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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.

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.

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

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

I've always felt becoming a Chuunin and Jonin was under-whelming. Nothing came with those ranks except a piece of clothing and the rank name itself. My suggestion today is to give more meaning to becoming a ranked ninja for your village. Blood and Chakra pills Tier 2/3- With the addition of tiers to pills, I suggest locking them to higher ranked ninja. It makes sense RP wise, for example the effects of these pills are too strong for a mere genin to use. Only a Chuunin ranked ninja who's faced adversary can handle it. So these should be locked to Chuunin ninjas. Blood and Chakra pills Tier 4 - You must be a Jonin to use these. Charms - I feel like charms are great for the game but really underrated / forgotten. When ninjas do know about them they often get a charm that doesn't work with their build / masteries. My suggestion is that once a ninja becomes a Chuunin (or Jonin) they can travel to the charm NPC and ask for their palm to be read again in an attempt to change their charm for a ryo amount (I suggest 1000 ryo) and they should be able to change it as many times as they want. Discounted items in the village - As a Jonin of the village, you build a rapport with the NPC's you've been serving throughout your ninja journey and they are extremely grateful for being protected by you so they want to show you their appreciation and give you a discount on what they are selling. - Option to buy 100 tools for 150 ryo - Option to buy 100 pills for 20% discount. Example, 100 tier 1 pills costs 2500 ryo, as a jonin you can buy them for 2000 ryo. - Option to buy clothes in the respected village for 20% discount. Example, Mist Pimp jacket is 40,000 ryo, as a jonin you pay 32,000 ryo. Unlock Spawn Points - This is a Jonin req benefit. Being able to spawn at a different area would be an awesome benefit to have because of your hard work of becoming a jonin ranked ninja. Mist Jonins - Unlock Spawn point at Tatori Village Leaf Jonins - Unlock Spawn point at Tanzaku Sand Jonins - Unlock Spawn point at Blood Puppet NPC These are just some that I have on my mind and I'm sure if @Ueda approves then as a community we can think of more. I hope you enjoyed reading these and I can count on your support!

Dear Ninja, I think it's around that time of year again where it's time to commemorate Nin Online's 9th Anniversary. Nin Online started in June 2013 officially (we were working on it for 2 months prior to announcing it) and so every June is a bit special in that we can celebrate Nin Online still going strong. Version 4 On top of it being 9 years of Nin Online, we've also today hit another arbitrary milestone, namely we've hit version 4.0.0, which means you're officially playing Nin Online 4 at this point. To put it into perspective, we launched the Inochi Client aka. New Client aka. C# Client in 2021 as version 3.5.0. The way we iterate the version numbers is... Minor increments, when there is no need to invalidate a past version 3.5.0 -> 3.5.0b/c/d/e/f/g/h/i/j Major increments, when we don't want people of the last version to login to the game 3.5.0x -> 3.5.1 In this way, we've released 194 client updates since April 2021. Which puts us at an average of around 1 update every 2 days. Before this, we weren't tracking updates, but it has always been about that. This is also not considering updates that are only server sided! aX6j08b.mp4 When we launched the C# Client, the number of changes that were in it on top of just optimizations could be counted with your fingers. We had to maintain the same feature set for the most part to retain compatibility with the old server and old client because it had yet to be deprecated. When it launched, the coolest thing was that it had a more modern camera and it had an options menu (that worked). Since then, it's had entire new systems that were impossible before added: such as the Lighting System, Map Baking, Seeing behind walls, oAuth and Quick Logins, Mailing. Thanks to the client being made in Visual Studio, we've had such an easy time debugging for Nin Online in the past year. Just in the past month, we've fixed over 100 reported bugs. We've also had the benefit of working with Github Copilot in the past few weeks, it's almost crazy for me to say this, but we're literally using ML and cutting edge technology to work on Nin Online. A bewildering departure from the days of working with a 1990s IDE (Visual Basic 6) for those who don't know, that's how Nin Online was built in 2013. This has always been the vision and this is why despite many asking for us the retain the old client, we couldn't. We're excited to add so much more that would've been impossible in the past. 9 Years I don't want to say too much and take away from next year's Denary. Because it's still not the 10th year of Nin Online, but it will officially be next year, it's just really close to it. I don't think many people can say they've given a decade of their lives to a project like this. I'm very proud of how far the game has come, and when I say this, I get flashbacks to times where people were telling me Nin Online was going to die soon etc. I even came across a post of myself in 2014 recently talking about how I saw Nin Online maybe lasting 4-5 years. A lot of what I believed was possible then came from similar experiences working on games in the past on Online Games, BYOND, Private Servers. I thought that a game like this would have a short, finite lifespan for sure because that's how it always was. It took me years to realize that it was possible to build a game that is sustainable. Most people who play Nin Online will never learn the deep history of the game. Nin Online is not a game that has ever been about money or even a game that pleases the mass market. To truly understand that, this year, I've written a long elaborate history of the game since its inception and first attempts in 2004. I really hope you give it a read with your time! I think it'll give a new perspective on the game, and also help your understand why I do this and make the choices I make. I'd also be honored if as many people as possible live their lives knowing the history of this little game development scene that happened in the 2000s until today. I don't want the history to live and die with me! The future Well first I have to get some 9th anniversary events going then we can talk about the long term future. But I think the future of Nin Online has never been surer, we'll continue to put out great updates as we always have. We hope you keep supporting Nin Online! Regards, Ueda

Read from left to right To be continued... Character Creation Insta link:https://instagram.com/antar__86?utm_medium=copy_link Source Material

The return of the demon Z

PLEASE... This raid point is offcenter, it looks so ugly and in the middle of a bridge/road. @Ueda I beg u to move it

Bosses such as Kraken, Dark Monkey, and Dark Weasel have very long spawn timers and too low of drop rates to compensate. I did a 50 kill experiment on monkey over 3 days and in those 50 hours I dropped only a SINGLE blank. This lack of rewards is a problem across all bosses in the game and leads to very demotivating gameplay. Especially when you consider if a rare item finally drops it has to be shared across anyone who shows up or fought over, causing resentment and distrust between players. Situations like this are not uncommon to see, different teams arguing over who deserves the right to fight the monkey. If drop rates aren't going to be increased then I think that the respawn times for these bosses should be drastically decreased so that more players from our growing community have chances to fight it and earn rewards. Also, increased spawns would give more chances for enemies to conflict during farming, since there would be a higher chance of teams being there to farm. It's really worth considering, even if it brings down the rarity of items a bit.

(Hope you enjoyed the read, Will be working more on these.)

Pretty much, we currently can have a maximum of 17 jutsu slots. I think it would be cool to be able to have more jutsus in our jutsu tab but only be able to have 17 active at a single time. For example, if I maxed out Fuuma shuriken I could earn the option to right click the jutsu and "deactivate" it, making it unable to use and giving me space to activate a new jutsu. But if in the future I decided I wanted it to be part of my kit I could simply reactivate it without needing to master it all over again, if I had slots available. Deactivating a jutsu could have a cooldown so that it isn't abused to gain access to more jutsus in a single fight or instance.

Disclaimer: While I have basic coding knowledge, I have never coded a game or any of it's mechanics. I am however suggesting mechanics that either already exist in nin online (spider boss, snake boss) along with some others that have been implemented in similar games. It is up to the game developers whether these mechanics are efficient/plausible to implement. While Land of iron (LOI) on release was very populated, the zone has been gradually declining to the point where, despite the high mission rewards and best in slot gear available from drops, it is rarely active. As someone who has done all the content this zone has to offer multiple times as well as killed both end game bosses (Nobu ~600 kills, Mitsuhide ~200 kills), I wanted to share my experience of the problem the zone has as well as some suggestions for improvement. The Problem with LOI: Some of the content is actually good; some missions like fill the bucket and haiku 575 offer a good change to normal missions and reward with good XP. While the kill missions IMO are bit overkill (due to very tanky mobs with a high kill requirement to complete), it is fine if you are grinding them for the build up to farm the end game bosses that have the best drops in the game. The main problem lies here, with the END GAME bosses (General Nobu + Admiral Mitsuhide). There are several reasons for this, listed here: Boss design: These bosses offer little mechanics that provide a challenge to the player. They are basically just walking cannons that have so much HP (With full DPS builds, 2 full INT players would efficiently kill Nobu in ~25 minutes, Mitsuhide in ~50 minutes). They can be kited, however they both have unavoidable damage moves due to the room being so small Cheese strats: Because there is no limit to entering and leaving the boss rooms, and the fights offer no reward for playing correctly, no one kills this boss as intended. I highlight this because there is no incentive to do so, and instead of a challenging, end-game boss, you're left with people going outside the room, waiting for CD's, going in, bursting and walking out to repeat about 60-70 times before they finally get a kill. This is because even while playing perfectly, you can easily be RNG'd with unavoidable damage, leading to death and a reset of a VERY tanky boss, with all your progress lost. No challenge: The bosses in all honestly, are not challenging. Yes, they are extremely difficult to kill properly, but that is because you cannot avoid damage, so it's not even a challenge, it's up to RNG. The small rooms add to this problem and the points mentioned above seal the coffin. Nobu is cheesed whenever it's killed nowadays and Mitsuhide has never been killed since the changes Erox implemented with Sushi. I could go on and list more reasons, but these 3 are the most important ones and cover the main reasons why this content is not used much. Suggestions: My suggestions are designed with the disclaimer in mind, and to make these bosses feel like challenging, end-game content with the highest difficulty, since they offer the best rewards in the game. Endgame PVE content at the highest level should be as challenging if not more than endgame PVP. Instance the boss room: The boss should only be able to be entered with a party of up to 4 (this is based on the mechanic that the snake boss and spider boss both have). The reasoning behind this is to keep integrity of the boss's difficulty, so that you cannot just zerg it down with many people; it is an actual difficult encounter that must be prepared for accordingly. This also addresses the cheese strats that are used by going outside of the room and re-entering for easy boss kills. Reduce boss HP dramatically: Bosses indeed should be stronger as the difficulty gets harder, but just increasing HP and damage is not an elegant solution. Right now encounters take so long even with a full DPS team, that it is one of the reasons they are hardly killed. Boss fights should get harder due to the difficult mechanics the boss offers, which leads me to the final and most important suggestion. Add difficult, challenging mechanics to the boss so that it is fun and rewarding to kill: This point is up to the staff to implement how they see fit, but I have some suggestions below in more detail. Boss Mechanic Suggestions: For these, I'm going to be using General Nobu as an example, but the same can be applied to Admiral Mitsuhide. These are just to show what kind of ideas I mean. To move between phases, if difficult to implement, can be replaced with a whole new coded boss that has the mechanics of that particular phase (with a cutscene or similar in between phase swaps). Boss has "Phases" at different HP thresholds (These can be changed, but my recommendation is 80%, 60%, 40% and 20%). 1. 100% - 80%: No change, it's just fighting the boss normally with his current skills and movement 2. 80% - 60%: The boss spawns 4 Golden Samurai/Penguins/Snow leopards periodically in all corners of the room until the end of the phase (marked by the blue crosses). 3. 60% - 40%: The boss periodically drops fire on the ground, where you will take consistent damage if you stay on those tiles (this mechanic is not yet implemented in game as is, but I got the idea from the auto-kill rooms e.g. when you fail the slot bot challenge). An example is spikes appearing in the tiles marked in pink: These tiles frequently change during the course of this phase 4. 40% - 20%: The boss occasionally does a charged up attack in an idle animation. The player party must do XXX amount of damage during this animation, or everyone will be killed (damage value can be modified, but I think 1000 damage in this time is reasonable). When doing this attack, he can have some sort of aura around him to signal the players, this is his DPS check. 5. 20% - 0%: The boss goes in rage mode, flickering more often, doing much higher damage and shooting jutsu out more frequently until the end of the kill. Rewards: IMO the boss encounter should be finished by entering a sort of chest room. In this chest room, there are always guarenteed rewards inside chests (can be implemented like mailboxes) that can be looted, to reward a player party for finishing such a difficult encounter, and encouraging them to repeat it often. The drop table should be random and large, with items being rolled randomly at the end, such as: - 10 Blanks - Flat Ryo (100-1000) - Unique drops (Blood iron fan, Claymore) - 100x of a mob drop (e.g. snake venom, cocoons, iron pieces) Conclusion: As always please keep comments on point to the topic. I believe the addition of difficulty and a fun challenge using game mechanics already implemented (mostly :D) could revive this end-game content and really make it an integral, difficult challenge for PvE, with great rewards. Editors note: One of the main reasons I'm making this post is because difficult and fun PvE content with great rewards is a repeatable activity, which does not rely on many other players for content. Land of iron has the opportunity to do that with these bosses.

Good Morning, or Good Afternoon, Good Evening, and Good Night. I am Suwa Dangan, as im sure many of you can read and have an idea what im about to speak on ill get right into it. i was one of the first few Suwa when the clan originally started in 2018-2019. Since then the clans presence(not as in numbers but as a collective group of people that play together) as whole on both discord and in game has plundered. many original members dont play or have moved on. However, through the time the Clan has still produced some talented Shinobi. Until now there hasnt been much word of the person leading the Suwa clan. Since thats the case i will pick up the mantle in being the Suwa Clan Leader. There is going to be some work that needs to be done as far as maybe getting more, or a new clan outfit, member validation, new discord, and maybe a day/event where the Suwa can be gathered and recorded together as a clan memorializing the occasion. im pretty active on discord, and i can be active in game during certain times daily. i can be online during any hours as long as im notified in advanced. My plans for the Suwa right now is to rework the clan attire , consistent weekly training and hunting to allow newer players understand the game better as well as once again solidifying the presence of the clan. Right now i encourage people who main Suwa characters now to add me on Discord(Dangan#0935) so i can add you to the clan discord. There have been mentions of suggestions for the Suwa clan in the past and i hope this post helps re-promotes them to give the suwa more presence again. The original leader of the Suwa Clan is Sour. and i think the Original Idea for the Suwa clan is fine. "The Suwa clan is a militarized shinobi clan from Konohagakure. They are a combative people known for their strategic planning and sometimes savage battle tactics. Suwa members are genetically predisposed to high levels of intelligence and superior physical ability. A select few possess the shikotsumyaku, a kekkei genaki which gives its wielder the ability to manipulate their own skeletal structure. By infusing their calcium with their chakra they are able to weaponise their bones. Upbringing for young clan members is very strict. At the age of 6, two years before the academy, children are taken from their homes to begin training early. Suwa academy students are expected to finish at the top end of their class. They are also expected to graduate before the average 4 years. Suwa genin are expected to be assets for their village upon graduation." - Suwa Sour The Kekkei Genkai is strictly in the description only as clan abilities are not available in game nor do we know how it will work when it does come out if it does. All in all the suwa clan were meant to be living weapons, selected from young ages to endure cruel conditions to unlock their latent potential. They are most skilled in chakra which is what allows them to perform at such levels and have such depth and range. The Original outfit was supposed to be 2 dark green war armors. one for the main members where the armor is sort of slate green and the left shoulder is dark green. - Dangan and a darker green war armor where the shoulder was slate green for a titled member (eg: Leader, Co-Leader) - Sour unfortunately, a green war armor was released in game that does not look like that and is not a suwa clan item. and the current Suwa attire is outdated, plain and doesnt seem to mesh with the description of what the actual founder wanted( this is my opinion although @Nikku makes it look clean). With the current in game items available to players the best suitable outfit for an official member of the Suwa are the Suwa Armor and a snake belt(any color snake belt is okay. white is easily available via cash shop) . there have been past submissions from players such as @Roei with great ideas of Suwa Clan gear reworks such as ... Reworking the clan outfit can definitely be a discussion that with enough push can happen. it just takes cooperation and people. I hope this will rekindle the Suwa players to level their characters and be active in the village fulfilling duties the Suwa way.

While helping a new player, I was targeted by Naruto and several of his alts. I had already submitted a report because he was being annoying, but I figured I should leak all of his alts as well to make sure no one else has to deal with this kind of problem. List of Naruto's Alts: Naruto Rival Kawaki Uzumaki Byakugan Manda Last Boruto

Dear Ninja, This questline has been in the making way before my time on the Nin Online development team Its been through a lot of changes and hard work put into it Following the "Land of Waves" Arc, the new location comes with a level 40-50 story arc. Nin Online's main story missions take place in a chapter format that all start from Mission Assignment Desks in each village. This new location contains 14+ quests, new items, enemies, bosses and more! Thank you to @Sezu for laying the initial idea down and @Ueda for being patient with me while I balance out some stuff irl (Also for making the format for this post lol) all love Regards, Erox To discuss this announcement, reply to this topic:

Dear Ninja, As much as we want to focus on making the old players happy with new content, Nin Online has to continue to become a better game for new players as well. A better experience for new players, means more players will stick around and join our community after all. We're starting off 2022 with a new location, the Land of Waves. Following the same format as the Land of Toads and Land of Iron Arc, the new location comes with a level 20-30 story arc. Nin Online's main story missions take place in a chapter format that all start from Mission Assignment Desks in each village. This new location contains 15+ quests, new items, enemies, bosses and more! Thank you to @Both for helping out with the artwork for the exterior of the train, the mobs and more. Regards, Ueda To discuss this announcement, reply to this topic:

Lightning Rebalancing Feast of Lightning Technique Range increased from 28/30/30 base damage to 31/32/32. Lightning Cutter Technique Range increased from 9/9/10/10/11/11 to 11/11/11/12/12/12. Lightning Cutter Technique Casting Time changed from 3/2/2/2/2/2 to 3/3/2/2/2/2. Lightning Cutter Technique Damage increased from 38/39/39/40/40/40 to 38/38/39/39/40/40. Lightning Cutter Technique Cooldown Reduced by 1s across all ranks. Lightning Spear Technique Stun Duration changed from 0.5/1/1s to 1s across all ranks. Lightning Spear Technique Damage changed from 22/24/26 to 25/25/26. Lightning Spear Technique Cooldown changed from 16/15/14 to 15/14/14. Wind Rebalancing Wind Shuriken Technique Cooldown reduced from 14/13/13 to 13/12/12. Wind Shuriken Technique CP Cost reduced from 10 to 5 across all ranks. Wind Scythe Technique Range increased from 8 to 9 across all ranks. Wind Scythe Technique Speed increased 30% across all ranks. Wind Scythe Technique Cooldown decreased from 18/17/17 to 17/16/16. Wind Scythe Technique CP Cost reduced from 22 across all ranks to 22/22/20. Fire Rebalancing Combusting Vortex Technique Damage increased from 22/22/28 to 34/34/35. Combusting Vortex Technique now stuns enemies for 1s instead of 0.5ms. Water Rebalancing Water Prison Technique Damage increased from 3/4/5 to 15 across all ranks. Water Substitution Technique CP Cost reduced from 36/30/30 to 30/30/26. Water Slash Technique Damage increased from 25/29/29 to 31/32/32. Medical Ninjutsu Rebalancing Poison Scalpel Technique Cooldown Increased from 8/8/7 to 9/9/8. Poison Scalpel no longer stuns. Weapon Mastery Rebalancing Wild Slashes Technique Cooldown increased from 19/18/18 to 22/21/21. Wild Slashes Technique CP Cost changed from 30/30/25 to 30/30/28. Risky Blade Dance Technique Range decreased from 5/5/6 to 5 across all ranks. Risky Blade Dance Technique damage reduced from 32/33/33 to 29/28/28. Blade Piercing Technique Damage reduced from 29/30/30 to 26/25/25. Triple Explosive Tag Technique CP Cost reduced from 25/25/25 to 20/20/20. Hidden Explosive Tag Technique CP Cost reduced from 25/25/25 to 20/20/20. Shadow Shuriken Technique Silence Duration increased from 0.5s to 1s across all ranks. Exploding Spiked Ball Damage reduced from 52/54/54 to 49/50/50. Bear Trap Technique Cooldown reduced from 30/28/26 to 26/26/24. Bear Trap Technique Damage changed from 18/19/20 to 19/19/20. Bear Trap Technique CP Cost increased from 15 to 26 across all ranks.

This is a suggestion I recommended back in 2019 although Rory now seems more open to outside suggestions so here we go again My recommended change: The bosses Kumorui & Manda are almost entirely forgotten about in the current state of nin, what I suggest is removing the current level requirements and replacing them with a group level requirement, ie the total level of all players in a team rather than each players individual levels. Starting with Kumorui at Group Level 110 (4 level 27's or below / 3 lvl 36's / 2 lvl 55's / 1 lvl 56 or above) Manda Group Level 150 (4 lvl 37's, 3 lvl 50's, 2 lvl 51 or above) This would cause almost no change to the level ranges that the bosses are currently designed for while also allowing those above the level requirements to be able to do the bosses, group levels can then be adjusted based on player feedback. Pros: * Revitalise old content for players * Test a new mechanic (group levels) that can be used in future content * More incentive to enter danger zones where these bosses are located Cons: * Could cause influx of drops from these bosses, although the only worth while item from these bosses is shirokata which already had an influx from land of iron. * Could make this content areas to be taken by higher level players thus unable to be completed by the levels these bosses are designed for although these bosses are almost done by no one (especially new players who normally pass these boss levels before even knowing they exist) and this could be fixed by instanced boss rooms.

Reworked Buff Durations There's now settings to make a buff last forever, including past logging out and relogging in, and past death. There's now options to make them disappear on Death and on Logout. Added an option for Jutsu to apply Buffs/Debuffs Previously, they were done very hackily and led to many issues. This should resolve bugs where NPC DoTs happen to you despite the attack not landing. Kage Menu Previously, Kage menu was very bad. I don't know how else to describe it. It's been improved a lot, along with text editors for Village Message of the Day and Village Orders instead of requiring it to be typed into chatbox with commands. Kage will also have a button display for them at the bottom right of the screen to easily open the menu anytime. Previously this was done with "/kage". (Admin Only) Map Editor Improvements I know players will never see this, so I just made videos to showcase it. These are very normal things to have in map editors, we just never had them till now. Undo/Redo (Ctrl + Z / Ctrl + Y) Most people don't know this, but Nin Online's map editor did not have a Undo/Redo (Ctrl + Z / Ctrl + Y) until today. Whenever we made a mistake, we either had to redo the whole edit or manually fix it. Flood Fill / Flood Clear Tool Ctrl + Click now fills like a paint bucket tool. In the past, when we wanted to make a large map all water for example, or all the black parts of a map unwalkable, we'd have to manually put water tiles or blocked attributes on each position. Tile placement preview A preview of the tiles you're about to place is rendered where your cursor is now. Improved display of Attributes Better display of Block Attributes, Spawn Attributes, Map Warp Attributes, Shop Attributes and more.. (Admin Only) Fixed Map Editor Attributes Text Display (previously all cut off) (Admin Only) Fixed Map Editor Clear Layer and Fill Layer Buttons Made "You have received mail!" message cyan to not look like an error (it was previously red) Fixed a potential bug where if NPCs had more than 8 DoTs/HoTs/Buffs/Debuffs, they would not be affected by them Fixed Map Directional Blocks They were not taking into consideration diagonal movement. This would require hacky fixes from us or for us to fix things like... Fixed NPC AoEs not taking into consider size of enemy NPC Hitbox For example, if an NPC was 10x10, the AoE would've needed to hit the center of the enemy for it to register. Fixed NPC AoEs (Including Bubble Clone Explosion) only hitting its target with it's AoE Fixed a bug that would cause certain DoTs/HoTs/Buffs/Debuffs to last longer for NPCs than Players Added Green War Armor Female Art Added features to fix this Forgot to add this to last patch note

Hi All! It’s been quite a while since this topic came up so I thought I’d bump it by giving it another whirl. I know it’s been suggested like a gazillion times before, but maybe the need for Leaf getting a utility shop or NPC of some shorts faded into obscurity during recent times. Anyway, here goes: Although I can see where they are coming from when they didn’t give Leaf a utility vest. Both Sand and Mist ninja were seen wearing these flak jackets as Genin during the Fourth Shinobi World War or at least once in the Show. As for Leaf, I haven’t really encountered any different variations to the Leaf flak jacket except the ones used in the Second Shinobi World War by people like Dan Kato which was a light green plain vest with no pockets, neck guards or scroll pouches. If we were to go down the route of every village getting a vest I’d say the best solution would be to recolour the Sand or Mist vest to a light green (like the one we see Dan wear) and make an NPC sell it (with utility pouches) in either of the Leaf shops or just set up shop in one of the village’s empty houses. Adding some symbol to the back of the vest would also be a nice addition but that would probably be too much for a simple flak jacket for non-ranked. Anyway, hope this gets implemented. Let me know what you think. Picture is for reference.

After the recent events with the balance team where members of the team were removed due to disagreeing with the balance team leader I am curious on the community's opinion on the continuation of the balance team.

Reworked Fortitude Stat Buffs including Antibodies Activation Jutsu that buff both just fortitude and jutsu that buff all stats have always increased the Max HP of the player. However, in the past, when your Max HP went from 100 to 200, your health would remain at the old amount eg. 50/100 -> 50/200. It will now additionally "heal" for that amount of health instantly. However, once the buff ends or is cancelled, the HP will lost again, down to the minimum of 1 health point ie. You cannot die to these buffs ending. This makes Antibodies and similar buffs an instant alternative to healing over time jutsu, but the effects are only borrowed and useful if able to end a fight quickly. Eg 1. Antar has 50/100 HP. I use Anti-bodies Activation on Antar. He now has 150/200 HP. He loses 10 HP and now only has 140/200 HP. His buff ends, returning his HP to 40/100 HP. (He borrowed 100 HP, and returned 100HP) Eg 2. Antar has 50/100 HP. I use Anti-bodies Activation on Antar. He now has 150/200 HP. He loses 130 HP and now only has 20/200 HP. His buff ends, returning his HP to 1/100 HP. (He had 180 HP lost out of 200 HP, so when his buff ended, he still had 180 lost of out 100. But ending buff cannot kill you right away) Status/Debuff Cleansing Items & Jutsu We've added the ability for items and jutsu to clear specific or all debuffs or buffs. We'll be using this soon for a new Medical Ninjutsu as well as items such as Anti-burn, Antidotes & more! For the time being we've introduced an event reward item called "Cure" that we've sent a tester to every player through their mail! Use it when you have Battle Injuries to clear it once. Warning: We have yet to add a warning to it, so if you accidentally use it when you have no Battle Injuries, it will still be used up. Edit: We've pushed another client update that adds a warning now! Rebranded Login Pages Login & Registration pages are now branded as Hitspark ID instead of just Nin Online account! "Reach Level 10" Mission now gives 3 Cure items as an additional reward All "Reach Level X" Missions now give 5 Event Coupons instead of 3. Replaced the famous "Don't fucking touch my balance, Seth." Buff Descriptions Just leaving this bit of history here. What happened was that our old programmer, played Nin Online circa 2017 for a day and then started changing content balance without telling anyone. I had to find out through the players. This description was first placed on the Taijutsu buffs and then copy and pasted to various other buffs as they were being created. Before 2022, buff descriptions were not displayed anywhere, so we never bothered to change them.

Quick Login System Thanks to the oAuth Login system added last year, we're now able to securely authenticate accounts logins. To top off this system, you will now only need to authenticate on each account occasionally. The accounts will remain in the Quick Login box on the login screen where you'll be able to login in a single click and switch between your accounts faster than ever. Edit: Added another update that now allows for unlimited amounts of characters. Reduced Rain Effects We've reduced the opacity of the rain effect until we rework rain as it was obscuring too much at night. Improved Desert Plains map to have a clearer path to the entrances Improved Forest of Ambushes map to have a clearer path to the entrances (Hopefully) Hotfixed server bug where NPCs would stop working for 2-3 minutes randomly. Fixed exploit to team with enemy village players.

Yo so I was thinking about the eye style changer and thought it had the potential to give players A LOT of other options to customize their characters. I opened up paint and started throwing around some ideas for eyes and this is what I came up with. These really didn't take me long at all maybe a few minutes each to figure out what looks best. I just wanted to make these to show that if needed, I am 100% down to animate and create eye styles if it means that these will be added into the game. I am also open to criticism and suggestions if you want to see what something would look like in game just lmk and ill try my best. @Ueda you cant look at these and tell me they wouldnt look sick in Nin Online! P.S. I know its probably small and hard to see on the forums just zoom lol

December 2023 Promotions Sand Village Jonin: @Vipe @steficy @Feitan Chunin: @kukks @Leper @Gol D Roger @kniphy @Unkofakits Specialized Jonin: @Mabilis Impressive wind techniques utilization. Mist Village Jonin: @Kozetsu @Yuma @Soya Chunin: @Hirashiki @Menace To Society @Anri @Dull @Singularity Specialized Jonin: @Maracuya Great situational use of earth techniques. Leaf Village Jonin: @Elite Arashi @Oceana @Rinnegan Chunin: @Windhand @Jero @Cryo @Sage @Daftz Specialized Jonin: @Hageshi Expertise with Wind mastery.

More fishing functionality added We're almost there Optimizations to Rain (& other weather) effects Threaded the processing of particle positions Large optimizations to game rendering (better FPS) - Screen occlusion - Baking Old UI system - Offscreen Text Draw calls are skipped - Many more Wolf wanted to get the game to run at 2,000 FPS on his computer, so he started optimizing more stuff. Personally, I get around 1800 FPS on small maps and 1000 FPS on Leaf Village now. We've added this as experimental options in the Options menu that you can disable to see the improvement yourself.

New Preliminary In-game Rank System We're moving as much of the rank system to not require Admins to add the ranks to players manually. Preliminary Automated Chunin Exam We're working on an automated chunin exam event. Added "Force Say" command to allow admins to force players to send text or commands (for debugging) (Hopefully) Fixed a bug causing NPCs to lose Aggro for minutes on end Fixed an instance map threading error Add Exile Date to Pardon warning message Fixed and Improved Kage Menu Ninja List Will now only receive ninja from own village

Greetings people of the Leaf village, The Twelve Guardians are here to offer their services to the village. Guardians will assign themselves requested by Leaf villagers to guard them on missions, and escort them to reach their destinations safely. The services can be requested either through the Aviary or the Leaf discord by pinging @12Guardians. Guardians can also utilize the Aviary to notify that they are available for assignments as well or the Leaf discord. We will usually work in pairs of two, but could potentially assign more numbers depending on which difficulty tier the missions are ranked, such as: D, C, B, A and S-Ranked missions. The ryo that we receive will be split 50/50. One half goes to our bank for sashes/tools and the other half for those Guardians who did the missions. For every mission the guardians MUST wear their sash. 12 Guardians Service Pricing List (List will be updated in the future) S-Rank Missions Revenge on Kuraken - 1000 ryo Bandit questline (100 ryo per boss. The last boss is 500 ryo) Land of Iron (Guard the Barricades missions 1000 - 2000 Ryo) A-Rank Missions Bandit side quests (wolves and alpha wolves are 500 ryo) B-Rank Missions C-Rank Missions Land of Waves (Bosses only) - 200 ryo D-Rank Missions Other services (Spy, Docs, WW, Escort for seals) are not included in the pricing list, but can be requested. The price of this may differ depending on the status of the DZ's. Please do not harass Guardians who decline a mission or are not available to fulfill a request. This idea was inspired by @Emiya post regarding the Guard Missions in 2021. I’d like to thank @Tsuuyoi for his feedback to improve certain ideas as well.

1. Switching top Hotbar You can use the ctrl key + 1-9 and 0 to switch between different hot bars or press the (~) key to move. You can use this feature for changing clothes, weapons, medicine, hair, dodgeball, and pushball faster than before. Nin Online 2022-04-13 08-48-11.mp4 2. Adding stats faster with the shift key You can hold the shift key and use the mouse to add five stats at once rather than one at a time. Helpful when you want to stat reset. Nin Online 2022-04-13 08-42-32.mp4 3. Splitting items into stacks You can hold the shift key to make a stack of an item in your inventory. Useful when trading Nin Online 2022-04-13 08-43-12.mp4 4. Moving chatbox hold shift and right-click to move the chatbox Nin Online 2022-04-13 08-45-26_Trim.mp4 5. Using the mouse to see an item or pick up an item Left-click to see an item/Right-click to pick an item Nin Online 2022-04-13 08-44-29.mp4 6. Interactive furniture in leaf Drawer Nin Online 2022-04-13 08-41-15.mp4 Microwave Nin Online 2022-04-13 08-38-13_Trim.mp4

Click here to visit the Patreon page Dear Ninja, Why Patreon? Patreon is a site where audiences can pledge a fixed amount of donations per month / per update to a project they believe in. It helps handle a lot of potential middle-man work that might incur from handling donations manually. Patreon was once used for a couple of months in 2017 when I had a tough time transitioning from living with family to renting. I'm eternally grateful for the support back then, even with just a couple of hundred dollars a month, it made all the difference in my quality of life for that tough period in my life. What is the Goal? I'm officially bringing Patreon back, but this time, with the goal of allowing the community to contribute to a specific cause in Nin Online. Every dollar gained from this platform will go directly into hiring additional staff for the game team. The first goal is to get an entry-level game programmer full-time to program alongside Wolf. The second goal is to get a full-time gameplay designer to work on balancing content and additional content. Why not just work with volunteers? For programming, it takes a high-level of skill to work on any MMORPG. Networked games are exponentially harder to work on than ordinary single-player games, especially MMO architecture. This is made harder with our custom engine built in C#, nowadays, most game programmers prefer to work in a game engine like Unity or Unreal. To make any changes worth getting anyone involved in, it takes a long time to get acclimated into the development environment/pipeline, and volunteers that will come and go are not usually worth the time commitment to train. We've tried working with volunteers for years at the start of the game's development and it just doesn't work for a project like Nin Online. The skill requirement is too high and people that have that level of skill don't work for free. Gameplay Designer is also an actual profession, and although slightly easier to study and there are a lot of game designers who want experience, it takes a lot of time commitment that people who are qualified usually wouldn't do for free. The trouble is that Nin Online is not exactly the best portfolio/resume piece for the industry, and hence, we've yet to get really qualified volunteers for it. Why not just freelance everything? Freelancers come with the benefit of usually being more cost effective, but at the cost of being unreliable. Without a dedicated project manager handling freelancers, its a pain to work with freelancers day in and day out, chasing for datelines. We need people we can rely on for the long-term and not for short term projects. Unfortunate Reality Nin Online players want features and changes faster than we can make it, and we want to present the opportunity to change that. So if you support the work we've done thus far, we hope you can go one step further and donate to our Patreon. If we do not hit the initial goal, the money from the Patreon will go towards helping alleviate the current costs of operations. As it is, Nin Online costs thousands of dollars a month to sustain, and although we are doing fine, any contribution will help us greatly. Regards, Rory

I think a good idea for future quest lines is that they should not spoon feed the player with so much information and be more of a mystery on how to complete. For example a lot of quests are just simple grinds for an exp payout like farming 100 penguin beaks in order to complete. Imagine a quest line that is added and the only information we have is a patch note saying it has been added to the game. We don't even know the starting point and finding it is part of the fun. Examples of this could be a new npc to search for in the world, or a drop from a mob that needs to be returned to its owner. Each step of the quest line should introduce a new mystery to be solved, and difficulty can vary based on what the end reward is. This can also facilitate roleplay, since most groups who find the information would most likely want to keep it safe from their rivals. Information itself can become a currency that's to be used within the world. Pretty much, a problem I have heard from Ueda is that content cannot be created fast enough because players power through it so quickly. Quest lines with this approach take a more time to solve than an npc stationed in the mission room who teleports you to a map with linear progression. Also, these types of quest lines would facilitate more movement throughout the game world and help to create more activity in the danger zones. Players would have to spend more time exploring and testing new theories. Some examples: Certain mob drops a letter or document, player can open the document to reveal a message that gives a hint towards who the author or recipient is, talking to that npc while holding the document triggers new dialogue and sets you out on a journey. An npc mentions something about needing a sword to defend themselves, but without mentioning how that sword is obtained. It could be dropped from something, it could be crafted from collecting materials, etc. The point is that its a mystery rather than telling the player directly what they need. These examples are meant to illustrate the idea that I am trying to present, I hope that future development takes it into consideration to help breathe some life back into the game. Thanks for reading.

Hello or good evening everyone ! Today I'm going, it's been several days now that I try to collect several ideas with my friends that could (according to us) add renewal and content! Why this suggestion? Quite simply in view of the release of your game on steam for July 2022. In our opinion, the game has a big potential overall and in the RP and the ideas that we are going to propose to you, could contribute to the good reception of new players (casual and try hard). I. Suggestions that would add new content to the game and revival 1. Economy system by village This is a point which has already been raised on the forum by Donatello Johnson and which is really very interesting. We wanted to relaunch it and complete it according to our ideas. Here is the link to his idea : @Donatello Johnson (I know several were on the project but I tag the one who wrote the subject) To legitimize his idea which must be implemented so that ours is prominent we wanted to add this : - If the trading post system is set up for each village, it would be wise to set up a savings system specific to each village through these trading post. This will add content but also a secure passive RP for the players (the economy affects everyone). Example : Let us give the possibility to the Mizukage for example to establish a minimum and maximum ceiling of a tax at the trading post ranging from 1 to 10%. All the players who would buy or sell at the Trading Post of Mist would result in increasing the resources of the Treasury and thereby implanting a treasury that only the Kages of each village could have access to. All the more so since these systems could help those new to the game (starter pack for example), help finance events, and the official organizations already in place in each village (payroll). - Secondly, have a tax specific to each village and that only the Kage can have access to it. This would generate tensions, wars and trade alliances. (Certainly more activity too and for reasons that may be RP) - Although it may seem complicated to set up, we also offer an alternative which is very simple and which remains a good idea despite everything but which unfortunately will not give more content or PR than that. The idea is this: create a neutral zone like Toad where anyone can buy or sell whatever they want. 2. Solar and lunar astrological sign (charms) (suject already mentioned by @Ainz Ooal Gown) Since there is already the possibility to choose your astrological sign for 500 ryo, and that some players seem unhappy with it, it could be possible to add the possibility of choosing a lunar astrological sign (RP side) in order to give a second option and not an implicit reset to the players. It also gives everyone a second chance. Although charms don't come at a big disadvantage for those who don't have them or those who don't match their stats. 3. An overhaul of daily quests There have been a lot of suggestions in this regard and I think it is once again important to get this subject back on the table.Knowing that the game will soon be known to all (and we sincerely hope so), we may consider revising the quest system. For example, between each rank of mission, that there is a minimum and maximum ceiling of experience and the same thing by level bracket (by 10). There is also the concern that some quests of the same level (A for example) are more complicated than other quests of the same level but give less experience. The opposite also works. Example : Say I have two quests of the same rank (A for example). - Glacier Bear Hunt - A Rank - 41000 XP whitout blessing - Retrieve Compromised Documents - A Rank - 149,985 XP whitout blessing The XP difference is just huge despite the fact that the quests are of the same rank. I understand however that the difficulty cannot be the same between the two but in this case you have to change the rank of the first quest mentioned in the example. Hence the principle of overhauling quests and the minimum and maximum fixed ceiling between each rank quest. 4. Big long-term content goal for Akatsuki and villages It is perhaps the subject which will be the most complicated to set up or even to speak about it but I think that with the dialogue between us (players and developers) we can give birth to something great. Principle of the idea : Add the Bijûs (at the scale of the game) i.e. 3.1 Bijû per village and respective to its village or other Why ? : Because being a game that strongly encourages role-playing, Akatsuki's main objective would be to capture the Bijus and the village to defend them. This will give Akatsuki and the villages a long term perspective. How to do it ? : By implanting 1 Biju per village currently given the size of the map and the existing villages, this is a game-wide proposition. Functioning : The villages must protect their Biju which will in this case be either in the village [proposal A] or a person designated by the Kage [proposal B] who will have the shoulders to contain the Biju. Explanations : A. The Akatsuki will have to attack the village and defeat the Biju or put it below a certain HP threshold, then use a sealing spell on it to capture it. (Sealing spell with a minimum cooldown of 24 hours and to be used by several people at the same time on the Bijû) B. This is the idea, I think, the most complicated to date: Give a player (one of the best players in each village) the Bijû (after designation). I think the easiest way to implement this would be to have the Biju he owns as a summon that he could spawn. However, if the latter has been designated to possess a Bijû, he will not be able to have access to the other invocations or will have to make a radical choice which is to delete his old invocation. He would therefore lose his Bijû after a certain time (player rotations) or if he loses it.) B bis. For this type of operation, we have thought of the police jutsu which allows imprisonment. We would then start on the same principle that would offer Akatsuki players to seal the person who is in possession of the Bijû once dead and who would teleport it to the Akatsuki's lair (blocked until the bijû is extracted from him ). In an RP manner, it will be up to the player in possession of the Bijû and the Kage who designated the person to hide the name and who is the host of the Bijû so that it does not fall on the Akatsuki's ears. Advantages for the Villages ? We have a basic idea which is to give a unique buff to each village with a Bijû (buff for all players) BUT being a versatile subject, there are several ideas available so it is a point which is open to various proposals. (like the whole post). Example : - Leaf Village: Buff for faster Chakra regeneration for all players - Sand Village: Reduction of cooldowns on all their spells (without abusing it) - Mist Village: Stat buff (+5 everywhere) /!\ This is just a non-exhaustive list of what we offer, again other ideas are doable. /!\ Conclusion of the first major point of the new content and the renewal that there could be : We understand that there is an intention to make your game hardcore, but you should try to reduce the farm and make it more versatile in view of the game's release on Steam. That new players have more content and a better gaming experience when they arrive. This is why we are also talking about a part relating to the quality of life on Nin online (the potential changes to be made) II. Improved gaming experience and quality of life 1. Attendance system Rewards To reward the most active players as well as the taxpayers, a reward system could be implemented. A system that would increase with the days giving gifts such as: - Ryo, ordinary and rare resources, blank scroll, reward coupon (same as event coupon), daily reset, all sort of things can be implanted. - Premium (gold ninja), possibility to have a blessing during the duration or double rewards or exclusive outfits. /!\ This is just a non-exhaustive list of what we offer, again other ideas are doable. /!\ 2. Ability to reset second mastery only The current game being complicated in the leveling, when we arrive at level 50, we pass a course and can be the most important moment of the game. Knowing that we do not have the right to the error with the few available resources (few / no videos, incomplete wiki ...). We offer two alternatives : - Lock the first mastery to prevent abuse and allow players from level 50 to choose their mastery and have the option to reset it once later. - Create a place where you can test the mastery available from level 50 so that you can correctly choose the one you want. 3. Buff House We have thought of all the possible ideas which do not tarnish the current system and which would avoid an imbalance between the player. We deduced that: - Obtain buff proportional to the price of the house example 5000 ryo = 5% xp / 2000 ryo = 2% xp. 4. Faster decline in Battles injuries We fully understand this BI system which prevents us from returning to the area too quickly or which allows us to avoid giving the advantage during a village defense against a raid. However, I think we could cut the time twice as fast when staying in the hospital. 5. Duel system included directly Directly include the duel request when clicking on a person. At the end of the duel everyone recovers their HP automatically. In order not to spoil our beautiful arenas (I am thinking especially of the village of mist) always perform the duels inside the arena. And less work for our doctors 6. Anti pvp system up to level 20 In view of the release of your game on Steam, since the lower levels get killed by the higher levels with no way to retaliate it would be preferable to set up a system where the levels ⩽ 20, cannot be attacked in the perimeter of their village (xp zones) but can be killed outside of it. It's really not fun getting killed all the time when you have a low level, especially when it's constantly. 7. Selection of the number of resources during trades I think this is a rule of thumb when trading MMOs, which is why we are offering this to you in order to make trading easier. Being able to choose the number of resources during an exchange. We have discussed these points at length together and we believe that these suggestions are common to all. We would like everyone to be able to contribute and add their ideas as well as improve our own. We believe that together we can improve the game and we sincerely hope that our ideas have been read carefully! Pour toutes questions méritant des explications plus détaillées, vous pouvez nous contacter en privé en jeu ou discord. Fujima ; Khalif#9191 Soya ; Don.#0301 Ynaws ; Swany#8857 Tetsuru ; Tyga#9153 corbac ; kamicorbac#0616 Kasi ; Asik#5580 Suggestions offered by : @corbac@Tetsuru@Kasi@Soya@Ynaws@Fujima

For more info check Community Contests - Announcements - Nin Online This is the topic we'll be using for the Best Dressed contests! Prize: 10 Ninja Credits to the Best 3 submissions! Rules: Reply to this topic with a clear screenshot of your outfit. No photoshopping, or editing. Show your username. Only 1 submission per round. You may not use shop window pictures, or edit in any items you do not own. Make sure to show what items you are using. Any subsmission that doesn't follow the rules/theme will be ignored. Here's is an example of what your subsmission should look like: (Make sure to show your ninja name) Since we are in October, our first Best Dressed theme is obviously going to be... Halloween You can submit your screenshot until October 15th! Good luck!

Hey, just wanted to share a video based on a leveling guide I created for the Leaf Academy discord. This video essential covers all the information on the leveling guide. I hope you enjoy! Link: [Nin Online] Leveling Guide

Dear Ninja, It's been a very turbulent last couple of months, we started having server issues out of nowhere in late November 2022. This was especially surprising and disorienting because at that point, we had not made any code changes to the server since about July 2022. We were sent on a goose chase to figure out why these issues were happening, and without our dear beloved (rest in peace) Robin to come rescue us from issues like this as he had in the past, we had an especially hard time. But I want to write this development log to explain why this issue was so pervasive, evasive, and abrasive, so players understand why this wasn't a simple "fix your server" kind of issue. To understand the rest of this post, you need to know what the following terms refer to: Server Software - Our proprietary, in-house server software we wrote to run authoritative logic for Nin Online and to handle networking aka. keeping players connected and sending data between them. Server Hardware - The actual machine that we rent to run the server software. This hardware belongs to a third-party company. Third Party Service Providers - Services that provide us with databases for the post part in our case, but can refer to any company that provides SaaS. DDoS - Distributed Denial of Service Attack, typically on a server, to prevent normal operations. SYN - Clients requests connection to a server by sending SYN (synchronize) message to the server. ExitLag - A shady company Phase 1: Locating Fault With a software as complicated as Nin Online. There's a lot of places fault can be found. All we knew based on player reports was the following... There are possibilities in third party service providers, client, server hardware, server hardware (OS, Networking), it could come down to almost anything. First I'll talk about what we tried in Phase 1. Restart Server Software Restart Server Hardware Check and reboot all third party service providers (MongoDB, MySQL) So basically all the things you do when you have faulty technological issues - "Have you plugged in out and plugged it in?" "Have you tried restarting your modem?" The next thing we tried was to make sure it wasn't an isolated issue with that specific server. We rented a new VPS server and hosted Nin Online there for awhile to see if it was something that was solvable that way, and if it could be down to Windows Server settings, an issue/change to do with our hosting provider, DNS issues, anything that could be isolated to server hardware/provider. This was not the case, so we moved back to the original server. From this, we diagnosed that the issue must have to do specifically with our server software. Because it happened on multiple different server hardware. A further clue was that Nin Online's Brazil Server was fine, and the Brazil server didn't have a lot of code changes that Nin Online NA had. So it was a good lead. Despite the fact that we didn't make any code changes, it is not impossible that existing code changes between that span of time could've started acting up later. Phase 2: Looking through code changes We first looked at content changes. Nin Online's engine gives a large amount of freedom to developers to create content on the fly. Although no code changes were made. It was completely possible that it was caused by a content change eg. A new map, a new item, a new NPC. But nothing really aligned with the timeline that would cause the bug. There was one thing that stood out... Erox had just launched the Christmas Event, and this year was the first time we had pathfinding changes. This led to the train of thought that perhaps it could've been that a massive amount of NPCs (Zombies) was causing the server to hang for a long amount of time, and during this time, the server could not send any data to players - hence the hanging. The caveat to this is that our pathfinding is threaded. Meaning, even if the pathfinding was hanging, the rest of the server processes should've continued fine. But to be safe, we decided to first disable all A*Pathfinding. We left the server online to see if it stopped, but it persisted. We later went back to the drawing board many times, looking at what content or code could have changed. We investigated if Erox has added any events/npcs/items etc. and forgot about them. (he didn't) The next thing I tried was to look through all the error logs that the server created. There were a dozen or so errors the server was throwing that seemed inconsequential. These could be things like a projectile/jutsu trying to target a player that was already disconnected. The server would normally ignore these errors. But I fixed them just to be sure. This didn't help either. After a few days, after discussing it with Wolf, we thought perhaps the issue could be due to threading pathfinding entirely. Threading it in the first place was a risky idea, even though necessary, because as I said, A*Pathfinding is expensive. So we decided remove threading for pathfinding. This didn't solve the issue, but it did mislead us for a few months. Phase 3: Completely misled A few weeks later, to no avail in solving the issue, we started looking to other data. Sadly, as we'll soon find out data lied. We looked at server performance while the server was having these hanging/spikes/disconnection mass events. We did this by profiling the server, looking into metrics we have been collecting for years, and we found that during increased player activity, the server showed obvious signs of degradation. I'm skimming through weeks of work to collect data, but basically our findings were that was a correlation between these hanging issues and degradation of server stats, namely TPS. The server was running less ticks per second when these issues were occuring! Hoorah, if we can figure out what is causing this, we can solve the issue. We spent weeks figuring out what the issue was that was causing the server performance drop. Clearly something was wrong with it, if we solved it, we would most definitely fix it... right...? So we started looking into the call stack and performance profilers to figure out what was causing the drops in performance. We looked at what changes could have been made around late November that could cause it. (Just note that although the graph looks like it only shows degradation in mid-December, this is only obvious now that we have a lot more data than we did in December. We found that certain packets ran processes on the server that were taking a long time to process. Namely packets/processes that interacted with MongoDB. So I spent a few days moving this these processes to Jobs (basically threading). It was possible that due to these packets not being threaded would cause a long pause where the server was just processing these on the main thread - hence causing the hanging. Unfortunately, this did not resolve the issue either. The server was optimized. There should be nothing left that took this long to process that it was bring the TPS down... except... Pathfinding. We later realized that the reason TPS was down was simply because we stopped threading Pathfinding. Pathfinding was so expensive that it single handedly was bringing TPS down more than anything. We sent ourselves on a goosechase because of what we had did in Phase 2. In hindsight, of course this was the case. But we were trying and doing so many things at once we lost track of what we had changed a little and we forget to go back to basics. We were consumed with the idea that the TPS was causing the login issues, when it wasn't. It was months of stress over trying to figure out what in the server was causing the TPS to drop that much, and it was just pathfinding. I'm glossing over days of me and Wolf diagnosing server performance. Running third party software on the server software to figure out what was causing it to hang. But this was work. Real work. Phase 4: Back to basics We went back to the drawing board and looked to what we knew as fact. The timeline of everything we knew and decided to look into what was happening during one of the disconnection events. We let the server fail in debug mode, so we could look into the internals of the server while it was having disconnections. Up until this point, the server was still functional for most of the day, it was just crashing every 24 or so hours. I was on full-time watch for the server, making sure it went back up when it was down. It had been months of this, it was stressing me out a lot. We noticed that the server had a large amount of connection sockets (TCP connections usually used to send data between client to server and vice versa). We started looking at what code issues within our login system that could be causing them to pile up without clearing. We spent weeks on this, making potential changes and hopeful fixes, to no success. One of the hardest parts of this issue was that we could not recreate it locally, so we had to rely on the live server to debug it. Each time we tried a code change, we had to wait until the next time the server crashed, so there was a lot of time when we could not do anything but wait for another crash. Sometimes code changes we made seemed to work, but really didn't. The bug would not appear for a few days, or even a full week, and then suddenly happen again. So we were constantly being thrown into "Yay we fixed it!" and "Fuck it's back". The only clue we still had was, no matter what we did, these connection sockets leaks were still happening. Phase 5: Player testimony We went back to player testimonies, hearing what people were experiencing and getting footage of what was happening what all was going down. We heard people tell us it was probably to do with Automated Tournaments, Quick Logins and various other features. So we went through rounds of disabling things and re-enabling things until we could find what was wrong. Eventually, the bug for some reason seemed to change it's modus operandi. It started manifesting as log out issues instead of login issues. Players who were logged in, were not having their characters ever log out... Curious. Phase 6: Discovery Not all players were having logout issues when there were little players online. But once there were a ton of players online (around 100) there started to be widespread logout issues. Because players were being stuck on logout, I started investigating why they weren't being logged out, since it mainly happened to a small number of individuals when the server was fresh and not very populated, I started with those users. I found that the players were having ping packets sent even when they told me that they had the Nin Online client closed. That's literally impossible I thought. Without the Nin Online client open, what could possibly be pinging the server...? ExitLag. Phase 7: ExitLag ExitLag around November last year, started using a method of "optimization" that was essentially, on scale, a SYN Flood Attack. The culprit was a third-party software that wants desperately to provide "better ping" for players. So it uses a combination of techniques to do so. One of those includes using multiple relay servers to send the same packets to our server, spamming our server with unnecessary information multiple times. It sends dozens of SYN packets per second to our server through the port our game client uses to connect to the server. It does so through distributed servers across the world. About SYN Flood Attacks https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/syn-flood-ddos-attack/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SYN_flood It doesn't even hide it. In the picture above, it shows that it's established multiple connections to our server and is constantly sending and receiving unnecessary data through it. What's scary is (we've not fully investigated this claim) but the software seems to also triple the amount of data our server sends for large packets of data like Map data. IP address/connection slot of someone using ExitLag and their source port number The reason why it was causing login issues was because it was filling up all the temporary slots allocated to TempPlayers (a method we use to verify and give real players a slot in the game) because the server had no choice but to check all these empty packets that was being sent. The reason it was causing logout issues for players not using ExitLag was because it was overwhelming the disconnection system, blocking the disconnection queue and causing a threading leak issue which was slowing down the server. A normal DDoS attack would've been quickly triggered by our DDoS protection we had in place since 2013. But because this was done at the authentication level (it wasn't spamming packets, it was spamming SYN packets) it was creating a lot of new issues. Our DDoS protection was "per connection" whereas this was creating new connections constantly. Another thing that really pissed me and Wolf off is that this isn't the first time ExitLag's methods have caused us issues. It was causing our server to throw errors in the past, and so we actually built workarounds. If only we had straight up banned it then. Lastly, we unfortunately had an issue with timing out TempPlayers. The intervals our KeepAlive packets were being set at was 30000-60000 seconds instead of 30-60 seconds. Which is a dumb mistake on our part. This made the logout issues much worse, but also just aggravated the issue of us being DDoSed. We never found that mistake for 5 years before this because we never had this issue. Phase 8: Resolution Now that the following have been put in place, this should prevent a future SYN flood attack and also ensure players aren't accidentally banned by using ExitLag. We've tweaked Windows Server's provided SYN Flood Protection capabilities to suit Nin Online With the help of ChatGPT, I wrote a new application that checks for SYN Floods and quickly (within a minute) bans IP addresses that are flooding our server We've banned ExitLag from being used with Nin Online, so players don't accidentally get their IPs banned. We fixed a bug that was causing KeepAlive packets to only be sent out every few hours. So even if a SYN Flood Attack happens, it will not cause widespread logout issues. We've contacted ExitLag to remove Nin Online from their listings. This has been one of the hardest 5 months of developing Nin Online. I've been on full time "make sure the server is not malfunctioning" duty for the entire time, and I've been caused severe mental distress by this ordeal. All this to say, I don't like ExitLag. Thank you to Wolf, Delp and all the players who have been helping provide information for the help in solving this issue. Regards, Ueda

Everybody is insisting that the boat ride is the problem in the garage so nobody wind play in the mist village. I suggest something like adding oars to the boat that people can sit down at and help it go faster, that way the more people active in the village the faster the boat ride is when they go out to hunt or do dailies. Erox said it’s slavery but it’s not forced, you wouldn’t say someone helping you water your garden is slavery when they want you to hurry up so you two can go out to eat or whatever. Rp wise the captain will make more profit from people wanting to reduce their travel time which is their payoff for a little manual labor, and he makes more profit because he is transporting more people at a faster rate. Mechanically it makes sense, since adding oars to a boat helps it go faster especially when there’s a lack of wind. Yes, there should be a cap on how much the travel time is reduced to so it’s not a ten second ride or whatever.

Fishing is now available for players Note that it is still in early stages and more improvements are to come! Proficiencies Menu More Automated Chunin Exam functionality and polish (Admin/GM Only) Functionality to end a Chunin Exam mid-way (for emergencies) Teams in Tournaments are now properly randomized Team Tournaments no longer disqualify entire team if one member leaves Fixed being able to transform into another player to reveal their concealed identity Fixed being able to hold more than 200 of each ninja tool if you use mail

Moved more of database to Cloud (MongoDB) We've done more Cloud-ification! Over the past 2 years, we've gradually moved our game over to use more a modern technology stack. We've taken more steps today by moving the storage of the following data types to Cloud: Titles, Animations, Villages, Ranks, Emoticons, Missions, Npcs, Shops. This means the potential for APIs for these data. Being in MongoDB also allows us to expand our data structures more easily as they are much more flexible in NoSQL. Cloning Technique 79f76fbc311c0790876f5f7ba7742eb9.mp4 I'm listing this as a new feature, instead of a bug fix, because we basically rewrote the entire system. Clones were initially implemented in Nin Online in 2013, but broke around 2018 and after years of trying to occasionally patch it up, we decided to finally just redo most of the code. On top of what it used to do, it now supports up to 2000 clones per player. It's an arbitrary number, it could be more. Of course, we won't do that. But we could... but we won't. These clones are illusion clones, so not Kage Bushin/Shadow Clones, but just clones to distract your enemy and make an escape or to make some time. Clones used to move in 4 directions randomly each step. Now it will follow your direction, until you turn, then it will pick a new random direction. If it face plants a wall, it will change directions as well. There's a lot more that was done in the background, but its too much to explain. (Experimental) Jutsu that can destroy projectiles Any projectile or AoE jutsu can now be made to destroy projectiles in it's way. There is also a setting for making it so the projectile only gets destroyed when it is weaker (less damage) than the other. In the past, this was suggested and considered many times, but due to the performance of the server in the past, it would've been impossible. The GIF above is taken at around 5ms ping on localhost. In a perfect world scenario, this would be what it looks like for everyone. Sadly, with latency, it's bound to look very different in real world scenario. Hence, this is marked as experimental for the time being. 08PeCWE.mp4 (Experimental) Revolving Heavens Technique can now destroy projectiles (Experimental) Wind Barrage Technique can now destroy projectiles (Experimental) Combusting Vortex Technique can now destroy WEAKER projectiles Improved server load times Previously, server took about 25-30s to boot up. Got it down to 14s with MongoDB + Threading. Improved server-side threading of AI Pathfinding Reverted adding shadows to Player sprites on Login and Eye Changer screen as it was buggy, may return in the future Fixed Tournament UI remaining on screen after tournament has ended Fixed Currency Item Type being usable to play animations Fixed collapsed UI sizing Fixed Revive Animation being played at wrong location Fixed Nuibari Description & removed unnecessary silence Fixed using puppet summoning removing concealment Fixed regression below Fixed the following Visual Bugs

Why it needs to happen With steam release around the corner and a popular Youtuber already pointing to the outdated mission system being too overbearing and uninteresting, I believe it's time we finally fixed it. While many of us have sat through hundreds of daily missions, throwing some away, it is one of the worst aspects of the game. The rewards can be great, often times not. They can be the difference of leveling up in a day or leveling up in 3 days. There are also a lot of oversights in the current mission pool that we need to discuss, so let's start there. Simple changes Some of the changes that need to be made are relatively simple. Whether it's an increase in exp for difficulty or decrease in requirements and exp to make the mission process a little easier. Let's begin with Danger Dangos. tl;dr: Double the EXP of Danger Dango and make it a C-rank mission OR repurpose Danger Dango as a B-rank mission with 10k exp reward and create a new D-rank mission to obtain Sake from Tanzaku. Lost Puppy/Lost Cat Being someone who doesn't do mission until level 16 I haven't gotten this mission in the past year that I've been playing. A very simple fix for this is to increase the level pool for this mission. It gives more EXP than Danger Dango and is a lot more interesting in my opinion. It could be chance that I never see this mission anymore, but it was always more bearable than Danger Dango since you had to travel less time and you could die during it. Mob Kill Missions So what is the solution? There's several; Increase the amount of exp for the mission. OR Increase the amount of money for the mission. OR reduce the number of kills required for the mission while keeping the exp the same. OR include blood pills I in the mission reward. Since these are the beginner missions, most new players are going to die on them. Rewarding them for the blood pills they might have used to complete the mission or rewarding them properly is what we should be doing. The fact that you get 8 spiders worth of exp for a mission that requires you to kill 90 of them is just criminal at that point. Player Kill Missions This is a weird one as there are people who hunt, people who buy kills/bounty and people who use alts. However there are some exp discrepancies that need to be addressed. Waging War II per the wiki gives 87k exp for 5 kills. Cold-Blooded Killer III gives 87k exp for 8 kills. This is a problem for several reasons but they are all pretty obvious. I would also like to add that Bounty Hunting is hit or miss entirely based on who you come across. For Bounty Hunting II you need to collect 30 Ryo. This can be the difference of killing 1 person or killing 8, entirely depending on their bounty. Simple solution would to be increasing Cold-Blooded Killer exp. It's hard to gauge if Waging War or Bounty Hunting's exp should be increased due to bought kills/alts. New Missions We have a lot of new systems since these missions were introduced so it's about time we utilized them. Medicine Delivery I - D-rank Medicine Delivery II - C-rank Crafted Concern I - C-rank Crafted Concern II - B-rank

One of the most common complaints in Nin Online is lag. It's the same for any online game. Common complaints come with comparisons to other games and/or with insults in it - things like "fix your server" are also thrown about a lot. Why games like WoW and Runescape don't lag as much? They do. The typical connection to a WoW Server is anywhere from 50ms to 500ms+ depending on what server you play on. https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/724514-What-is-your-average-latency-in-WoW#:~:text=Average latency%3A ~20 ms. https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/what-is-the-maximum-acceptable-latency/276360/2 Isn't it because server application is poorly coded or spaghetti code? This is how Nin Online runs when you connect from local host. As you can see, the ping fluctuates between 2-15ms. Near the theoretical limit. Nin Online's server is modern, lightweight, threaded and utilizes a very powerful low-level networking library. Most of the game's visuals run on the client which allow for instantaneous response times, for example in movement, and is then "validated" on the server and corrected if it was illegal (to prevent cheating). Is it because you're running it on a cheap dedicated server? It's an expensive, gigabit internet, unlimited bandwidth, 32gb Ram. With 75 players online the server application is only utilizing 1.7% of the server's CPU and 1gb/32gb of the dedicated server's memory. So why do I lag? The game's dedicated server is located in North America, near the border of Canada and the US. The reason it is, is due to the majority of the English speaking world being located around that area. The majority of the existing player base is also located in the US and Canada. This is a heat map of our paying userbase. Unfortunately, there are physical limitations of how optimized we can make the server. We could theoretically shave off another 10ms of ping with micro-optimizations, but the majority of what is being felt by people with the worst ping is due to... ISPs cheaping out on Sea-cable access routes & throttling certain connections To understand ISPs and sea cables read https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/25/asia/internet-undersea-cables-intl-hnk/index.html https://nordvpn.com/blog/what-is-bandwidth-throttling/ https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Internet-speeds-vary-between-countries Don't take my word for it, this is a video by NoPing, a company that uses dedicated servers to create a virtual tunnel, a more direct access to our game servers by bouncing packets between it's servers with good access to sea cable routes towards any location. videoplayback.mp4 A lot of players tell me they use software like NoPing, ExitLag etc. to get better Ping, without understanding why it works. But once you understand how it works, you should come to the realization that the only way it could possibly work is if you don't actually have the best sea cable routes you could. How else would a VPN make things faster? Distance between the server and you and the physical limitations of material sciences You can use tools such as https://wintelguy.com/wanlat.html to estimate how much latency you should feel across distances. This is not taking into consideration the quality of cables and how indirect the routes might be. It's graphical lag, not Latency Lastly the a common complaint is people misunderstanding what they're experiencing. If the game is hanging visually for a second and no input can be made. It's graphical lag not Latency/ping/network lag. I don't lag in X game and Y game You're most likely talking about some game that has localized servers, or a different server architecture. Games like Minecraft and Fortnite. You might also be talking about games where there is no server authority. https://doc.photonengine.com/en-us/bolt/current/troubleshooting/authoritative-server-faq If you're talking about WoW or another MMORPG. Most likely those games aren't fast-paced combat games, they usually hide the clunkiness behind mechanics that don't reveal lag. Like standing still and casting for 3-4 seconds for a spell in WoW. My connection to the server Lastly, I'd like to say that my connection to the server is around 240ms Before we rewrote the server, it used to be around 500-800ms. So that's how far it's come. If we use the tool I mentioned earlier to calculate what latency I should have... https://wintelguy.com/wanlat.html We only need to assume equipment latency of 49ms for it to be the theoretical speed limit. And that's assuming that I have the world's most direct sea cable path straight to the server. Most likely, my ISP is sending my network packets to some part of the US and then to Canada. And I'm from the country with the world's best Internet connection speeds. What does this mean? Not much, just means we really can't do much to make your connection better to Nin Online's server at this point. The next way we can do it is by localizing it to more regions, but that's a whole different topic. I dare say at this point, Nin Online's server runs faster than server software developed by many AAA game companies in the 2000s, a lot of credit to just technological advancements.

Life Steal & Chakra Steal Systems This was added as it was the highest voted feature on the Patron "What should we work on next?" poll. If you want to choose what feature we add next, consider joining our Patreon. We're able to make weapons or jutsu steal % amount of damage dealt to their enemy. Currently only added to Samehada (10% Chakra Steal) There's a lot that can be done to adjust the balance with this new mechanic, Fixed Quick Login not warning players they were using outdated clients.

We've finally finished working on our ranked queue system which offers repeatable content with progression for players. It is now open for all players to use. This is not NPL. The reason this was made was for competitive PvP for teamfight queues (since no one wants to 1v1 a pure wm or flicker demon GF) and since strong 1v1 builds or cheese strats matter much less in teamfights, it is not as frustrating. There is an option to queue with friends (i.e. if they are queuing at the same time as you, you will always be teamed), more information is inside the discord. Queuing alone is also completely fine. Team queues have 3 modes: Random teams, Team captains, and MMR balance. Currently default queue is Random teams, however this will be changed and adapted as the season progresses or for games upon request. Our promise to you : On a pvp game, there is naturally going to be trash talk and egos clashing, but we will make sure that beefs will never affect your ranked elo or your position in the discord. We have created this for nin community to enjoy content when there is nothing to do. Currently there are no prizes for reaching any elo apart from competition and bragging rights, however we do plan to actively implement rewards in game. Here is the link to the discord to join: https://discord.gg/hueAA6ed Here is a tutorial video on how to get started:

Table of Contents Introduction Choosing your village Leaf Passive Hidden Technique Summons Clans Sand Passive Hidden Technique Summons Clans Mist Passive Hidden Technique Summons Clans Stats Strength Agility Intellect Chakra Fortitude Masteries Fire Wind Lightning Earth Water Medical Weapon Taijutsu Teaming Up Missions Daily Missions Roleplay Missions Level 20 Story Questline This will be a guide for levels 1 to 25. Each section will be focus on a village, their clans, their hidden jutsu and their leveling spots. There will be a general section at the beginning that will focus on information for every village, stats, level up event and more. I was exiled from Sand for making this guide, so make sure to drop a like Introduction Choosing your village Each village has their own pros and cons. Their own hidden jutsu, their own passives and their own clans. Leaf Passive The passive for the leaf village is the Will of Fire. In the first 10 seconds after fainting, there is a 5% chance that the player will get back up with 10% of their maximum HP and Chakra. This can trigger multiple times during a fight as it is a percentage chance. Hidden Technique Gentle Fist is the hidden technique of the leaf village. This line of techniques are based on Strength and require the Taijutsu Mastery to use. These techniques include Pressure Point Needle Technique, a jutsu that requires 100 chakra to use and buffs the user's punches based on their strength stat. Unlike most techniques, the Pressure Point Needle Technique utilizes two stats, Strength and Agility when calculating damage. Gentle Fist has a variety of techniques that are either ranged or close ranged. If you choose the Leaf village, this would be a mastery you should explore. Summons The two summons that are only available to Leaf ninja are the Toad summon and the Slug summon. The toad summon is an attacking summon that will often flicker and shoot fireballs. The slug summon instead is a healing summon that can heal allies. All summons use their own independent stats and increase their damage with the level of your summoning jutsu. Clans Sand Passive Unlike the leaf and mist village, sand's passive is based on the Cloak of Invisibility Jutsu. When you create a character in sand, your cloak of invisibility just is already maxed. This means that when you use the cloak of invisibility you are unable to be detected. However this is still dispelled by the jutsu Sensory. Hidden Technique When you pick the village hidden in the sand and you select wind as your mastery you will be able to equip the Fan weapon. This weapon is ranged in nature but attacks a lot slower than most melee weapons. On top of this being a weapon you also have access to the several jutsu that can only be used with a fan equipped. These techniques range from Tornadoes, cyclones, knockbacks and homings. Summons The two summons available for the sand village are the Weasel and the Hawk. Unlike most villages, these two summons are separate in that the Weasel summon is located in the Jutsu Scribe store and the Hawk summon is located in the Aviary of the village. The weasel summon attacks using a wind AoE jutsu while the hawk can stun and apply bleed with wind slash. Clans Mist Passive All mist ninja are able to walk on water without losing chakra. They can also charge their chakra on water and regenerate if they stand still. While this doesn't sound effective in combat, certain maps require the traversal of water to reach, allowing Mist ninja to engage on water while their enemy is out of chakra. Hidden Technique The mist village's Hidden Techniques revolve around the pipe weapon. Giving them a wide range of bubble abilities. The pipe is a weapon that places bubbles on the field which will snare enemies in them temporarily. Along with the pipe you can also use bubble techniques that focus on Snares, Knockbacks and more. Summons The two summons reserved for the mist village is the Panda and the Clam. The Panda has melee attacks with a strong stun while the Clam also has a stun but is a stationary summon. Both are sometimes considered to be the best summons in the game. Reached the file upload limit... Clans Stats There are 5 stat points in Nin Online that you may utilize while leveling. Strength, Agility, Intellect, Chakra and Fortitude. Stats may increase damage of attacks or the amount of health or chakra you have. Techniques have stat requirements as well as level requirements. Weapons also have stat requirements for you to use them. I'll go over the stats in the game and what they are used for. Strength Strength is utilized for most weapons and their techniques. This means that Swords, Fans, Pipes, Melee Kunai, Poison Kunai and Throwing Kunai all use Strength to increase their damage. The only exception to this is the leaf hidden technique Gentle Fist. Since many of these techniques are melee based it is often suggested that you add more fortitude than strength as you are going to get hit a lot. Agility Agility is a lot less versatile than Strength in terms of use, however it ends up being one of the strongest 1v1 mastery paths in the game. Agility affects your movement speed, your punching speed as well as your punch damage. This means not only does your damage raise when you put in your points for Agility, you also increase your attack speed meaning you can hit multiple times a second. Intellect Intellect can be considered the most common stat to be used in the game since there are 5 masteries that entirely rely on it. On top of that, Medical and Weapon masteries also have Intellect sub-paths. There was a weapon that was recently added that requires Intellect to equip which is called the Adamantine Staff. Chakra Chakra is a universal stat required for all techniques. The amount of chakra and the amount of chakra you charge is determined by your Chakra stat. The formula for chakra regeneration is (Chakra Pool*0.5)*0.1 then round that number down. Medical Mastery is the only mastery that utilizes Chakra as a stat for damage as well as healing. Fortitude Fortitude is another universal stat however no techniques or attacks use it for damage. This stat simply determines how much damage you can take before dying. Since this is a PVP based game without any form of armor or defense, Fortitude is one of the most important stats in the game. Fortitude will also determine how much you regenerate over time. This formula is a lot more simple in that it uses the amount of fortitude you have as a stat to determine how much you regenerate. If you have 70 fortitude you would have 750 health and you would regenerate 70 HP every 5 seconds out of combat. Masteries There are 8 masteries in the game. 5 elemental and 3 non-elemental. When you achieve level 10 you will be able to pick your first mastery. When you reach level 50 you will be able to select your second mastery. While the masteries are meant to be balanced, there are some that either are strong on their own or are strong in combination of each other. This is a beginner guide to determine how the early levels will be, so this guide won't go too in-depth of what masteries are the strongest for PVP or Raids. That kind of information will be included in a guide later on. Fire Fire is one of the hardest masteries to use in combat, but it ends up being really effective in farming and leveling up. Because of it's damage over time as well as the amount of area of effect techniques, Fire may be one of the best PvE masteries if you're interested in leveling up fast or farming for drops. Wind Wind is similar to fire in a sense that a lot of their attacks require aim. However Sand has access to hidden techniques under this skill tree which makes them more adept with the Wind mastery. Some wind techniques cause bleed while others knockback. They also utilize a homing technique at level 25. Lightning Lightning is one of the hardest techniques to learn for several reasons. Your jutsu are staggered in levels in a way that your first jutsu is at level 10 and the second is at 16. This means by level 35 you're a jutsu behind every other mastery. While at the beginning Lightning is one of the hardest PVP masteries, as you master your jutsu you're able to combo majority of your techniques. This is one of the only masteries that allow for this to happen. Earth Earth is regarded as one of the best masteries in the game for its versatility in being a secondary mastery at level 50. Earth has two techniques that don't require aiming, one of the longest snares in the game and one of the best slows in the game. This is why some prefer Earth as a secondary as it allows them to land some of their stronger jutsu with ease. Water Water element is another good secondary mastery in several senses. The technique Water Prison is great for locking down a target for combos and you get another substitution technique. Water also has a lot of area of effect techniques that make it a good mastery for farming and sometimes leveling. Medical Medical’s main focus is based on support and healing. However it also comes with a lot of offense. Techniques like Poison Senbon, Poison Scalpel and Poison Cloud are all attacks while Treat Wounds, Mystical Palm and Cell Regeneration are support techniques to use on your allies. This mastery is the only mastery that uses chakra for requirements and healing. Weapon Weapon Mastery has two paths that can be utilized. There is a more support approach by using traps through the intellect tree. Then there’s the aggressive approach which is through the strength tree. Weapon Mastery is hard in a sense that a lot of the strongest swords in the game require over 100 stat points into Strength to use. However you are rewarded with the amount of quick combos you can land with their flicker techniques. Taijutsu The most aggressive play style in the game is rewarded to Taijutsu. Taijutsu has a faster attack speed although it is the closest range. Taijutsu also contains a lot of jutsu that will interrupt opponents while they are casting. With techniques such as Youthful Springtime you can further increase your speed and damage. This mastery relies purely on Agility, unless you are in leaf where Gentle Fist’s damage is mainly using Strength. Teaming Up Creating a squad while pulling missions is one of the better ways to get them done faster. Most of the missions you will receive are based on killing a certain number of monsters. If multiple of you share the same mission you will get it done faster. There are also Roleplay missions which require 3 members and a high ranking villager to do. When killing monsters in a squad you are given 60% of the EXP from their kill, however the trade off is that you only get 60% of the EXP from the monsters you kill as well. This means in theory while you are killing twice as many monsters, you’re only gaining about 20% more exp than you would have been playing solo. When you have 3 people in your squad you get about 47% of the exp. In theory you would get 143% of the EXP in a squad of 3 and so on. Missions Daily Missions One of the fastest methods to leveling up is doing missions. At the beginning you'll get a very small amounts of EXP but the missions are also very easy. As the difficulty and danger in mission increases often times does the reward. When you finish the test at the academy you'll be taken to the mission room in your village. At a low level you will get the missions Bad Larva, Take out the Trash or Defeat Spiders. As you get to higher levels the missions will change. You can only do 3 missions a day, and if you have a mission left over from last time when they reset that will count as your first mission for the day. The higher the rank of mission the more dangerous it is. Some may require you to infiltrate other villages to steal documents or spy on the kage's office. Others might require you to kill other players. With the added risk of dying, some missions might reset if you die. These include Village Entrance Guard Duty, Survey Village Entrance and more. Roleplay Missions Roleplay missions are different from Daily Missions and require a certain level to be reached in order to get them. Unlike daily missions RP Missions will need you to find another player to host. These players need to be Chunin rank or higher and you will also need to find other players to join your squad. Each village has different takes on each RP mission, so it's hard to create a guide to them. However the main takeaway is that Roleplaying is also an important aspect of Nin Online. Be sure to stay in character during these RP Missions and follow your teacher's guidance. Level 20 Story Questline still in progress Thank you to @Lumy for reading over the guide to give guidance on edits.

Inoshishi Mask, Tengu Masks and Winter Hanzo Mask now conceal identity. Fixed Soap Bubble Explosion losing its knockback on Rank 3

Automated Tournaments Part II Team tournaments added. Any team size can be used eg. 2v2, 3v3. Teams are randomly picked and players are added into a group where friendly fire is turned off for the duration of their rounds.

Hello everyone. I play nin-online on and off, it's a game that always draws me back. Whilst I play quite a few mmo's I always feel like Nin progression is a bit too centered in just obtaining jutsus or weapon if you're a WM/fan. I really think Nin could benefit from something like a skill tree to boost its versatility. Excuse my poor "Paint" skills but I just wanted to show an example of the idea I'm suggesting. For example we would have a skill tree symbol where when we'd click, we'd have a similar to what I've attached pop-up. By clicking on your own element, say fire, it would drag a bunch of passives that you could unlock by spending say for example skill points. These skills points could either be gained every 3 levels up to a cap of 10/15 skill points? or you could even have a mastery system where by just using your jutsus, you'd obtain "Fire Experience" and your fire would level up, giving you a mastery point to spend, again a maximum of something like 10/15/20. Depends how many passives you would like to add. (The paint example was a really rushed example of passives that i randomly came up). Instead of just thinking about "we need new jutsus" I think by just expanding what we currently have would really strengthen Nin Online as it's already such a fantastic game. Thanks for listening.

Feast of Lightning : Lightning smite from the heaven on 1 player in a 7 tile range. If a player is hit, anyone in a 3 tile radius of that person (Up to 2 people) is also smited by lightning for half the damage. For example, main player is hit for 100, anyone in a 3 tile radius up to 2 people is damaged for 50. Nice original change to a jutsu that is considered underwhelming. Thoughts?

Auto-Tournaments Part 1 Game Masters can now host 1v1 tournaments fully automated, all it takes is setting up the event name, level range etc. and the tournament will run itself. This is not simply a tournament feature but a general system that is being designed to automate any kind of repetitive event. Other planned features for this include visual brackets, support for team tournaments, FFAs, a timer that displays time till next round and time till the round ends, other prizes and prize modes, round robin support. We will continue to add on to this, improve quality of life and fix any issues remaining. We aim to automate events daily, freeing up our Game Master's time to work on more creative events while giving players more activities to look forward to at a fixed schedule.