, if it is an elaborate RP event planned and overlooked by the staff, rules change. If you somehow got wind of anything, outside of RP, you can not use it since your character didn't acquire this information. But we are going off-topic so more on that later. So, remember that you have several options on how to perceive the world, based on past or current events. Want to be careful around the Anbu because you believe they are corrupt? Go ahead, but don't make things up. Justify it by events you read about on the forums or witnessed yourself instead. You think that the Sand village is switching leaders way too often, showing political weakness in your eyes, go ahead. Besides, if you are capable and confident enough, why not make a post yourself? Make it clear that it is for RP purposes and maybe you lead the next chapter of the timeline? It is a very touchy subject and hard to fully grasp by just reading about it, but eventually, if you spend enough time in the community, you will get the hang of it. This concludes the section about the unique RP environment of NinOnline, so let's move on the most exciting but also often the most significant source of conflict in RP. Your Character. 3. Your very own shinobi Now that we know about the basics of RP and the specific situation in NinOnline, it is finally time to start making your character to throw out there! But where to start? This section goes into detail about the basics of character creation, their backstory, and common mistakes to avoid. 3.1. Where and how to start First of all, we need to remember what we learned in section 2 and 2.1. If you are a new player and start the game, you will be an academy student at level one. And while it is pretty simple to advance to the genin rank, the fact remains that you are a greenhorn. A beginner about to step foot into this new world. So what can we do for our character in terms of RP? First of all, the backstory is always an excellent way to start. If we visit our profile, we see a tab titled Ninja Bio. This is the perfect place for your backstory since it is easily accessible by everyone. In terms of design, there are no set of rules, and everyone has their style. Always check out the bios of other players to see how they did it and get inspired. A popular method of making ones bio more unique is creating ninja info cards. Their designs also vary and can be found on a lot of profiles, but let's continue with the main topic. So you have the ninja bio tab open, excited to create something and find yourself in one of those two scenarios. 1. I got so many ideas, where should I start? 2. I got no idea what to do whatsoever. We already established, as a beginner, there isn't much in terms of achievements that you could've possibly done. So refrain from making you look like the best of the bunch. We know that our abilities in-game tie to our RP, so more humble beginnings are recommended. If you prove yourself, you can start going down that route and start pursuing RP in that direction. But more importantly, and often overlooked, is your heritage. How did you grow up? What about your family? Any rivals or close friends? What made you go down the path of a shinobi? By answering all these questions, adding some character traits, things they like & dislike, it elevates your character far above the standard and is a solid base for future additions. Once again, though, remember section 2. If you claim that you come from a village that was raided by the neo-akatsuki and destroyed, this is not canonical nor has it happened as any sort of event. If you still want to stick with it, why not be from one of the main villages? They got raided multiple times throughout the timeline by a plethora of different people and groups. Not only is a backstory like that more believable, but it also solidifies your character as part of this world despite not have taken part in mentioned events. With everything set, let's go for some goals. 3.2. Goals and ambitions You wrote your backstory, created your character, and got some levels. What now? A lot of new players face this problem when playing, and it becomes even more of an issue for RPers. Having a goal becomes tough if the "story" of the game is everchanging and dynamic. We can avoid running into this roadblock by utilizing the features given to us by the game. As mentioned before, the simplest goal would be a combat orientated one. Trying to become a good PvPer and basing our goals of that. While it isn't the most unique nor incredibly exciting path to go for, it is a reliable option and something that will never fail due to the strong presence of PvP. If you like fighting but want to have more RP becoming a teacher may suit you. Using what you learned and training the new generation is not only a fantastic way to incorporate PvP with RP but also helps the community. Getting beaten by a random ??? that jumped them helps no one and discourages, especially new players. Being able to train and improve your skills in a controlled environment is especially alluring to newcomers, and a great way of making your mark as a teacher in terms of RP. Not into fighting others but enjoy grinding and collecting? The role of a merchant would suit you best. NinOnline has several cosmetics that you can farm and sell to interested buyers. Buy joining the official NinOnline discord you also get access to the trade channel, with constant offers to buy and sell a multitude of items. Not a fighter and prefer to support? Welcome to the world of medical-nin. Being able to heal others can be a significant edge in different situations, and the unique ability to revive someone prevents the infamous battle injuries status. And for anyone afraid that they won't be able to defend themselves from threats as a medic, NinOnline made sure that if you can heal a lot, you can hurt a lot. It may sound confusing at first, but you'll understand if you play the game. With some goals for the long-term set, there are a few more things you can do to flesh out your character. 3.3. Organizations NinOnline has several organizations in the game, official and player-made. These organizations are beneficial for RPers since they allow us to find a place of like-minded individuals to pursue common goals for all sorts of purposes. Can't find an organization that suits you? Create your own! It is a robust tool to emphasize what your character stands for and create a micro-community within the world. As I mentioned before, there are official organizations like the police force, for example. Adding a new layer of rules, these official organizations are perfect for people that are still desperately looking for any sort of "legitimate" reason to RP since now, sticking with the police force, you are enforcing the rules of the village. You have a unique role in the bigger picture of that villages community. And if you prefer the more evil side of things, the neo-akatsuki is something you can strive for. 3.4 Consistency So for this section, we assume our character has a pretty normal backstory. He grew up in the Sand village, a mom and dad with no other siblings. His backstory states that he never went out of the sand territory. Let's assume he managed to reach level 30 and became a chunin sticking to his backstory. He hosts an RP mission for some genin and decides to slay some tigers with them. In RP one of the genin asks him if it is safe to go there and our chunin replies "Of course, I know that place like the back of my hand". Now if he wasn't just coky in front of his team, he just caused an inconsistency. Describing your character in one way and acting completely different is exceptionally harmful to RP since, as we mentioned before, we have to go by a set of rules; otherwise anyone can be everything, which is not what RP is. A much simpler example is, someone states in their bio that they are terrified of blood and can't stand to see it, almost passing out at the sight of it. Now they pick either weapon master or medic as their masteries. This makes little sense in regards to his backstory since both of these roles are the closest to blood, with the weapon master causing open wounds using his swords and tools and medical-nin having to tend wounded allies. This would be less inconsistent if they justify it by saying they want to overcome their fear head-on. Otherwise, the character has no reliable backstory that others can use in RP. But this applies to all aspects of a character. The way they talk, behave, react, the more specific you define this, the more attention you have to pay. The best RPers are the ones that rarely, if ever, break character and stick with it no matter what. Being able to do and say anything turns you into a Mary Sue, which we will look at in the next section. 3.5 Preventing to become a Mary Sue. Taken from Wikipedia: "A Mary Sue is a generic name for any fictional character who is so competent or perfect that this appears absurd, even in the context of the fictional setting. Mary Sues are often an author's self-insertion or wish fulfilment. They may excel at tasks that should not be possible for them [...] They may disregard previously established aspects of the fiction such as characterization and natural laws." This is important to know since many beginners tend to create characters that fall under those criteria. They make shinobi that are both open and friendly but are also laid-back and shy. They love going out with friends but are introverts at the same time. Several different characteristics that contradict themselves and make for a terrible character. Also, they tend to give them too many abilities and strengths. We already established that in terms of PvP you couldn't make anything up since you have to prove yourself against others. However, people still manage to ruin their characters by adding all sorts of skills. Great at cooking, dancing, fantastic climber, fearless, immense willpower, the list goes on and on. A lot of people want to make a good character, and no one wants to be labelled as weak or useless but more often than not are weaknesses of a character what gives them depth. No one will care for the journey of a character that is already a master of all, and no one will cheer for them in a tournament, but rather the underdog that despite his obvious short-comings made it just as far. Weaknesses do not equate to a weak character, but a well-rounded one. Now we should have our character, presumably not a genetically modified shinobi, time traveller, or the lost descendant of god knows who, but a young shinobi setting out to carve his name into history with his ambitions and beliefs, with strengths and weaknesses. With a goal in mind and a potential organization in sight, you have your very own character and the all the basics to start RPing in NinOnline. The next section goes more into depth about some topics and provides some additional help by using made-up scenarios and interactions that can help everyone, not just newcomers. 4. Tips, tricks, and examples This part of the guide will focus on a more direct approach by showing you side by side comparisons of different RP encounters and extensions of the previous topics. There are many facets to it and, especially even for advanced RPers, it is often a struggle to perform right, no matter the preparation or dedication. I'll try my best to provide examples tailored to NinOnline. 4.1.1. Being part of a Conversation While I talked a lot about the relevance of actual skill concerning the gameplay, at the very start, we established that RP is the written interaction between individuals. And we do that mainly through dialogue. It is simple enough to talk with one person only and do RP, let them finish, they let you finish. Not much to do wrong here. The tricky part starts when there are multiple people involved. So let's lay down some ground rules necessary for a smooth experience and then go into the intricacies of it. As mentioned before, allowing someone to finish their sentence is key to proper dialogue. But now, with multiple people involved, it may become quite hard to join in or get your point across. We already established that your character is not a protagonist by default. So sometimes you may slide into the role of supporting or side character, and don't let that discourage you. And usually, if the people involved know what they are doing, they will let you have a say eventually. Keeping that in mind, you may find yourself in the spotlight of an RP session. The key is not to overdo it. If you already got in that position, it doesn't make sense to hog it and makes the whole experience boring for others. And always keep in mind, you won't always be in that position, so if you abuse it, you may receive the same treatment or will be exempted from future sessions altogether. Another big problem is almost abusing the (OOC) or (Out Of Character) clause. Whenever you find yourself in a situation where you would have to break RP, you would type in brackets (). We already established that we are all humans, mistakes are made, and sometimes things are just not clear enough. You can use this to indicate to others that the sentence on display is not from your character, but the player behind the screen. What do I mean when I say abusing? A lot of players, especially inexperienced ones, will constantly break character and type a lot of messages with the (Out Of Character) method. And just like most things, it should be used only if necessary. If you don't understand and order, don't break character to ask what you need to do, but do it in character. No one will judge you for asking a question, but they will if you keep interrupting the RP since that is what we are doing. We are out of character, meaning the RP was interrupted by something else. In most scenarios breaking character is not needed, but people assume it is fine since it is precisely that, out of character but can't see that they are still a major roadblock for a smooth experience. So unless absolutely necessary and unachievable by any other means, try to avoid it like the plague. Now if you find yourself in the position of a bystander, you can still contribute. We learned about using /emotes and /e earlier. This is an excellent opportunity to put them to use and make the session more exciting. Did someone say something exciting? Show it by using an emote! Your enemy said something infuriating, but is still in his monologue? Start fuming! Maybe your emotions will lead to attention from others, and thus you managed to be a passive part of the conversation and get an active role. Now, as with everything, don't overdo it. Not every quip needs an emotional response, and overusing /emotes and /e is a common beginners mistake. Use it sparingly at the right time, and you'll make any conversation much more lively. Let's look at some examples. 4.1.2 Being part of a Conversation: Examples So let's have a scenario of 4 people involved, a specialized jonin (Saku) with his assigned team (Flame, Iskarus, Hisa) doing a simple reconnaissance mission. Name: Text like this represents normal dialouge (Text like this represents events happening in-game) Text like this represents using the /e command Saku: Alright, we have arrived, Flame and Hisa, make sure no one was here before. Flame: Sure thing. Hisa: Will do. (Flame and Hisa start moving around, investigating the area) Saku: Iskarus, you'll follow me, we will check the surrounding area. Iskarus yawns Iskarus: That sounds boring as hell. Saku: Too bad, come on, follow me. Iskarus shrugs. (Iskarus and Saku move ahead, but can't find anything suspicious) Iskarus: Great, a waste of time. Saku: I know you'd rather be sparring now, but we have a mission to do. Iskarus: Wasn't there anything more exciting available? Saku frowns. Saku: It's not always about fighting, you know? Iskarus: Tell that to the neo-akatsuki. Flame: Complaining again, Iskarus? (Flame and Hisa joined up with Iskarus and Saku) Iskarus: Ah, shut up, nobody asked you. Flame starts laughing. Saku: Did you find anything? Hisa: No, nothing at all. Hisa stretches and yawns. Hisa: So can we go home now, I'm tired. Iskarus: Yeah, we are wasting our time here. Flame: As if you have anything better to do. Flame grins wide. Iskarus: I do, beating you in another sparring match. Flame: Ist that so? Well, let's go then! (Flame enables PvP, indicating he is ready to spar.) Iskarus: Sure, I get to beat you in a different setting. (Iskarus enables PvP as well) Hisa crosses her arms. Hisa: So immature. (Flame and Iskarus get in position, but Saku runs between them) Saku: Enough already, this is too dangerous. Flame: Ugh, fine. (Flame disables PvP) Iskarus: Oh, what, afraid? You should be. Saku starts grinning. Saku: If you want to spar that badly, let's head back to the village, and we have a go. Loser has to buy ramen for the team. Flame looks excited. Hisa: Nice, free ramen. Iskarus: Anytime Teach, get ready to pay up! Saku: We'll see. (The group heads back to the village) That was a lot; let's analyze the conversation and use of emotes. I wrote it deliberately with everyone being considerate of each other and assuming no one interrupted anyone. Notice how a majority of sentences are kept short. This is very important and something you should always pay attention to. Writing too much slows down the flow of the conversation, people will be too busy reading your wall of text, and the RP quickly withers away. This applies even more to the /e command. Writing too much is counterproductive since it is meant for emotions and not conversations. On the topic of using /e, notice how I used it in a way to connect it to the previous or upcoming sentence. This is a great way to give your dialogue more punch and make it feel alive. Sometimes the /e command has been used purely for reactions, which is a clear example of the earlier mentioned method of being part of a conversation without interrupting it. The amount of /e used is also in an acceptable range, but some could argue against it. This always comes back to preference, but since the things they wrote in /e were very short I doubt anyone would have a problem with it. So this is what we gathered. -Use sweet and short sentences unless you need to describe something of importance, or it just can't be done otherwise. -Use the /e command, but keep it short and don't overdo it. Now let's look at another example. This time, with a jonin (Reign) and his team of genin (Randi, Sepu, Dominic) doing a reconnaissance mission as well. Name: Text like this represents normal dialouge (Text like his represents events happening in-game) Text like this represents using the /e command Reign: We arrived at the destination mentioned in our mission documents. Let's scout out the nearby area and find any clues that may lead to enemy movement of any sort. Randi and Sepu, you check this sector while Dominic and I will check the next one. Sepu: Alright. Dominic: Understood. Randi: What the hell, no way. I will go with you Sensei, Dominic is not ready to handle a surprise attack like I am. Dominic: What makes you say that? Randi: Sensei, trust me, you are much better off with me on your side. Dominic: Hey, I'm talking to you! Dominic gets angry. (Randi runs ahead of the group) Reign: I guess Randi and I will go. You two stay together then. Dominic: ... Sepu pats him on the back. Sepu: Don't let it get to you. Dominic: You're right. (Meanwhile, Reign runs after Randi and meets up with him) Reign: Randi, this kind of behaviour goes against everything they teach you in the academy, and I won't have a genin disobey me and make up their own mind. It is simply unacceptable, and I hope you understand the consequences of your action. Randi: Look sensei, I found footprints. And from the looks of it, they must've been from the neo-akatsuki, and they are fresh too, maybe we can catch them off guard! Randi revels in the fact that he found something by himself, screaming out loud "Soon I will get my revenge on the neo-akatsuki for attacking our village." Reign: Now hold up how can you be sure that it is from the neo-akatsuki? We have no reports of them in our mission documentation, and they haven't been roaming this area for quite some time. (Reigns message was barely sent as another wall of text from Randi is posted) Randi: Take the others to the village and warn the Kage; I will go ahead and find more evidence. Don't worry; I'll manage on my own. Reign: Listen here; you are the genin; I am the jonin. You don't give orders. Randi: What the hell, I am clearly more competent than all of you. Why would you prevent me from pursuing my destiny, my NINJA WAY! You know what, maybe the neo-akatsuki is right after all. I don't need a village to hold me down. Screw you and these other morons. I'll be back even stronger and crush you. Randi gets furious about the fact that the jonin won't understand him and proceeds to flee into the wilderness by himself. (Randi runs off into a different map, not regarding Reign or his team in any way) We will end the convo here because I am sure the majority can tell that this was an example of how to do everything wrong. I purposefully wrote it with everyone staying in character despite the horrible RP going on, to make the errors more clear. So let's dissect and apply what we already know. First of all, both Reign and Randi are writing way too much. Their sentences are long, full of unnecessary information and overall poorly executed. The most significant problem child here is Randi. Not only does he continuously write excessively, but he ignores his teammates and his higher up. He is lost in monologues and forces himself into the position of leader. This also applies to the way he is using the /e command. That command is used to express emotions and actions one takes that aren't doable by gameplay means. We established that these should be used both sparingly and kept short. He overdoes it and makes his performance even more underwhelming. These mistakes become much more problematic since the chatbox used in NinOnline is already small, and long sentences like that make it impossible to have fluent RP for everyone involved. 4.2. How to properly use the /e and /emotes commands I have been mentioning it a lot, and we are going to use this section to elaborate on how exactly you should use it without hurting your RP instead of helping it. Said several times already, but something that can't be stressed enough. Don't overdo it!!! It is the biggest mistake of a lot of people and the downfall of their maybe otherwise completely fine RP. You should keep what you say in /e short and sweet. Here are some good examples. (Someone else said something to another person.) Saku is angry. (Someone stars yelling or screaming) Saku shrieks in surprise. (A friend or ally gets defeated in combat) Saku starts tearing up. To the point, clear, not disrupting the flow of conversation, and thus, the flow of the RP stays intact. Now for some terrible examples. (Someone else said something to another person.) Randi gets infuriated about what the hokage just said, he can't believe that he heard it with his own ears. (Someone stars yelling or screaming) Randi is struck with fear, causing him to stumble backwards and fall on to his rear, resulting in his pants getting dirty. (A friend or ally gets defeated in combat) Randi suddenly realizes a wet feeling on his eyes "Are those tears?" as he quickly wipes them away with his forearm. Now we have to make it clear that, objectively these sentences aren't wrong. Some may argue they provide more information than the short versions, but they aren't taking into consideration the context of a given situation. 90% of the time, short sentences are more appropriate and just work better. So what about the other 10%? This is where you go back to the topic of context. If several people are interacting with each other, we use the short versions, but in some unique cases, we can use the more extended versions that are similar to what Randi used. Below I will list possible scenarios that may be applicable. 1. As a way to initiate RP If there isn't already any RP going on and you don't just want to ask for it blatantly, you can use a longer /e message to indicate your intentions effectively. Saku gets excited seeing his friend Flame sparring and decides to join him Saku is happy to be greeted by Iskarus, and starts grinning wide. Saku is baffled that Hisa got so much stronger since the last time they met. This is a valid use and clear sign that you are currently RPing and thus totally acceptable to be wordier than average. 2. Doing a specific action in RP Maybe your team leader asked youto look for clues in the forest where a group of genin have been assaulted. Instead of simply walking around a bit and continuing the conversation, you can use a longer /e message. Saku gets frustrated since he can't find anything useful in the area. Saku shudders as he accidentally puts his onto a bloodstain. Saku rummages through a bush and manages to find a strange-looking kunai. Scenarios like these are probably the best for longer /e sentences since they paint a picture we can't achieve otherwise. The trick is not to use this all the time and is one of the most common mistakes during chunin exams. Standing in the waiting room and using a sentence like this: Randi pulls out a scroll with plans and strategies for the upcoming exams and shows it to his friends. Let's remember context. In our first example, Saku was given a task and used the /e command to emphasize his actions that he couldn't do otherwise. In the instance of Randi, it becomes trickier. If no one asked him and he just said it for the sake of RP, it is a poor choice and somewhat of an ass-pull. It is much more graceful to talk about a plan with your team and create it right then and there. Thus, after your entire team does some RP you could use a /e sentence like: Randi writes everything down that he has discussed with his team. Now it becomes much more understandable and more exciting since it is a reaction to a prior event. If you want to insist that you were prepared beforehand make that clear to the rest of the people involved. Mention it to your team in a conversation, brag about having studied prior exams, etc. You need a set-up, or otherwise, your RP will suffer. 3. Thoughts and Passive Interaction Sometimes, you don't want to say something directly but share certain information or feelings with your peers. This is where longer /e sentences can come in handy. But be careful since this is another big problem for a lot of people, overdoing it and technically never saying anything and being mute, in an RP sense. There are generally two methods we can approach to get our thoughts across. A direct and a more narrative one. The direct way would look like this: Flame starts thinking "Why won't anyone listen to the kage during the chunin exams?" In this case, we can see what the character in question is thinking about any given scenario. The narrative solution would look like this: Flame is confused; he didn't expect the chunin exams to be so unorganized. This way makes it seem, as the name suggests, that someone is narrating his thoughts and allows us to phrase things that would be otherwise not fitting your character (throwback to section 3.4) as long as it is within reason. We can also use longer sentences for situations where you simply can't interact with but don't want your character just to stand around and be silent. So let's assume we know for certain our character won't be getting any involvement for a set amount of time, and we don't to just spurt out random lines. Now lines like ... Flame stretches and lays down on the floor, trying to get himself into a comfortable position. ... become acceptable because you won't be doing much anyway, and is an excellent way to be a passive part of the RP, of course under the assumption you won't overdo it. So what have we learned? Using the /e command is a double-edged sword. While it provides your RP with a lot more depth and can make for some engaging scenarios and conversations, using it poorly or in excessive amounts can quickly make you look like a complete tool. So always remember, when you are about to type your next /e command, ask yourself "Is this really necessary?". It is regularly better to type less. We already know that we can't constantly be in the spotlight, but we can always make a fool out of ourselves. Use /e responsibly. 4.3 The chunin exam The without a doubt biggest RP event available for players is the Chunin Exam, or CE for short. This is a tournament hosted by the Kage of a village and the primary way to advance from the genin rank. I have been part of, and spectated, several CE over the four years and was the first person to receive a higher rank because of RP. So I want to use this opportunity to talk about this major RP event and why the outcome should not discourage you from doing RP or stop playing altogether. Let's get started! Since players in the form of the Kage and the higher ranking shinobi are in charge of handling the CE, they all vary greatly in execution. Some may go more smoothly than others, and the enforcement of RP is handled differently. Already we come to a big issue with the CE. At the time of creating this guide, I was fortunate enough that a CE was held within one of the villages. And witnessing the decision making of the Kage made it extremely clear that the player run communities are both a blessing and a curse. Let us look at some examples. "Kage A held a CE. He is overall considered ruthless and harsh for his strictness and enforcement of rules, both PvP and RP related. And not doing any RP at all restricts you from receiving a higher rank, even if you would've won the entire tournament. The higher ranking shinobi overwatching his CE act similarly." "Kage B held a CE. It has just begun, and the crowd is rowdy. He tells them to be quiet to explain the rules. One of the participants, entirely out of character, constantly interrupts him. The Kage, in RP, walks up to him and warns him for the last time. He continues though, met with an emoticon by the Kage. The Kage is overall very forgiving and doesn't punish at all. His higher ranking shinobi act similarly, breaking RP regularly and fooling around, even arguing with him, but not in an RP sense." Now we have two completely different Kage and how they handle their CE. Every RPer will of course side with Kage A, since in their eyes it is the proper way to host such an event. But we established that this is a PvP focused game and community. So while it is called an RP event, since it is in the hand of sometimes people that never did any RP, you can see how this becomes a huge problem. So a majority of people prefer Kage B, since he will pardon and give them second chances till the actual fighting portions of the tournament start. This is also why I mentioned it at the beginning, don't get discouraged by the CE since Kage change as do participants, so you have a chance to be part of a decent one eventually. And some may think now "But why participate if RP isn't enforced properly?" and I can only say you are right. The CE is a big turn off due to the false advertisement and inadequate regulations in most cases, but as stated, villages are run by players. And the examples given weren't made up, but things that happened in real CE tournaments. And again, some may think now "If even the higher ranks don't care, why should I?" and once again I can only say you are correct. You shouldn't, but it is the only official way to get a higher rank within the game by RP means or at least stated that way. And maybe you get lucky and have a Kage A hosting your tournament. I realize that it sounds underwhelming for everyone that wants to join because of the RP but still do it. You need a team, after all, so get some friends together, and if everyone is just not caring, at least your team will. CE are a great way to make memories, and even a Kage B may see your RP performance and gives you a rank. And if you think that is impossible with the current leadership, try to push for a vote, or change villages. As an RPer, we are the minority, so we have to bend a lot to get the experience we desire. Some may have been looking for actual advice, but following this guide is all you need. It is a glorified RP session after all, so the same rules apply. We talked about how to be part of a conversation, consistency, passive engagement, and the use of emotes. There isn't anything else you would need for the CE. So give it your best, and obviously, try to have fun with it. Don't get frustrated over other people failing miserably trying to string a coherent sentence together. RP with your team and be the best at it and trust me, if you give it your all, people will notice you. They always do. And this concludes my guide on NinOnline specific RP. I am always willing to help someone in terms of RP regarding their backstory or otherwise so just message me. I hope I could help someone with it and can't wait to see you in-game. Afterword If anyone wonders who I am and why I did this. I'm Saku, joined this game a little over 4 years ago, only ever had this account and been a big fan of RP way before that. As mentioned already, I was the first person to receive a rank because of RP, being promoted to the first specialized jonin of Nin. That's why I wanted to make this updated guide since there is an older version pinned, but I felt it didn't represent me or the Nin RP accurately, so I reworked it. I enjoy writing, so feedback is highly appreciated. Thanks for taking your time reading this far. You're the best.
    28 points
  20. It has come to my attention this game has no form of two step autenthication in order to log in. This , if it existed, would prevent any attempt of hacking into accs or protect accs from data base leaks. An example of this is a player name issa who 1 day ago before this post is being made got all of his 3 accs stolen with emails changed and passwords changed aswell (note they all had different passwords) and the person who stole reset all of his accs so it would be impossible to get any progress ,the orginal owners made , on those said accs back Another player named @oreo got his acc stolen and name changed for some odd reason. All of these players claim they got hacked and they never shared accs. I simply suggest 2 step autenthication should be added into the game to prevent such cases to even exist because an acc with 2 step authentication can never be stolen because the user who tried to hack the acc would also need the original owners phone number to get access.
    27 points
  21. Good evening everyone, I've come with a suggestion that could change the pace of hunting and how groups fights are orientated; with the addition of player executions. Currently in game, once an opposing ninja is downed, there is nothing that you can do to speed up the kill other than to wait for them to press enter within the 59 second interval. During this time period, allies of the downed ninja can come to interrupt you from getting the kill by reviving them. Executions would not only allow players to counter this, but it would bring a new mechanic to the game that comes with a risk. How would Executions work? Executions would act like the Mystical Palm technique, albeit forcing the player into the death screen instead of reviving them. With that being said, players would be required to stand directly beside the body in order to execute the downed ninja. Moving away or being hit with knock-back, stuns, and/or snares will cancel the execution — forcing them to restart. And since executions would be cast-time, there is the risk of being killed yourself by enemies. *All Players who are level 10+ should possess the ability to execute(all levels possessing the same cast time; preferably 7.5-8.5 seconds). With the requirement of level 20-30+ being there to use it, execution animations — if any at all — can correlate to your 1st mastery. ex: Earth Execution - A multitude of earth spikes emerge from the ground below, piercing and gutting the downed ninja. Water Execution - A chain-like whip wraps around the ninjas body, constricting around them like a snake; suffocating them to death Fire Execution - The user snaps, causing the downed body to burst into flames; scorching the poor soul into a dark husk of ashes. Side Note: We could also make use of @Fuze's aseprite commission services to create the animations for such, if it were be implemented of course. I personally would love to contribute some funds towards this. How would this change hunting, or even group fights? At the current moment, whenever an ally is downed, they are either ignored until the enemy is killed or distracted enough to allow for a revive. With executions however, this would prompt groups with a decision — Do we allow the enemy to take the chance at an execution and reposition, or do we defend their body and take the risk for a revive? The same goes to the people who got the kill. Do we push and execute the downed, or do we focus on another objective — possibly giving them the chance to revive/getting W.O.F? More suggestions for executions: - This should be a "hotbar-less" technique, only appearing(possibly above the village logo) whenever the player is standing directly beside the downed enemy. - If it is interrupted, there could be a 20+ second cool down, allowing for only about two attempts max on an execution. At the current moment, this is all I have in mind for executions. If anyone else possesses any ideas/changes or wanst to contribute to it, please feel free to do so! Thank you, everyone. - Issa P.S. It is currently 3 AM my time and I haven't slept in 40 hours. Please excuse any grammar/spelling mistakes. Lol.
    27 points
  22. Dear Ninja, For this year's Let It Snow Event I decided to go a little bit further than the years past. With the help of @Angelik Date, @Fuze and @Kvaset for contributing artwork, I'm proud to announce what the event will entail this year. Hidden City of Joy For the duration of the event, our good ol' Hidden City of Joy from back in 2018, will be open to all. This time, the city is 3x bigger, features a gun store where you can buy a pistol and ammo to kill zombies (and each other), new special enemies, as well as 4 new rewards. This will be our most lowbie friendly Christmas event yet. The city is also an Arena Zone, where a single bullet is usually a kill. So watch out for both Zombies and other player's gangs. You can enter the city by talking to an Event NPC in each village. The City will open from 5th December 2020 to 5th January 2020. New Rewards These are 3 new cosmetic rewards available from Let It Snow 2020. We also have a special new cosmetic item, Angel Wings , which will only be available through Let It Snow 2020 and never again through another event. After this event, we will only ever give out Angel Wings to players who bless the server a great amount in a single month. More on that in the future... Some of the rewards from previous years are also available again! You can also get Event Coupons by trading your spare Zombie Organs and Snow Balls. Free Stat Resets FreeStat Reset Visit the Hidden City of Joy and speak to Santa Claus. This year he has a Naughty or Nice list which he will use to decide if you are eligible for a present from me. If you are naughty, no worries, you can earn you way into the nice list! New Cash Shop Items Green War Armor is a time-limited exclusive item that will be on sale for the duration of Let It Snow 2020, after which, it will never be sold again. It is tradeable and treated like a normal item after claiming from your stash, but has no Ryo value. New Weapon Released Although not exactly Christmas-related, we also added a new weapon this update... Iron Scythe Our first ever scythe. It's still going to work the same way as a sword, but this will now drop from -redacted- and be available for Weapon Masters. Art done by @Fuze Side Notes I spend most of my time through the year on development, so I rarely get time to put together fun events like this. But it's always the most fun I have working on Nin Online. The end of the year is a special time for everyone because it's the advent of a new year. Let It Snow in Nin Online has less to do with Christmas and more to do with celebrating another year of Nin Online. So much has happened in the world this year, so I thought it would be nice if we put into extra effort this year to bring some seasonal festivities. We hope you enjoy what we have prepared!
    27 points
  23. Not everyone wishes to be a part of a village when they join the game. Some people like the idea of being a more "evil" type of character and the game doesn't really allow you to start out as that. Currently the only way for that is to be a rogue but being a rogue is meant to be more of a punishment than something you choose to play. Rogues have no unique clothes, summons or masteries. If you are a Leaf rogue you still have a Leaf passive, Leaf summon, Leaf hidden mastery... This makes it so that there is no real option to be a dedicated rogue player. What I wish for is that there is an option to create a character that is more "hardcore" from the very beginning. An option to create a "rogue" character which is not tied to any village. IDEA The idea is that cursed ninja would be the "actual" rogues while the exiled ones are village rogues. This would allow for cursed ninja to have things which are unique. Playing as cursed ninja would be a very hard way to start out and would not be recommended for new players (could even make it only possible after resetting a lvl 50 character). You start out in Cursed Lab which is hard to get into and hard to get out of, very little mobs are around and it is easy for a low level to die just trying to step out of host cave or to die to them while trying to go back in the Lab to hand in a mission. Just like normal rogues you would have friendly fire and wouldn't be able to team villagers. Your default and only spawn point would be the Cursed Lab. LORE You start out in the Cursed Laboratory, which is a part of a larger network of laboratories called Village Hidden in the Sound. In your thirst for power you have abandoned your past and origins and have come to serve Sarugami. You are one of the few ninja to have survived his cursed seal experiments. In order to strengthen your cursed seal you must set out in the ninja world. PASSIVE Cursed Seal - a cursed seal has been placed upon you which grows stronger over time. Unlike villages which get a passive that is at full power right at the start, cursed ninja start with a quest called "The Growing Curse". The quest requirement at first would be to reach level 10 for example. After you complete it you get a "Weak Cursed Seal Activation" jutsu. It is a weak buff that drains your health while it is up. After completing the current one you would get a new one which would have higher requirements but would award a stronger Cursed Seal jutsu. This would repeat until you get the strongest version of it. All of the Cursed Seals would share cooldown and be untradable. HIDDEN MASTERY I thought a lot about what would be a good and unique mastery to introduce in the game. Puppet mastery and genjutsu are something that have been talked about for ages, so why not add a mastery that is a combination of the two. Demonic Flute Genjutsu - a mastery that utilizes a weapon called "Demonic Flute" to cast sound based genjutsu and control summoned creatures known as Doki. The mastery would be based around the summon. Your flute melee would cause it to do a certain action like use an attack or to Flicker. You'd also have access to genjutsu which would be strong CC that deals little to no damage. Some jutsu could be: 1.Illusionary Warrior Doki- you use your flute to create an illusionary warrior called Doki to fight in your place. This would be the main jutsu of the mastery. It would depend heavily on it's summon to fight. 2.Phantom Chains - you use your flute to create a illusion for your opponent in which they are bound by chains. Single target CC that does little to no damage. 3.Phantom Sound Wave - you use your flute to create a sound wave which commands your Doki to take a bite of their target's soul. Does moderate damage but saps a large chunk of chakra from the enemy. SUMMON Nue - a chimera that is able to sap your opponent's chakra. ORGANIZATION The Sound Four - a team of elite cursed ninja which serve as bodyguards for Sarugami. Their base would be within Cursed Laboratory and their buff would be some strong cursed seal.
    26 points
  24. Alright ninjas, I'm here today to suggest something that I believe will fix a couple of things in Nin, particularly the open world danger zone scene. Right now there are 2 issues with hunting in Nin: Mapswitch Camping Armies running around My suggestion to fix BOTH these issues with one stone is to change every single map in the game into a war zone except for the Village map AND the new lowbie maps that Erox created a while back. Changing these maps will force people to only hunt in a maximum group of 4 as any more will hinder them, this will inevitably change the Mapswitch camping and army meta and diminish it. Ninjas will have fun fighting small skirmishes across the Nin Online world. This also heavily suits RP, during the majority of Naruto it was always groups of 4 hunting and ONLY during war will a village mobilise it's army to fight. In turn this will also make the War Event something to look forward to and viable as the main forces will want to fight big upscale battles for glory and prizes since they wouldn't be able to do it on a normal hunting day. Some issues that people might have is "how about the safe zones that are made for lowbies". Well to answer this, right now those same lowbies still die in safe zone, so it's not really saving them from anything and with the addition of lowbie maps behind the Village maps, lowbies have never been more safe to farm and level up. I personally believe this change will fix the problem we're having in the danger zones, @Ueda I implore you to initiate this on a test run. For 1 month implement these changes and if there's a backlash or negative impact then simply change it back. Thanks for reading
    26 points
  25. certainly not Bogdan I need to mention that I promoted in the JCE that took place on 18th. I'm currently waiting to get my rank ingame, asked GMs and they said it is ok to register. EDIT: I just got my rank ingame aswell and also I want to publicly request a name swap between "certainly not Bogdan" and "Bogdan" for the sake of this village and whoever is trying to type my amazingly long name. This is my new main and i would be very thankful if I'll receive this name swap.
    26 points
  26. Just making a post here because YouTube recommended me our own Nin Online soundtrack. I've been reminded recently of the amount of money spent to create original music in the early development days, when the game was burning through my savings and freelance earnings. When I had to survive on bread and milk and instant noodles for months on end because I had nothing left for myself and I don't come from a wealthy family. Every cent donated throughout the development period was also given to freelancers and others to draw art, make music, code and to draw promotional artwork that we still use till today. In the last week I streamed playing games made by others that had stolen Nin Online's original Art and UI. It really got me thinking, why go through all the work of actually being the one to create things when others just out right steal what you've invested your time and money into. I don't really talk about the struggles of development in 2013 leading up till beta because I usually can reason with myself that those sacrifices were necessary. But when people show me otherwise, that they can make money off my work without repercussion, I start to doubt myself and regret putting myself through so much hardship. But then I was serenaded by Sand Canyons by @Afilion The hopeful tune really gave me the lift out of the dumps that I needed. The reason why I couldn't copy someone else's work in 2013, as an 18 year old kid was because there was nobody to copy. There was no game like Nin Online yet. The community here is great, I can tell everyone appreciates the efforts put in by everyone who has played a part in making Nin Online. When I asked on Discord for people to help bring attention to the fact a game a youtuber had made a video on had stolen art from us, everyone came together to attempt to help. It might or might not pay off and Nin Online might get the attention that game garnered off our team's work. But at the end of the day, I'm just glad we have a supportive community of players who just want to play a good nar Ninja game. Anyway, this is not really a dev log, more like a rant. There's so much happening and coming for Nin Online that I'm honestly so excited. Hope everyone's been doing well in this pandemic!
    26 points
  27. Dear Ninja, Normally in June, we'd release a time-exclusive cosmetic as a way to commemorate another year of Nin Online and for these items to hold "I was here in 20XX" significance. But as the days are passing and my focus has been on the actual in-game content but more importantly the major reworking of the game's core technologies (Server & Client), I've found myself further and further past the dateline to write this annual note that signals another successful year of service and further development. So I'm just going to write a love letter without the gift for now with the promise we'll have one sometime later this year. Nin Online is a love letter As you all know, Nin Online is a game made by fans for fans. It's been the biggest project in my life so far, and it's been something I've been making since I was a kid in one form or another. Some of the newer members might not know, but Nin Online really started in 2006 when I was a kid. I wanted to make an MMORPG based on Naruto, because there was none at the time. I was way too young back then, so I spent years learning, I went to school to learn infact, and I joined projects to learn how to make Nin Online. Then I made Nin Online in 2013. There's dev logs documenting the entire journey sprinkled all over this forum. Filled with so much history, I urge anyone who hasn't done some digging on the past to just start reading our Dev logs from 2013 till today. It'll really give you a clearer picture of the vision from then, and how it's being fulfilled till now. To a lot of us Naruto is something that has all meant something to us at least at some point in our lives. It's that commonality that brings our otherwise very different personalities together and keeps our community grounded at the end of the day. It's something I still strive to honor as much as the game differs from the series, I still want everyone to feel like they are part of the ninja world, but it's your ninja world. A bright future It's almost crazy how Nin Online is still growing and livelier every day. With a player base larger, more active and dramatic as ever, it's unbelievable almost. The recent months past have also been the most financially successful in Nin Online's history! This year, we intend to take the game's capabilities to a new level by remaking both the Server and Client (the technologies that power Nin Online) and we're already more than half way through that. Once we're done with these major reworks, we intend to introduce features that have been asked for since the beginning. I don't want to speak on what exactly because I've learned too well that hyping things in advance causes advanced backlash when we shift our focus. Things are honestly looking very positive for Nin! Through the thick and thin I have to acknowledge that without the support of all the Gold Ninja from back in the day, we would not have had a game to launch into live service in 2017. Without the support of everyone who has supported the game in the past year, the server rework project would not have been able to happen. And with your support into the future.. we will have another year of Nin Online to celebrate in 2021. We've had rough times over the years, we've had staff members come and go, and we've had our fair share of complaints, backlash and criticism. Things can get really nasty and debates can get very heated. But I will always respect and remember the kind people in the community who have stuck with us, stood up for the developers and shown us support regardless of whether it was cool at the time to do so. I love you all! Nin Online Kampai! Regards, Ueda
    26 points
  28. Fun things to do with friends, as we know Nin is a hardcore game geared towards pvp most of the time but there are some wholesome moments where we can do things that dont end up in a salt fest this is one of them! So some background information "The Wanderer" A higher being descendant of the moon people (Erox) is visiting "earth" our mission is to take our visitor around our world and show him the way of life that humans have on this planet! Along with my friends @Camellia and @Taeledra we work together to escort our wanderer friend to one of nin's greatest sights the Elusive Glacier Bear! After traversing the lands the wanderer decided that he wanted to take a break, treating this sightseeing as an escort mission we obliged to his request. Taeledra then used her expert knowdlege of the earth mastery to create a smooth surface so that our otherwordly visitor could feel comfortable. In this image above you can see the wanderer teaching us a game from his planet, where if we rolled above the number 20 we got to take a step forward on the bridge but anything under would end up in taking steps backwards! I ended up winning this little game and it was very enjoyable to play with friends. After play though, it was time to return to the mission at hand Being asked by @Taeledra to scout i then proceeded to make sure that the vicinity was clear. We waited Ages for the Elusive Glacier bear to spawn while making idle conversation sharing our thoughts on meditation and the creation of chakra that we now use today that we inherited from the wanderers great grandmothers grandmother. Camelia and I both being members of two of the most blood thirsty clans within the Hidden Mist Village (Sakame and Hoshi) attacked the Eusive bear ferociously in fright that it may dissapear to never been seen again for years not realizing the feelings of the wanderer who hates to see violence before his eyes, as Taeledra tried to warn us being to consumed into the battle we didnt realize what we had done until it was over. We apologized to the wanderer asking him for forgiveness and then headed back to our village ! After a very eventful today full of laughs, mistakes, triumphs, we learned to enjoy our present moment and the people around us as the wanderer had taught us, to try to not resort to violence in every situation The wanderer bids us farewell and wishes us the best on our path , although hes gone i still feel as tho hes still with us, watching us every step of the way ! Peace, Love, Positivity The objectives of this mission was to show our culture to the visitor while causing the least amount violence as possible to those fellow players around us and even animal mobs! Special Thanks to @Erox The Wanderer, a big thank you to @Camellia and @Taeledra to introducing me to this style of rp and such a fun time in the few time i do log in. Roleplay in Nin Online is very much alive as long as the players that are interested in it decide to join together and create moments like these its all up to us! We have all the tools needed now we only have to add our imagination! ~~True Art are the memories we draw upon (yesimobssesedwithartidontcareeither)<3
    25 points
  29. Read from left to right To be continued... Character Creation Insta link:https://instagram.com/antar__86?utm_medium=copy_link Source Material
    25 points
  30. Hello! I just made this pixel inspired by Naruto's and Hinata's wedding. I think adding them to the cash shop could open a lot of possibilites for RP weddings. They were pretty easy to made since the male one is a recolored kage robe and the female one is a modified and recolored snake inner kimono. Based off
    25 points
  31. Almost half of this map is water and you have no way to access it. Adding the stairs on the bottom would fix that and would allow for this map to be utilized way better. There could be some mobs which only spawn on the water and some interaction with the sign that's under the tree on the small patch of land. The bottom left of the map where the water is could be used as map switch to Mini Bridge. It would also be good if stairs were added here and there was a map switch on the bottom right of the water area that would map swap you to Mini Bridge. This is where the map switches would be. I think having more map switches here would prevent map swap camping.
    25 points
  32. Dear Ninja, After discovering a set of accounts linked with illegally obtained items, and illicit trade of those items for real world money. We've taken action to ban around 60 accounts that were linked (by IP address) to the accounts. If you find that your account has been banned with no apparent reason, it is due to sharing accounts, trading accounts leaving traces of the IP in your account permanently. As such, it is advised to NEVER give out your account, or log into an account you do not own, as if such an incident occurs, you could lose your own account. Regards, Ueda
    25 points
  33. New & Improved Idle Animations for Players and NPCs! Way more fluid animation speed and breathing pacing. Fixed Emoticons playing order There was a long standing bug where emoticons played wrongly. With this update, non-looping emoticons like /rock /paper /scissors are working perfectly. Other admin/dev related bug fixes. Before afters below! Old vs. New
    25 points
  34. Dear Ninja, It's been another year... time flies! In 2021, I daresay we made the most progress on the game in a single year since its inception. Although a lot of the time was still spent on developing the game engine and making the core experience more enjoyable, we're quickly reaching a point where story content, more missions etc. is the biggest concern. As mentioned in the recap from 2020, we aimed to get @TheWolf on the team full-time as our Lead Programmer, and the plan went through, which led to a year of great development progress afterwards. Here's a short overview of some of our development over just this past year! Further Server Improvements In 2020, we remade the game's server (previously in Visual Basic 6) to C#. In 2021, we went one step further and upgraded it to perform better & more consistently over time, rewriting a lot of the core code and replacing dated technology like .NET Framework with .NET 5, turning it into a console application as well as other ways of making it more lightweight like moving some of it's functionality to our cloud database. We also rewrote a lot of logic, cleaned up the code further and are building new functionality like the new tournament system modularly. New C# Client with 64-bit processing! Yes, that was this year. We gave the game client the same treatment as the server, moving to C# and modern technologies within a span of a couple of months. An interesting story is that we reached out to companies that specialized in converting dated software to modern technology, asking for a quotation on doing it for our client. But before they could get back to us (in a couple of days), we were already close to finishing a working prototype of the new client. I'll let the emails speak for itself. I'm sharing this as a testament of sorts of how stupidly efficient and talented (mainly Wolf) our team is and how proud I am of it. A team of professionals who've made their careers around modernizing code bases brought up concerns, recommended other options and told us we might not be able to reach the same performance of the game client in C#. Yet we did all of that and improved performance marginally in a matter of days before they could make that response. In comparison, there's games currently like Habbo Hotel, MapleStory with multi-million dollar budgets and teams of dozens of people working on similar projects and barely scrapping through or failing at. Habbo Hotel re-launching it's old client after a failed attempt at deprecating it and replacing it with a Unity client and MapleStory losing 32-bit support completely, taking years despite simply being an upgrade to support 64-bit processors - not even a full rewrite. After learning from what we did with the visual basic 6server conversion project, the client was for the most part a breeze for us! I'd also like to thank our Gold Ninja & Silver Ninja on Discord who started testing the New Client with us since January, in preparation for the deprecation of the old client in April. Our Gold Ninja program has always been a way for players to show support to Nin Online through donating a one-time fee, the same price as an indie game title and It's completely optional! While other games monetize through subscription models or by selling Pay-To-Win items for real world currency, Nin Online continues to believe that ethical Free-To-Play is the way to go. This is what the New C# Client looked like at launch in April! Once we had both the client and server modernized, development significantly sped up. We were no longer held back by dated development tools and the lack of proper debugging tools. Here's just some of the awesome stuff we worked on this year. Automated Tournaments (& Events) System As our latest major feature, we've replaced the need for GMs to host tournament events with our very own automated system that can (currently) handle hosting 1v1 tournaments better and faster than a human could and with less error. We're still expanding on this, but we plan to make it as stable and all-encompassing as possible and then schedule automated tournaments throughout the week so that players can depend on it always happening on time and efficiently! Click on the image to view the full video! While 1v1 Tournaments are not the main focus when it comes to Nin Online gameplay, we recognize that this is a fan favorite event (the best things are usually the simplest). We'll soon make it support team tournaments and much more as well. The eventual goal is for this system to be able to host a Chunin Exam by itself. Hair Color Rework Something I've been talking about doing for a long while (since we first launched the new client in the start of 2020), making it so hair colors only require one color artwork (white) and a graphical shader recolors it based on the user's preference was something we finally got to add. This update served more purposes than it first seems, solving multiple problems... The first issue with the old way we did hairstyles (27 colors and 27 artwork files required for each hair) was optimization, if multiple players were on the same map with different colors of the same hairstyle, it would still require a separate texture to load. Textures loading can cause stutters on older PCs and take up a lot of memory. We reduced the amount of hair texture files 27 fold, meaning we went from 2214 texture files to just 82. The second issue was that preparing artwork for new hairstyles took a lot of unnecessary work, with each hair artwork needing to be manually recolored to 27 different color palettes. This reduced work time for each hairstyle and made adding them more accessible for us and for players to contribute artwork. The last issue was that we wanted players to pick from any color in the spectrum, and for individual parts of the hair (eg. Accessories and dip dye designs). We came up with a very advanced solution that only requires the use of a single texture file for each hairstyle, while still containing all the information needed for the graphical shader to know what to color for each color channel. New Day/Night System, Advanced Lighting, Dynamic Shadows & More! Arguably the prettiest thing added to Nin Online since 2013, the new Day/Night overlays, God rays, Lighting system and Dynamic shadows have come together to make Nin Online so much prettier than it was before. Some of this was inspired by the player @Adarya whom submitted great fabricated screenshots for the Screenshot Competition we held in June. This really goes to show that a picture can speak a thousand words. Nin Online has always had beautiful pixel art thanks to dozens of contributors over the years and myself. But until now, these graphics have not been used to it's full potential. I mean, how could we have had lamp posts that never lighted up at night for 7 years until now? That's pretty hard to fathom in hindsight. The only reason we couldn't do it was that it would've never been performant/optimized enough for players on our old Visual Basic 6 client. I'm just so glad we're past that now. Advanced Lighting The lighting system is also probably one of the most optimized 2D Lighting systems ever made, generating quadtree meshes so the client knows only what is needed to be rendered at the time. Dynamic Shadows Another cool visual feature is that characters now cast shadows in real-time, based on their positions relative to the light source. This gives a very pretty effect that is clear from this image! By the way, all the lighting is updated instantly for all players, editable within the game itself by our developers. Nin Online's development toolset is contained within it's game client, which while is very complex to make, makes it possible for us to add content and many of our updates instantly without the users required to patch their clients. New UI System Maybe one of the less obvious advancements we made this year was the creation of a custom new immediate mode user interface (UI) system that has allowed us to rapidly create new UI. As such we've been able to add all of these UI very quickly. A lot of development of new features was previously held back by not being able to easily add UI. Here are some of the new user interfaces introduced or remade this year: Cash Shop/Specials Items Stash, House Panel, Corps Panel, Title Management, Report Player, Confirmation Prompts, Blessing Message Input, Mailbox, Options Panel, Notifications And these are just the user interfaces accessible to players, we also use this on our developer tools! One thing players probably don't know is that we actually developed two new UI systems this year and are in the midst of deprecating the first new UI system in favor of the New New UI System (the immediate mode one). The first UI system was alright, it was used for the Options Menu and the Mail System, but it was tedious to add new UI so kind of defeated the purpose of it. It also had rather poor performance due to re-cursivity in the design. Mail System A feature that seems almost like an afterthought, but is actually very useful for us, is the new mail system. With this, we're able to easily handle things like giving our items to players whom are offline without manually accessing the database to edit player accounts. We're also able to distribute prizes, quest items, send furniture back to players when Kage clear them from shared spaces etc. Basically any time we need to give someone an item while they are offline or their inventory is full, we can use the mailbox now. So the mail system is actually a lot more important than it seems. We also will soon make the mail system usable by players to send items and messages to one another! Instanced Maps, Housing & Furniture System Another huge feature added in 2021 is the new instanced maps feature. This allows us to have maps that are not loaded into the server's memory all the time, so they don't have any strain on the server, unless players need the map. That limitation would've prevented us from sustainably introducing player housing, because every player would've meant an additional map that needed to be loaded on the server start up, and taking up the server's memory. Adding player housing on top of the instance feature was then easy, and to make players able to customize their spaces, we added the furniture system which players are already using creatively to create shared arenas in the village, bars and other roleplaying spaces. Mist Village Public Arena @Northwind's Bar in Asoki Port Village We can't wait to introduce more furniture in the future and let players get creative with it. Also let's not forget Wolf's side project that he worked on in his off time made it so you can watch YouTube videos in Nin Online through TV furniture, or display your favorite YouTube Videos in your house for visitors! Cloud-based statistics & analytics logging We moved all our server's analytics to our cloud database. Thanks to this, we're able to share some fancy statistics! As of 13-Dec-2021, we are seeing 61 average players online across all time zones, and peaking at around 100-148 players online daily! (in Toad, English, North American Server) We've had 39,240 Ninja in the English Server create their ninja in-game! It's times like these I think back on the 2016 thread pointing out that "Nin Online is dying" and titled as such Corporation System replaces Official Organizations Our old Organization system was unsustainable as it required a lot of admin intervention to keep running. Every time we introduced more organizations, it created a lot of administrative work. Hence, as one of the first targets of this year, we aimed to automate and put control directly into player's hands. The old organization system was flawed because it was too hackily linked to the forum software and with a third party forum plugin that was deprecated. We did not have the source code for the plugin, so we were unable to make it do what we needed or upgrade it for the forum software's latest versions. As such, the old organization system was holding us back from upgrading the forum - and oAuth 2.0 was broken on the versions of the forum we were on. This created a dilemma for us that we had to solve all at once or not at all. We have completed the first, most important, part of the systems that will fully replace the old organization systems aka. Corporations. At first, it was using Winforms for the UI, which was very hacky and unintuitive, but once we were done with the New UI system, we created a new UI for it with that. The new corporation system includes functionality such as adding limits (max tenancy period) to how long a player can remain in the Akatsuki, ANBU etc. as well as how long they cannot return (time out). It also allows for setting of roles and rights of those roles directly in the game. The next step in replacing the old organizations system is our plans for a Player Organization system that will just be called Organizations. Players will be able to create ie. Guilds that they can add more players into. Players will be able to contribute towards the organization to unlock new features for it's members. This will hopefully be done in 2022. In total, we finished over 150 Programming Tasks This is just another interesting statistic from our private workspaces. We moved from using Asana to Notion this year, and together eliminated 153 out of 214 tasks in our list (of things to that are required for Nin Online to be code complete). This list included tasks that dated back all the way to 2014 as well as newer tasks. We don't add tasks for things that can be done quickly and immediately, so these are all at least somewhat substantial and can range from anything from "Make player outlines render above everything" to "Auto-Tournaments" to "Lighting System". When I talked about some of the major development changes earlier on in this post, I had such a hard time picking a few out of the list of notable features to expand on because there were so many important changes, but here are some of the others that you might have forgotten has only been added this year... Other Notable Features Transformation Jutsu Pushball Event Red Light Green Light Event Notification System Blessing Messages TV Functionality for displaying YouTube videos in Nin Online Corp Chat Zooming Camera & Target Tracking Running Indicator Player Reporting System Smooth NPC & Projectile Movement Smooth Knockbacks & Knockback Direction Rework Huge optimizations to game installation size Pardon/Exile cooldown Raid System Removed Authentication Server in favor of passive cloud-based solution Server upgraded to .NET 5 Chat Swearword Filter Cloud-based Player Saves Replaced Zlib with LZMA for graphics & packet compression oAuth Login System New Map Renderer New Player Renderer Offset AoE Atatcks New Graphics Encryption method Moved Item & Jutsu Data to Cloud Database Chain Missions New animated login screen Keybind Settings in the Options Panel (Previously they were done in notepad config.ini) Quality of Life Changes Items & NPC names display toggle function and keybind New outline targeting shader & color options Chat bubbles are hidden for players who are cloaked Item drop animation Chat bubble duration based on message length Colored Chat Bubbles Confirmation when Adding Stats Revealing targets behind large objects/buildings/trees aka. Look behind feature Camera moves to NPC you are talking to Displaying Player Title over names Emoticons positioned based on name and title visibility Confirmation prompts for buying/selling items /ignore is no longer case-sensitive Clipboard paste to chat box Option to skip Genin Test Login status displayed on the login screen & new login background Expand Chatbox Feature Ninja Time Displayed at bottom left of the screen Camera Speed Setting Dynamic Game Window Resizing We resolved over 100 Issues This year, we introduced the GitHub Issue Tracker, and then deprecated it, moving over to the new issue tracker right in our forum software. Throughout the year, players submitted issues they were facing. These were anything from crashes to minor bugs affecting them. With this system, we managed to resolve over 100 issues that were submitted by players. Some of the major bug fixes this year include... Fixed over 30 crash bugs Fixed weapon timer desync causing every alternate attack on some weapons to not register Fixed summons not being able to use or get DoT buffs Fixed summons killing NPCs not counting towards XP and Kill counter for missions Fixed player directions not updating visually on the client side when auto-attacking an enemy Fixed Team Display Icons Fixed trade requests failing sometimes Fixed login screen using unnecessary CPU/GPU processing power Fixed heals sometime doing 1 extra interval Fixed bug where If you cast Substitution right after moving to another map, you get stuck Content Additions This year, we introduced the Level 50 Questline - Land of Iron Arc - as well as a bunch of World Bosses (Dark Monkey King, Dark Weasel, Chimeriko etc.) We added housing districts in each village, and over 100 furniture items. Besides this, we released dozens of cosmetics, event prizes & NPC drops and more! This year saw even more player contributions, with a large number of players stepping up to contribute hairstyles, clan items, event prize artwork (pixel art) to the game. This is awesome because Nin Online has always been a game made by fans for fans, and so seeing players contribute their time to make the game better in the areas they want is encouraging! We also spent some time aiming to make the beginner experience a little friendlier with the Level Up! Quest Lines, free automatic stat reset at level 10 and more... We also balanced quite a bit this year with... Major balance changes Reduced Critical Damage Charging Chakra Rework Sensory Jutsu rebalancing Mystical Palm Jutsu rework Will of Fire rework Weapons Mastery Requirements Free Stat Reset given at Level 10 Transformation Technique reworked Rebalanced missions that were too hard Added Level 30 Bubble Jutsu Gentle Fist, Weapon Master, Medical Ninja and Taijutsu balancing For a full list of changes, you can start on Patch Notes page 30 and work your way up to 34! Deprecated Old Updater Software We also abandoned our old Updater/Patcher software that was made and maintained in-house in favor of using PatchKit. This helped solved a regular issue of players who had problems updating their games because of their Anti-Virus software not trusting our C# application. PatchKit settled this for us by having their own certifications and took a burden off our shoulder. Old In-house C# Updater application New PatchKit Updater The old updater software is now open-sourced and free for non-commercial usage. New Forum & Website Designs This year, I also found time to upgrade and revamp the forum software and website designs, after almost 3 years of the same designs (since beta launched). It's something that I've been wanting to do but has never been a priority. I grew up in the 2000s spending a lot of time as a web designer/developer, so a lot of small things about the old site and forum designs bothered me. This became important because of the game becoming more integrated to the forum through the login system using oAuth 2.0. oAuth 2.0 is the standard for security in logins on the web. It is also partly what allowed us to deprecate our Authentication server (a separate C# server application that would liase with our forum's MySQL tables to verify logins) since all of the authentication is handled by the forum, along with the move to MongoDB for the game server registry. The website is important because that's the first thing that anyone who visits our website sees! Two Game Services On top of all that we did, we also were managing two separate game services. North America aka. Global Nin Online and Nin Online Brazil. Shout out to @Kenock, for taking on the role of Ueda in Brazil. This meant while we were pushing updates to Nin Online, we were also regularly pushing updates for Brazil. We also went through a lot of trouble, switching between hosts in Brazil multiple times, I can count at least 5. Hosting in Brazil is not as convenient as in North America, as servers are both weaker and over priced, hosts are less professional etc. In Nin Online Brazil's first year of operation, it already has and peaks at around 70 Players online daily with a 31 player online average across all timezones. Events As time goes on, we hope to provide more and more events for players as a game service. As such, automating them is crucial to free up time from hosting repetitive events, to create creative events that players can enjoy each season. This year we managed to host 3 seasonal events, 8th Anniversary aka. Level Up! Event Halloween 2021 Event Christmas Hidden City of Joy Event In particular, the Halloween Event was something we tried spending more effort doing. This included searching for prize sponsorships and handling logistics for prizes. Once again, we're thankful to JumpButton Studios for sponsoring prizes for the event. Thanks to them, we were able to give 1000 USD worth of prizes including brand new Nintendo Switches and Razer Accessories. We learnt that it is a lot of work to run an event on such a scale. As such, we'll probably not do that very often or at all anymore and instead focus on events that can be automated and scheduled by the system. Eg. A yearly halloween event that activates itself without our intervention. This year, thanks to our GM Team, we managed to host 6 bi-monthly Chunin Exams, making it the first time we've successfully hosted it as planned! Final Notes There is a lot going on behind the scenes every day to make Nin Online possible. There's also a lot of decisions that may seem trivial or not make much sense from a player perspective in the short term. Like why it was important for us to move to oAuth 2.0, why we had to deprecate the old Organization system. But each decision was made with a lot of careful thought put into it, and unfortunately, with limited time comes unlimited responsibility, so I couldn't be spending time justifying each change we made. Instead, just as I've done for 8 years now, I let the results speak for itself and hopefully after 8 years people will start to trust that the game just gets better over time and that we know what we're doing. 8 years is crazy to me, I don't believe there's another game out there in such active development 8 years after it's inception, with our (lack of) budget. I feel it's always necessary to point out that Nin Online does not have the large scale funding that most MMORPG projects do. We're a team of 2 developers and lot's of volunteers. We don't monetize unethically, and we still work full-time on the game because you love it. I'm super proud of what we've accomplished in 2021. I think it's hands down the most productive year in Nin Online's development. This coupled with what we have in store next year gets me excited to continue to be at the helm of Nin Online's development. 2022 is looking just as hopeful, now that the game's codebase is both modernized and stable, you can expect major improvements and feature changes at a good pace. We are also set to launch 2 major story quest lines! Once we're done with that, the sky is the limit for Nin Online. There's never been a better time to play Nin Online, and to introduce friends to the game, so if you enjoy Nin Online, we hope you tell all your friends about it! (and we'll say the same thing next year when it's even better) Oh, since you made it this far, here's a special discount coupon you can use in the cash shop (First 100 uses only!) LETSEND2021GOOD for 21% off anything in the Cash Shop Regards, Ueda If you liked this post, maybe you'd be interested in learning the History of Nin Online that I wrote about a couple of months ago Past Year Recaps
    24 points
  35. I made a few different items for the event that id gladly like to be in the game! (some of the are not meant to rotate and only be place in certain ways, hope you understand my view in this project) One thing to point out is that instead of just making the art i also went ahead and made icons for these items! i hope most people will like these items and im glad we can finally have our own little house to customize! Show Off image Real size (for applying in game) Items applied in a little house (Anything underneath is for the team to copy paste for ease of use) (yes the last one is indeed a nin online scroll)
    24 points
  36. I'm still rather new to the game but I don't mind contributing. These are just a few of the things i'm planning to submit, though I'm not sure how many things you can submit to the contest but i'm planning on making more than just these.
    24 points
  37. Dear Ninja, In the spirit of Nin Online reaching 7 years of development, and 3 years of live service, we are doing a humble event to celebrate another year of Nin Online~ As a throwback, I'm inviting you to take a nostalgia dive to our first ever anniversary post from 2014.. Things were certainly different back then! This year we're going to be doing 3 small things as part of the big celebration. Free Gold Neck Protector For all existing Gold Ninja & Silver Ninja, and for all those who become Gold/Silver before the end of August 2020, you are entitled to receive a free Gold Neck Protector from the cash shop. This is in the same spirit as the Gold Forehead Protectors given to all Gold Ninja from before August 2013. Where the very first few initial supporters of the game donated to the game when it was but an alpha announcement. Although it wasn't a grand sum of money to receive back then, it gave me what I needed to push the game into alpha with a decent server and pay for our upkeep costs through the development early on. For that, Gold Ninja and Silver Ninja will always hold a special place in my heart and in the legacy of Nin Online for being the pioneers of the game. What better way then to all have an item to symbolize "I was here". Time-Exclusive Cosmetic To celebrate our 7th Anniversary, we are going to be selling a limited time only cosmetic item - White Jira Vest! The Jira Vest is a new series of items from 2020 so it's fitting it receives a special version for 2020. The White Jira Vest will be on sale from 1st August - 31st August. After it's sale, it will not be available for purchase anymore ever again, but will be tradeable in-game so that players can continue to pass it down to future players. GM Riddle Me This (For Free Stat Resets) We will also have a mini-event for everyone to play with our GM team. If you want to win a free stat reset (one per player), each GM has been given a limited amount of coupon codes that will give you a free Stat Reset from the cash shop. As long as you can hunt them down and bug them to give you a riddle! If you can answer it there and then, you will be given the code and you can use it to claim a stat reset from the cash shop here..! So far GMs @Erox @Kenock @Serias have each been given 10 Coupons..! @TheWolf is holding 2 with him. More coming soon? We'll see! Conclusions First I'd like to apologize for the delay when it came to this event, we've really had a lot on our plates recently pushing the new server, and all the updates since. As you may guess, this has been a lot of work and as such, celebrations took a back seat. I know I'm not the only one who is joyful about another great year for Nin Online, and the ones to come, so I should know not to be too sluggish on getting this out.. We still have a lot in stall in the coming months and years, so as always, look forward to another great year for Nin Online, and if you're new here.. Welcome to the community! Regards, Ueda
    24 points
  38. It's always nice taking time to look back at a full year of Nin Online running as an actual realized game. As of now, we've had almost 4 years of live service operation since launching Open Beta in May 2017. It feels like such a long time ago now that I actually lose count of how long it's been and have to check announcements to remember. For those who don't know the full history of Nin Online, the game project started development in mid-2013. We had multiple closed and open alpha tests, before finally launching Open Beta in 2017. This recap post is something I try to make time for every year to gather all my thoughts on the state of Nin Online and the state of Nin Online's continued development. Some random "year in numbers" stats This year, we had 10,000+ new registered accounts and 7,478 new forum posts. We localized the game service to Brazilian Portuguese. We added 263 new patch notes... Of all those patch notes, here are some of the highlights of running Nin Online for 2020... Game server recreated in C#, replaces our Visual Basic 6 server operation! Networking replaced from Winsock networking to Mirror. Unique Clan Clothings Improved Idle Animations for player and NPC characters. Village special abilities (buff WoF ) Crazy new crosshairs (rainbow spin woo) Flicker improvements (won't fail to flicker when player's front and back and blocked) First level 50+ content (Blood puppet factory area) Optimized large packets including map packet sizes by 60% Ninja Dodgeball Event 7 new side missions Added signboards in villages for directions and on-screen instructions for aviary and scroll shops New GM event system (the /eventjoin system) Moved stash from Gumi to dedicated UI button Added 43 Gold/Silver exclusive emoticons 5 Chunin Exams, 3 mini-events in the middle of the year, Anniversary Event, Halloween Event & Let it Snow event Added a friggin' gun FINALLY Fixed random DoT / Maplock bug 104 new items (not all released) 28 new mobs & npcs (not all released) 11 new jutsu animations (not all released) Nin Online Podcasts I had a lot of fun on the 4~ Nin Online podcast episodes I did this year, including the one where the new client was shown off! It was nice to talk to everyone we interviewed and hear their stories about the community and experiences in-game. I hope to do more in the future! The year of player contributions I have to say that this year has been a first in the amount of people stepping up to create art or hire people to create art, independent of any direction from myself, for Nin Online. It all began with people learning to do pixel art or getting others to help create clan outfits for their own clans, other clans and eventually entire pieces of content like weapons and Christmas cosmetics. Thank you for everyone who went out of their way to contribute to Nin Online your time and money, and I'm happy to have help! The new server software The importance of the replacement of our old server software to our new C# server... cannot be understated. It's been so nice knowing the server isn't crashing when it reaches 100+ players anymore. With the new server moving to C# also comes the added benefit of a modern development environment which has helped so much in solving bugs like just today fixing the years old bug of people getting damaged by random NPC poison/bleed effects. Without the new server, this wouldn't have been possible. The way our new server handles errors like a boss, not resulting in crashes, has also been something we previously never accounted for but has been so great. Transparency & Optimism for 2021 Honestly, I feel that the second half of 2020 was slower than I would've liked it to be in terms of content updates. Also, I took a long break for the majority of December to play Cyberpunk 2077 and watch Community. :p I have a lot of optimism that things will pick up with the start of the new year, we have work and people lined up to help me in the coming months, including my plans to steal Wolf back from his big game studio job soon. I am excited to start 2021 with some content updates dropping as early as January. On top of that, Nin Online has been performing a lot better than past years financially (thanks to more players stuck at home during the pandemic and the new brazil localization), and with that I'm able to start paying people more to work on Nin, which is going to be a great going forward. Gratitude Finally, I just want to thank the Nin Online team who have really helped me with Nin Online this year. Thank you @TheWolf for working with me throughout the year. Thank you @Kenock for leading the expansion of Nin Online's game service into Brazil, constantly pestering me to work on specific issues and telling me whenever the server crashes. Thank you @Erox for being a big help with support, moderation and running events. Thank you @Serias for actively helping me with art and also moderation. Thank you @Robin for helping with the new server project. Thank you @Seth for his continued assistance despite having a busy year attending school. Thank you @Sezu for joining us again this week and already contributing a bunch of the upcoming content. Thank you @external & @Lucass for helping us moderate discord. EDIT: On one last note, there's something I'd like to say that I forgot to write about when I posted this... In a year like 2020, where myself included, a lot of us were forced to spent a large portion of it cooped up at home, the community has been a nice place to enjoy a social environment with stakes beyond short rounds of finding out who the imposter is, or running through obstacle courses with strangers. Nin Online is a special game, but not just because of what the game is, but what the community has made it become. The Nin Online community is amazing - we have "petty drama" every day, we feel strongly defensive about what they represent, and people have friendships (and pseudo enemies) that go beyond what casual interactions in other games allow you to... because you guys spend months to years in it, interacting with one another, making stories and a history of meaningful events in our collective imaginative world. Nin Online Community is truly something like no other. I have not felt the amount of comradery and stake in a long time, and as much as I try to stay neutral to everything, watching people form their own personas or show their character makes being around the community a very enjoyable experience. In 5 years, I don't know if Nin Online will still be around, it might be. In 10 years, who knows? But the one thing you'll surely remember from your time here are the experiences with people you shared here. People will come and go, nobody can stay entertained on something forever. But during your time in the community, enjoy your share of stories and impart enough for others to remember you. That's what community is about, and on a bigger scale, what life is about. I appreciate what everyone here contributes in their own way as a person to the whole community. Enjoy your petty drama and discord pvps, because it's a privilege to feel such strong emotion about something and because who knows when the next time you'll feel so strongly about anything is, Thank you!
    23 points
  39. Connection Status text now shown during login on the client To inform players what's going on in the background while they login. No more Authentication Server Removed the need for central authentication server application by using modern database, cloud-based replacement. This also means the issue where the server would not "come back online" after automated scheduled maintenances is fixed. Cloud-based Saves Rewrote saving of player data from saving to local JSON files to saving into cloud database. Upgraded server to .NET 5, stripped down to lightweight console application Faster generally, cross-platform server application. Server ported to a Console Application. Replaced ZLib with LZMA A Modern, faster compression library, with better compatibility. ZLib was causing some players to be unable to run the new client. New oAuth Login System (Social Logins!) Rewritten login system to login through OAuth 2.0 standard which allows players to authenticate directly through the forum. This also means social logins is working again after all this time. Not just the existing methods of social logins, but we can basically add any service that has oAuth as an authentication method for Nin Online! Map Instancing We now have the in-engine functionality to create instanced maps. This for the time being will just used for Player Housing. Player Housing Player Housing is now implemented into the Engine, however there are currently no purchasable houses in the world, we'll add them as soon as we ensure the server is stable. Furniture System aka Placeable Objects Placeable Objects, there are now items that can be placed into the world (not just houses) like a Chair, or Table. Corporation aka. Corps System This is the successor to Official Organizations. Player Organizations will be a completely separate, new system in the future. Corporations is a fully in-game replacement of player organizations. Kages can now manage the corps in their village, and assign leaders there. Leaders can manage members. Each corporation can have a unique set of roles/titles. Each corporation can have a time limit for how long a member can stay in it, and a cooldown for how long before you can rejoin it. This takes effect whether you were kicked or time runs out to prevent abuse. The in-game UI for Corps is currently using a temporary UI that only works when running in windowed mode. New Player Reporting System The previous report system was essentially useless. You can now Right-click -> Report a player to open a game window that asks you what the player is doing wrong. This will immediately alert any GMs online about it, and save the report to our cloud server, where can handle data better than ever before. Profanity Chat Filter In an effort to encourage better player communication, we've added a system that replaces words like the N word to a cleaner alternative. Added 144 FPS cap on the client This was missing in the previous versions of the Inochi client. Stat Reset at Level 10 This is now a permanent, automatic feature because I don't want people feeling that they didn't add the right stats at level 10 and need to buy a stat reset or create a new character. It's too early to take a player's money, and they didn't know any better. So at level 10, your stats automatically reset, no item required. Forum upgraded The forum just underwent a major upgrade after quite some years. It should contain a lot of cool new features coming soon! Client now prioritizes 64-bit processing mode. Replaced client fonts. Improved Map Loading times by improving process and using better compression method. Rewrote how Packets are handled on the server, Improving latency by up to 20ms 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. Fixed Blurry Textures after Zooming Bug Possibly fixed the Client bug known as "After Images" Fixed a bug where typing in some UI would trigger HUD and interact with the game. Map Transitions are now Time Based instead of FPS based and should be consistently fast on lower FPS capped clients. 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. Fixed client grabbing your wrong IPv4 for localhost testing. Fixed some visual flaws in Character Creation with the Mist Village button (No animations). Improved Combat Text to move at a consistent speed on all FPS. Client now Times out during Server Selection if it fails to login after 30 seconds Fixed a bug where Jutsu with cooldowns less then 1 second wouldn't be correctly processed Fix to Slow Cast Jutsu making walking move players backwards Fixed an exploitable bug where two trades could be opened at once Fixed a lot of issues where the Client would disconnect from the server unexpectedly. Rewrote game's time calculations, which Improves Server Responsiveness for attacks and Jutsu. Optimized, refactored login processing to speed up logins dramatically. Halved the server startup times by threading loading of data, allowing for faster server scheduled maintenances restarts. Powerful server Job System, allowing for tasks to be multi-threaded, put simply, This improves server performance. Improved the new UI System (Currently used for options menu, housing menu) rendering performance. Fixed an issue with resizing your client making the cursor invisible on the title bar of the game. Game Masters & Developer Related Changes Players can now be muted for longer than 255 hours Fixed some of our Live Editors crashing the game on the new client /heal can now be used by Game Masters, allowing them to remove Battle Injuries from players Clone/Paste functionality has returned to our Live Editors. Fixed many Event Management commands not working as intended Added /faint to force yourself to faint PatchnoteFeaturesHeader.png.cb804e75c3da7a4e81a4bcaf546ecd6d.png.1477a5ae2419bed77fe06f7c7eeba9de.png.url
    22 points
  40. Dear Ninja, The next update for Nin Online has been awhile coming now, and we're also not sure when we'll be able to get it ready to launch. We're working almost every day of the week to try to make sure the update is the best it can be. But in the end, it's only really going to disappoint a large number of people because just by launching it because it's not like straight out content updates, we've been working on underlying systems a lot to get the game fully modernized. We put time into the wrong things In hindsight, a lot of what we've been working on is less important than it seemed. Like we re-programmed the entire game's saving to be Object-Oriented, in a production-level cloud database, MongoDB Atlas, but in the end, it's still going to be entirely the same for the end user. So it's a shame, it's something I believed was going to be a seamless transition, but took weeks out of our time to resolve all the problems, and we might still be having some. And again, in hindsight, this should've taken a backseat to working on things people care about or would directly affected their gameplay. Cloud saving is nice to have, and it brings about opportunity for stuff like a Web frontend for Nin, like imagine being able to display your characters on the forum, or edit their name from the web, manage your items etc. We rewrote the login system to use oAuth, a clean login standard that means no more entering your password every time you want to login too. It also simplifies our server's job of checking MySQL tables to check if a player is banned because oAuth handles all that on the client and web side. Logins should also just be faster in general now, as we've rewrote a lot of the underlying login code as well. We updated the server to work with .NET 5 instead of .NET Framework. It's basically Microsoft's latest development framework. Which sounds like a small change, but .NET Framework is ancient technology at this point. .NET 5 allows us to modernize the server even further and export it as a containerized server for hosting services like Heroku. This also means that the server is now a console application, and cross-platform (we can host it on Linux servers which are cheaper because Linux is free and Windows Servers need licenses, Linux servers are also more easily available). Along with this, we also halved the server loading/launching time. So less down time between server restarts. Wolf rewrote the packet handler thread in this update, it should shave off about 20ms off larger packets. We updated our networking library to use it's latest version, this was an attempt to fix some low-level bugs with disconnection we were having. We replaced the compression library from Zlib to LZMA, which fixes a lot of compatibility issues players were having with the new client and potential crashes. We also managed to get map packets and map loading down a lot with better compression along with reducing the amount of packets needed to be sent on login by almost 10 fold. So faster logins, better map loading times. But in order to do this, it meant we had to deprecate the old client. It's a weird situation. In order to deprecate the old client we needed to make this change, but Zlib was also making it so some people couldn't move to the new client. We have the player housing update, furniture update and corps update in this too one patch too. We also used MongoDB to replace an entire component of our server architecture, our authentication. It's now an entirely passive web-based solution. Servers register to an online database instead of sending that data to the authentication server to do the central server selection stuff. As such, we also had to make it so the server does the saving directly to the cloud instead of the authentication server. So a lot of these things were interconnected, and had to be all done at once. This directly caused us to stack update after update into one patch, and it became harder and harder to push one patch without issues. With all the major architectural changes and low-level code rewrites, a lot of things broke. Because of the nature of the changes we were making, we also couldn't make them independently of each other, so it had to be one big update or nothing. There's also a hundred other things I've left out, including reworking movement on the client side to animate smoother. These things don't make the patch any more complicated, so it's not worth mentioning. Hectic month of testing with BR Server We started testing the latest patch around a month ago on the Brazil Server now. During that time, we've fixed issue after issue, and some of the "fixes" were also entire rewrites, which caused more issues. It's been stressful, we've had days spent just fixing login issues, and days spent just fixing saving. We've had data corruption issues, where players accounts and all their data become too messed up to fix, and we've had to do hacky fixes for them like restore partially their data from old backups. We've had a period where the same player couldn't login for a span of days, and we realized the server wasn't disconnecting players properly. Stressful stuff. We've had issues where resetting characters wasn't working and worst yet, it created a duping exploit. We've had more of these issues in a span of a month, than we've had over the last 3 years of development. We pushed two new major features, one is currently being used actively, and that also came with it's own issues, but was a lot easier to fix than the issues that came from major architectural changes. Though some have been incidental to them. We've had issues where players were logging in as other players when they tried to login at the same time. We've had players spamming us telling us we're idiots and we should just put back the old client, we've had players spamming us telling us to revert to the old server, to stop using them as a test server, all while our full-time job had become fixing issues for a month. It's been stressful, for both me and Wolf. Side note: Whenever Brazil players complain about the issues happening, we sympathize with them, but we also think about how up until now, they've only been getting updates that have been screened and tested by the NA/Global server (you guys) and so they're fortunate to not have been the guinea pigs up until now haha Irreversible Update The worst part in all this was the difficulty in which the reversal of this update would've been. In order to update Brazil server, we needed to move all of the existing data into the cloud into a slightly different format. Which meant if we want to reverse the update, we would need to build a software to convert the data back into our old format as local JSON files or rolling back players a month. So it's been a go hard or go home month. There were times where I'm so tired I wanted to reverse the entire update and call it quits (this also happened just yesterday) but I had to force myself to look through code and fix it instead, despite being so sick of it. This is going to be even more so irreversible for the main server, because in order to update the next patch, we have to update the forum software, and that's one-way. So we're going to have to be even more careful with this server, which is why we're taking our time and making sure everything is good to go. The worst part I'm also stressing out about how this update won't bring enough content to make players happy, or bring gameplay value to people. It's very painful, knowing this, because we've been working so hard on this, but I know in the end, this is more for the sake of the game in the long term, and also some of it is just wasted effort. Most people won't care that the game server runs slightly smoother and that login is faster, more convenient etc. Nobody is going to care that player data is now stored in a cloud database. This update has been months of work now, but I'm just waiting for the criticism on how it's a shit update etc. It's going to happen, and I'll understand why, but it'll still be hurtful. This update when it takes into account how much work has gone into it by two of us, thousands of hours of work, which means tens of thousands of dollars worth of work. It's not funny for me, it's very painful. And I agree with players, is it really necessary? We could've done without. I could've just not have a full-time programmer, and I could've just focused my time on working on stuff people care about like adding more Jutsu. This has been the hardest months of development since maybe 2017 when the server was unstable, crashing every 1-4 hours, and it's self inflicted. The bright side The bright side is that things are looking much better, there seems to be some rare bugs that happen, but it's stable for the most part now. One guy claims he managed to login multiple times in a row without it saving his progress, which we're looking into. And there's some others who seem to not be able to login sometimes. We're looking into that too. The reception of the update has been a lot better, after holding a tournament yesterday, Kenock (Brazil server admin) remarked that the server felt smoother than ever with a large number of people on the map, and it was a high activity period of Brazil server as well, so there were lots of players online in general. Brazil server host is also notoriously bad (despite being super expensive), so if it runs on Brazil's server well, it's going to run even better on NA's. We don't know when we'll be confident to launch this update on the main server yet. Because if anything messes up, we'll be running heroics, fixing corrupted data, or salvaging the situation, pushing updates on two servers instead of one. This is another reason why we regret so much making this update so major (on an architectural level). We did also have to do a lot of this in order to deprecate the old client. We did spend some time making sure the new client is ready to completely replace the old client, and that anyone will be able to use it. So we haven't had anyone on Brazil server that can't use the new client completely anymore... Lastly, I'd just like to apologize in advance if what we've worked on doesn't please you. I know, it's not what anyone wanted. But we've been doing what we thought was important. We've re-evaluated what's more important going forward and will focus on bringing content updates here on out. It's both easier for us, and more fun for you. Regards, Ueda EDIT: Just thought of something funny. Maybe the reason we worked on Cloud saving is because everyone kept asking "Cloud when?" and we interpreted it wrongly EDIT2: Some of the low-level changes we made include rewriting the game's method of calculating time, and the spell buffer. This could've been causing issues with sometimes your jutsu not casting when you press it, and small things like that - that maybe some players will notice.
    22 points
  41. This post should have happened maximum a year after that 2018 post. As I fully understand where you are going and why it is best to work on other stuff, I feel like we have been hyped and missled by you. We are not a big community and we are the core reason of why Nin Online is still a thing. Yet you kept the truth from us for years. We know very little of what you are planing and why certain things are the way they are even tho most of us, this precious community, cant understand the reasoning without answers. Many jutsu's are the way they currently are because of advanced and many in game unbalance were unchanged because of advanced. Advanced were the reasoning behind lots of things that didnt make sence to us. But we waited because advanced masteries were suppose to be the answer to our many questions. We endured true unbalance and a medical ninja pandemic because things were supposed to be set for the future balance. It was only natural for us to spam you and question you about advanced masteries. I know this was annoying, but if you had said the truth from the begining, for my part I wouldnt feel lied. As for now, since the advanced are cancelled, it would be nice if the in game pvp balance is not based around the future and actually based around what it is currently. Yours truly, Nin Online lover and addict since 2015, Indra.
    22 points
  42. First of all, best suggestion post I've seen in a long time, maybe ever. First one that really made me smile in a long time at least. We're in the midst of some major reworks as you can tell, this is becoming more possible by the day. I've pinned it as an example of what suggestions can be!
    22 points
  43. New Level 35 Wind (INT) Jutsu: Wind Claw Technique! Murasame Clan Outfits added! Hoshi Clan Scarf added! All secondary pieces of Clan clothings are now level 20 required. For example, if a clan has a robe and a vest, the robe will be level 10 and the vest will be level 20. Renamed Hoshi Folding Fan to Star Folding Fan to avoid confusion. Wind Claw Technique causes Bleed II. Slicing Wind Technique, Wind Scythe Technique, Wild Slashes Technique and Blade Piercing Technique causes Bleed I.
    22 points
  44. Mailbox System This isn't activated for player use yet, but we've added a new mailbox feature where we can send items to players when their inventory is full, for events etc. An example of usage for this will be that when players house rent ends, we'll collect their furniture and mail it to them. Other uses would be for debugging players or distributing items for events (eg. Free stat reset day~) This will come a bit later, but we also intend to let players send items to each other for a Ryo (in-game currency) fee/tax. Knockback System Rework Can no longer control knockback directions by changing own direction for projectiles Slight knockback animations so players can track targets better visually. Also optimized and cleaned up the code a lot. I understand that this will rustle some feathers. Although it's a bug fix, players have built a meta game around this bug and fixing it was a decision that I had to take serious consideration about. It was a bug that introduced some level of complexity to combat, but it was also very hard to balance around. We'll have to make some balance changes in the coming days, and we're open to feedback. Added warning when dropping an item in an instanced map Players were thinking they could transfer items in instanced maps. Added new feature to our universal control prompts (Esc to cancel). Added text wrapping to new UI system, used for improving text rendering on confirmation prompts for now. (Admin only) Dummy logged in players now can be attacked (Admin only) Added command for us to broadcast messages to specific villages Fixed Projectile Max Range rendering (they were disappearing too late). Fixed players being unable to Right click -> Report concealed ninja. Fixed world maps in village displaying general world map rather than village specific maps. Fixed players getting stuck when using a buff (eg. Substitution Technique) right after changing maps. Fixed 2 misc. obscure client crashes due to null values. Fixed players being able to get knocked back into player house walls and solid furniture.
    21 points
  45. Suwa Clan Attires The suwa clan like many clans have been waiting on new clothing. @Ryutekzu, Takami and @Sin, have contacted me, to create an updated attires for the suwa clan. We would like to ask @Ueda if he accepts the designs and whether or not he likes them, so that we may continue working on the sprites. Large Size Normal size Artist: @Roei Guidance: @Ryutekzu, @Sin And Takami
    21 points
  46. As some of you MAY KNOW, the Boss enemy, Dark Weasel, uses 2 techniques: Dark Wind Scythe - Dark Slicing Wind - What I would like to suggest is, Bosses that can cast jutsus should drop a scroll that can re-skin a specific jutsu to the dark version of it. The scroll would be one time use and tradeable. Examples: Dark Weasel skins: Dark Slicing Wind Re-Skin Scroll Dark Wind Scythe Re-Skin Scroll Kiemon skins: Dark Phoenix Fireball Re-Skin Scroll Dark Great Fireball Re-Skin Scroll Reain skins: Dark Wind Barrage Re-Skin Scroll Dark Slashing Tornadoes Re-Skin Scroll These are only a couple of examples, but my idea is for every Boss that can cast jutsus, there could be these skin drops. Please leave feedback down below C: -Thanks for readin
    21 points
  47. Jiroubou | To the next era of the Hidden Leaf.
    21 points
  48. NyctoPhilia The White demon of the Mist Known For Her Insane use of the Mist Hidden Techniques
    21 points
  49. October 2020 PromotionsLeaf Village Jonin: @Charky @Prado Chunin: @Blade Dancer @Jay @Argalo @Black Rain @Ryutekzu Sand Village Jonin: @Donatello Johnson @Bolan Chunin: @rompeortos @SandMaster @Zeref @Marino @Ivannice Specialized Jonin: @Yaeto for exemplary medical ninjutsu use Mist Village Jonin: @Boo @Leiting Chunin: @Ainz Ooal Gown @RedRum @Kronkaro @Yashagoro @The Avatar I'd like to thank @Serias for hosting Leaf and Mist Chunin Exams and @Erox for hosting Sand Chunin Exams! Great work!
    21 points
  50. Hello everyone! I found this website the other day in another discord server and I wanted to share it here. https://picrew.me/ This website allows you to create your own custom character in a lot of different artstyles. While the website is in japanese its pretty easy to navigate. (If you use google chrome, you can right click anywhere on the website and select translate to english.) With a little work you can even add some things yourself! Like for example I added The leaf bandana and Netted shirt to the art to make it look like my character even more! I think this can be very useful for a lot of people RPing.
    20 points
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