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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

Jeez, 7 years? Well I’ll be damned. I’ve only here for bout 3 if those, huh.

started playing this game on 2016 on another account, even with the breaks i took i cant leave this game definitely, this game is so niche but yeat so amazing sometimes apart from all the turbulences it went through, i think i will play it till its end, rory, although you do some bad decisions sometimes i gotta admit nin is the best game of this kind.

Happy Birthday Nin!

All love.. Onto the next successful year!

Yo yo, I joined the Nin community in 2015. Played off and on waiting for Nin to improve over the years. I've tried to support when I could , and I'll continue to support when I can. I appreciate the hard work and dedication to creating a home for us Ninja. I have genuine love and respect for you guys and y'all work. P.S. Can you drop Kimimaro inspired robes and hair next? lol gotta get that in there...

wow I was 2 when this game was made thats crazy (but my parents let me play this game so its fine) nice work roro

That vest is looking dope

7 Years huh, where has the time gone. Congrats on the 7 years.

White Jira vest!!!

2015-2020+! Happy anniversary Nin! Been a fun Journey.

Aye, I've spent over a year and a half here... just a kiddo. But I don't think I will ever forget everything that has impacted me on this crazy journey!

I really feel this with Nin and I love it.

The clan's logo is basically bones that look like flowers, the clan isn't similar to the Yamanaka clan at all. If anything the clan is similar to the Kaguya clan, Kimimaro's clan. Our clan's ability should be bone release. I personally think that it should scale with agility because Kimimaro's attacks were basically dances. Basically they should get a kekkei genkai that boosts their stats by 2 and gives them one sub when activated. And they actually remind me more of the Hyuga clan considering the Hyuga clan was probably one of the richest clan in the leaf village. So yeah a boost that lasts for like 3 minutes and gives them a sub. Since they're medical ninjas, they should get buffed healing abilities, basically like a passive. That's all I can come up with right now ^^

Appreciate the compliment there. Few of us had bought Gold Ninja before there was a single benefit to it back in the day and Rory had nothing to show to us, we had such high hopes. Never been around for a game this long only because it has potential. We've built such a great community over the years.

Dear Ninja, Here's another wall of text, this one talking about the core game designs and philosophy behind.. Daily Missions! Before there was daily missions, the only way to level up was to grind. Killing enemies repeatedly. When initially designing Nin Online, one of the hardest problems was trying to create a variety of ways for players to level up. One of the ideas was to make it so open-world PvP gave experience. Another idea was to reward medical ninja for healing players. This would turn out to be a big headache because of all the ways this would cause huge infinitely experience exploits. Preventing Exploits As simple as it sounds, giving experience to ninja for killing other ninja, or healing other ninja is not possible because it opens up better ways to train with no risk, opening up exploits where you can just stand outside a hospital and make one character kill another to level up, or you can pay high level ninja to let you kill them for hours to level up. Or you could just use a bot to do all those things. One of the things that having missions that limit the amount you can do such things is that you can't plan to just "cheat" the system to the top. The missions tell you to kill X players, and once you're done with that, your next goal is collect X bounty. This way, you can't just AFK near the hospital and bot for hours getting XP from killing people. We still want to reward players for open world pvp, but we don't want to do it carelessly or replace killing mobs, or actually doing missions. So we make the rewards part of the missions system. Where who and why you kill. Is it just any enemy? or is it somebody with a bounty? As time goes on, we can make it increasingly more specific. Eg. missions that tell you to kill 1 Mist village ninja. Kill 1 Sand village ninja. Kill 3 Missing Ninja. Kill 1 ninja from Level 10-30. These are all tasks that both reward for open world pvp, and prevent you from exploiting or just repeatedly paying the highest level player around to AFK and let you kill him for hours to level up. Variety While preventing infinite experience loops is an important function. It is far from the main purpose of the system. The main purpose in the system is to create variety in the game play experience and the journey to becoming a powerful ninja. Instead of a repetitive grind, the daily missions give you a random journey to go on. A mission like "Collect 30 Something" provides you with more options than just going out and killing for XP. If you have spare Ryo, you can buy it from somebody. Your journey then becomes meeting up with this player in a location to make the exchange happen. A mission like "Kill X Enemy Ninja" lets you take a break from the endless grind to interact with other players. Team up. Explore the larger world. Infiltrate the enemy villages. Although not encouraged, it also allows you to attempt to negotiate exchanges with enemy village ninja. A mission like "Collect X Bounty Rewards" let's you open up your bingo book and find players who are enemies of the village, then track them down based on where you think they'd likely be for their level range, or based on their village. A mission like "Time off!" puts you in a place where you can relax and where you have time to burn, to socialize. Although the reward is low, it is there, and doing nothing but socializing for a few minutes can be seen as a good break from grinding. If you're not up to it, then better luck on the RNG, but getting experience for doing little to nothing and just appreciating the world is a good break nevertheless. The balance in how much experience it should give you is important, and maybe we haven't quite got it right. It should be enough so that you have the choice between just grinding - or doing nothing and getting a lesser reward, but hey, the RNG village mission assigners told you to do it so might as well just chill for awhile. We also send enemies potentially your way, so it's not always completely peaceful. There's also tons of missions that provide short stories and ask you to go on small adventures like finding a missing cat, or retrieving a hawk. You may bump into other players during the time, or you can ask people for help on where they would likely be, creating a way for experienced players to help new players in a way besides letting people kill you for XP (back to Preventing Exploits). Variety in experience for these missions can be drastic, but the way we balance it is so that your journey to maximum level is only a matter of time. If you just complete your dailies, eventually you will get to maximum level. Sometimes that journey might give you more experience, or sometimes it will give you less. But it's balanced so that eventually your luck will get you there at the same rate as everyone else, so that you don't feel the pressure to just grind your way to max level. The Limit The limit on daily mission exists so that we can provide the option to abandon missions. We want ninja to complete their missions. But we also don't want them to be stuck on a mission forever when it's not possible for them to finish it if there's no players online. The way we balance missions to give you experienced fairly so that all missions are worth doing, is by limiting it. We don't want players just abandoning the low experience missions to reroll for high experience missions. If given a choice, nobody wants to do the lower experience missions because you start to see Time vs. Reward. Of course it's meaningless to take a break and do "Guard Duty" if the Documents Mission is just more productive. But thats not fun. Feeling as if the only viable way to play is if you abandon your guard duty to get documents just kills variety. Then you're stupid not to! Back in earlier versions of the game, we could already see this behavior when we allowed players to share missions (this was an experiment that Seth did). What happened was the entire game play became a matter of finding players with the high experience missions and begging them to share it with you. Because you'd be stupid not to! Why waste your time doing something like "Guard Duty", when you could do "Retrieve Documents" which gives you more experience in less time? But the entire balance of rewards is designed to take you to max level eventually. The high XP missions exist because the low XP missions exist. If the game let you choose to only do the currently high XP missions, then those high XP missions would have to be nerfed to the point where it still takes you about the same time to get to max level. We want ninja to take their time to get to max level, because at every level tier, there is opportunity for unique RP, unique battles and unique experiences. (But this topic is for another design development log!) Lore The final case for daily missions being the way they are is the lore. It's clear in the Naruto series that ninja just don't choose what missions they're assigned to. The story of any ninja in Nin Online shouldn't be "I completed Retrieve Documents 1000 times to become a Jonin". The variety in experiences is what made your ninja the powerful ninja he is. To paint a fuller picture, daily missions are supposed to be the grind that you don't see ninja in the Naruto series do. It's mentioned and shown many times in the series that when you're not watching team InoShikaCho doing a crazy mission arc, they are out serving the village in less epic ways. The Toad village Arc at level 30 in Nin Online is a storyline arc that took a long time to do, and creates a one-time off story arc that is something that would be showcased in the anime series. While daily missions are the missions you don't see. But in Nin Online, you play as one ninja all the way, you see his full picture. Him doing epic adventures, and also taking time off! Eventually what we want is for there to be an interesting Toad village arc-like story mission for every village at every 10 levels. I'm currently planning level 20 arcs for the Leaf village to be something like a Zabuza arc for example. Conclusion It's 7am in the morning and I'm sure I've missed out a lot of points. I might be all over the place with my explanation, and I'm sure it'll still leave some questions unanswered, or it might have completely went over your head and you still don't understand why Daily Missions are random and how the solve the grind mobs problem. In which case, I'll probably do a second version of this dev log when I'm less sleepy! Regards, Rory