Community Upgrade

[Ueda]

Dear Ninja,

Over the last couple of days, along with a major engine update that you can learn about in our patch notes, I've been upgrading the forum community software to the latest version of Invision Community. This brought about a bunch of new features for us to use.

New Features

There's all new Ranks on the forum used to display the seniority of members active in the forum community as well as Badges that are like forum missions.

Ranks progress linearly based on content count (Topics, Posts, Status Updates etc.)

Badges are earned by completing achievements, or can also be given out manually by Game Masters and Staff in the future for competitions (eg. Winning a Best Dress Contest)

As an example, click here to view my Ranks & Badges.

Gold & Silver Ninja can continue to upload profile songs. But with even more customization options!

You now have the option to upload up to 3 songs that will play back to back. You can also change the accent color of the music player and choose whether or not it auto-plays when people visit your profile.

While the new Corporation System replaces Official Organizations in-game and a separate guild system will be added later to replace Player Organizations in-game, we've also added a new way for players to congregate and organize themselves. Introducing the new Clubs system, which comes with a whole host of features that I haven't even explored fully myself.

This is a completely forum grouping system for players to subscribe to groups where they can have private group discussions, or disseminate news to everyone.

An example of this would be to create a Club for players who like to Spar in a specific location at a specific time, getting this information out there so new members can join your activity.

With the new upgrade to Cloud-based player saves in the last update, it is now possible for us to use data online to create cool features like the Leaderboards. We can also display things like Server Blessing status, who blessed it, in the future, all on the web or even on Discord. We will also be able to do cool things like display the player's character on the web some day in the future.

For the time being, we've used this to create a real-time web leaderboard that you can access here.

 

There's a lot more small changes such as a new layout for the homepage with news (finally) displaying with it's full content. But these are largely design changes. So last and not least, my favorite part of this forum upgrade...

Styling Overhaul

I've finally sat down to spend the last 2 days upgrading the forum skin, layouts and stylings to be a lot more professional and modern. The old look served us well over the last 2 years, but it was due for an upgrade, and one to match a lot of the new design language we've established for our branding.

There's a lot of care put into making sure the design stayed familiar enough to the old one, while making it look fresh and fixing a lot of the annoyances I had with the last one. I also generally went darker with the site, so that it's a lot more like a dark mode site. As of this moment, it's a little troublesome to maintain two versions of the forum styling, and a lot of the post content to date has been designed for white layouts, so it's in our best interest to keep the content background white.

Emoji
We now support usage of Web Standard (Twitter Style) Emoji, along with the custom ones we've always had.  If you input ":" into the textbox and type, it will bring up suggestions!

  

Optimization
I can confirm that Invision Community's latest version is loading quicker than ever. Along with that, I've upgraded some of the underlying web technologies that we use. Nin Online's forum launched in 2013... so we were running on very legacy MySQL settings. As of now, it should start running a lot faster than before.

Conclusion

I hope the Nin Online forum will remain a nice place for players to have discussions about Nin Online or just chill and meet friends. While it is true that most of our audience is now on Discord, I also think that the permanence of discussions in our forum has it's use case and appeal. We want to keep suggestions for example, on a platform where we can neatly refer, rank and remember them for a long time. Also, every player of Nin Online is automatically a member of the forum, so that's a big plus! We hope you like it.

Regards,
Ueda

To discuss this announcement, click on our discussion thread below.