Ueda

The current "Chidori" jutsu isn't actually chidori. It's based on this https://naruto.fandom.com/wiki/Lightning_Cutter The final form of Chidori will be much different.

Dear Ninja, The next update for Nin Online has been awhile coming now, and we're also not sure when we'll be able to get it ready to launch. We're working almost every day of the week to try to make sure the update is the best it can be. But in the end, it's only really going to disappoint a large number of people because just by launching it because it's not like straight out content updates, we've been working on underlying systems a lot to get the game fully modernized. We put time into the wrong things In hindsight, a lot of what we've been working on is less important than it seemed. Like we re-programmed the entire game's saving to be Object-Oriented, in a production-level cloud database, MongoDB Atlas, but in the end, it's still going to be entirely the same for the end user. So it's a shame, it's something I believed was going to be a seamless transition, but took weeks out of our time to resolve all the problems, and we might still be having some. And again, in hindsight, this should've taken a backseat to working on things people care about or would directly affected their gameplay. Cloud saving is nice to have, and it brings about opportunity for stuff like a Web frontend for Nin, like imagine being able to display your characters on the forum, or edit their name from the web, manage your items etc. We rewrote the login system to use oAuth, a clean login standard that means no more entering your password every time you want to login too. It also simplifies our server's job of checking MySQL tables to check if a player is banned because oAuth handles all that on the client and web side. Logins should also just be faster in general now, as we've rewrote a lot of the underlying login code as well. We updated the server to work with .NET 5 instead of .NET Framework. It's basically Microsoft's latest development framework. Which sounds like a small change, but .NET Framework is ancient technology at this point. .NET 5 allows us to modernize the server even further and export it as a containerized server for hosting services like Heroku. This also means that the server is now a console application, and cross-platform (we can host it on Linux servers which are cheaper because Linux is free and Windows Servers need licenses, Linux servers are also more easily available). Along with this, we also halved the server loading/launching time. So less down time between server restarts. Wolf rewrote the packet handler thread in this update, it should shave off about 20ms off larger packets. We updated our networking library to use it's latest version, this was an attempt to fix some low-level bugs with disconnection we were having. We replaced the compression library from Zlib to LZMA, which fixes a lot of compatibility issues players were having with the new client and potential crashes. We also managed to get map packets and map loading down a lot with better compression along with reducing the amount of packets needed to be sent on login by almost 10 fold. So faster logins, better map loading times. But in order to do this, it meant we had to deprecate the old client. It's a weird situation. In order to deprecate the old client we needed to make this change, but Zlib was also making it so some people couldn't move to the new client. We have the player housing update, furniture update and corps update in this too one patch too. We also used MongoDB to replace an entire component of our server architecture, our authentication. It's now an entirely passive web-based solution. Servers register to an online database instead of sending that data to the authentication server to do the central server selection stuff. As such, we also had to make it so the server does the saving directly to the cloud instead of the authentication server. So a lot of these things were interconnected, and had to be all done at once. This directly caused us to stack update after update into one patch, and it became harder and harder to push one patch without issues. With all the major architectural changes and low-level code rewrites, a lot of things broke. Because of the nature of the changes we were making, we also couldn't make them independently of each other, so it had to be one big update or nothing. There's also a hundred other things I've left out, including reworking movement on the client side to animate smoother. These things don't make the patch any more complicated, so it's not worth mentioning. Hectic month of testing with BR Server We started testing the latest patch around a month ago on the Brazil Server now. During that time, we've fixed issue after issue, and some of the "fixes" were also entire rewrites, which caused more issues. It's been stressful, we've had days spent just fixing login issues, and days spent just fixing saving. We've had data corruption issues, where players accounts and all their data become too messed up to fix, and we've had to do hacky fixes for them like restore partially their data from old backups. We've had a period where the same player couldn't login for a span of days, and we realized the server wasn't disconnecting players properly. Stressful stuff. We've had issues where resetting characters wasn't working and worst yet, it created a duping exploit. We've had more of these issues in a span of a month, than we've had over the last 3 years of development. We pushed two new major features, one is currently being used actively, and that also came with it's own issues, but was a lot easier to fix than the issues that came from major architectural changes. Though some have been incidental to them. We've had issues where players were logging in as other players when they tried to login at the same time. We've had players spamming us telling us we're idiots and we should just put back the old client, we've had players spamming us telling us to revert to the old server, to stop using them as a test server, all while our full-time job had become fixing issues for a month. It's been stressful, for both me and Wolf. Side note: Whenever Brazil players complain about the issues happening, we sympathize with them, but we also think about how up until now, they've only been getting updates that have been screened and tested by the NA/Global server (you guys) and so they're fortunate to not have been the guinea pigs up until now haha Irreversible Update The worst part in all this was the difficulty in which the reversal of this update would've been. In order to update Brazil server, we needed to move all of the existing data into the cloud into a slightly different format. Which meant if we want to reverse the update, we would need to build a software to convert the data back into our old format as local JSON files or rolling back players a month. So it's been a go hard or go home month. There were times where I'm so tired I wanted to reverse the entire update and call it quits (this also happened just yesterday) but I had to force myself to look through code and fix it instead, despite being so sick of it. This is going to be even more so irreversible for the main server, because in order to update the next patch, we have to update the forum software, and that's one-way. So we're going to have to be even more careful with this server, which is why we're taking our time and making sure everything is good to go. The worst part I'm also stressing out about how this update won't bring enough content to make players happy, or bring gameplay value to people. It's very painful, knowing this, because we've been working so hard on this, but I know in the end, this is more for the sake of the game in the long term, and also some of it is just wasted effort. Most people won't care that the game server runs slightly smoother and that login is faster, more convenient etc. Nobody is going to care that player data is now stored in a cloud database. This update has been months of work now, but I'm just waiting for the criticism on how it's a shit update etc. It's going to happen, and I'll understand why, but it'll still be hurtful. This update when it takes into account how much work has gone into it by two of us, thousands of hours of work, which means tens of thousands of dollars worth of work. It's not funny for me, it's very painful. And I agree with players, is it really necessary? We could've done without. I could've just not have a full-time programmer, and I could've just focused my time on working on stuff people care about like adding more Jutsu. This has been the hardest months of development since maybe 2017 when the server was unstable, crashing every 1-4 hours, and it's self inflicted. The bright side The bright side is that things are looking much better, there seems to be some rare bugs that happen, but it's stable for the most part now. One guy claims he managed to login multiple times in a row without it saving his progress, which we're looking into. And there's some others who seem to not be able to login sometimes. We're looking into that too. The reception of the update has been a lot better, after holding a tournament yesterday, Kenock (Brazil server admin) remarked that the server felt smoother than ever with a large number of people on the map, and it was a high activity period of Brazil server as well, so there were lots of players online in general. Brazil server host is also notoriously bad (despite being super expensive), so if it runs on Brazil's server well, it's going to run even better on NA's. We don't know when we'll be confident to launch this update on the main server yet. Because if anything messes up, we'll be running heroics, fixing corrupted data, or salvaging the situation, pushing updates on two servers instead of one. This is another reason why we regret so much making this update so major (on an architectural level). We did also have to do a lot of this in order to deprecate the old client. We did spend some time making sure the new client is ready to completely replace the old client, and that anyone will be able to use it. So we haven't had anyone on Brazil server that can't use the new client completely anymore... Lastly, I'd just like to apologize in advance if what we've worked on doesn't please you. I know, it's not what anyone wanted. But we've been doing what we thought was important. We've re-evaluated what's more important going forward and will focus on bringing content updates here on out. It's both easier for us, and more fun for you. Regards, Ueda EDIT: Just thought of something funny. Maybe the reason we worked on Cloud saving is because everyone kept asking "Cloud when?" and we interpreted it wrongly EDIT2: Some of the low-level changes we made include rewriting the game's method of calculating time, and the spell buffer. This could've been causing issues with sometimes your jutsu not casting when you press it, and small things like that - that maybe some players will notice.

July 2021 Promotions Leaf Village Jonin: @Shinobee Hinode @Naizen Chunin: @Sky Walker @C1over @Sakashi @Gintoki Sand Village Jonin: @Deidara @ana primal Chunin: @Tormenta @Gilgamesh @Obituary @BlackRain Mist Village Jonin: @fox @Insidious Chunin: @Lamentations @pxy @Maniac @Scalpel

I signed you out of discord so you can try now Annyeong, welcome to Nin Online.

Since launching the Inochi Client at the start of 2021, we've got it to a state where most people, if not all, are better off using it. Some of the major advantages it brings are obvious as a player. For most people, it will bring a performance boost, has new features that weren't possible before and there's no need to install Visual Basic runtime files (COM Components) to run it, which means no more pesky runtime errors. But we've talked a lot about what it brings to the table. Today I'm here to talk about what keeping the Old client around costs and why we have to deprecate it soon. The increased workload of double updates It's hard to push updates with on both clients. There's a separate procedure for pushing updates on both so we have to do double the work. Also, some of the art has to be reworked into different formats for it to work on the old client. We're effectively maintaining, updating and supporting two games at the moment. Two sets of it's own troubles and issues. When an important bug is found on one, it might have to be patched on both. To add an item to the game, we have to update both etc. This slows down development, and this alone outweighs the benefits of maintaining the old client. A new engine, with new possibilities, bogged down by the old client's limitations There's new features that we've added and will be adding that cannot be done in our old engine. Some examples that we've worked on in the past few months that simply wouldn't have been possible before include oAuth login system (which also means social media login), Housing System & Furniture System. There's optimizations that can be made, but not without losing support for the new client. We've done a lot of this in the past few months as well. eg. LZMA Compression (Modern compression library). Once the next update is up, the new client will download and cache maps faster than ever before. There's features we want to add and shaders that we want to use, but will only be possible on the new client as well. Such as a way to recolor hairstyles to any color you want on the spectrum. Better debugging With everyone on the New Client, regardless of how it performs for the individual, it will give us valuable information on how to solve remaining issues and improve performance across the board. We've added a lot more debugging information, along with what's available through 3rd party resources for modern .NET software, we will be able to handle issue reports that crop up better. We've also been able to fix a lot of major issues that have long been impossible to on the new client, thanks to having Visual Studio .NET to work with, better debugging tools. Visual Basic 6 was deprecated in the early 2000s, the IDE doesn't even have Mouse scrollwheel support. That's the kind of limitations we've had to work with all this time. Conclusion There's a lot we can't do until we finally get past the hurdle of finally deprecating our ancient technology. As much as it's sad to say good bye to the old client and the work environment I've been using for 15 years, and 7 years for Nin Online. It's time to say good bye and move towards better days. This is also going to be a one-way street. Once we make this move, it will never be possible to go back because of how major the upgrade is going to be and how much data is going to be converted... but it's one we have to delve into bravely. I hope for everyone's understanding and support. If you haven't already moved over to the new client, please do so by downloading the new installer on the Download section. It also supports Macintosh! PS: For people who are having issues using the new client, part of the deprecation of the old client involves removing some components that were causing that issue. So it will hopefully be working when the update comes. Regards, Ueda

Thanks for the chat! Enjoyed it.

It's not easy. We are only two people. We work on Nin Online full time. We cannot work any faster than we do.

We wanted to do this, but due to recent feedback regarding our time spent reworking core systems to make anything rather than late game content like more jutsu. We've decided to pivot focus into just working on the stuff that people actually care about.

We wanted to do this, but due to recent feedback regarding our time spent reworking core systems to make anything rather than late game content like more jutsu. We've decided to pivot focus into just working on the stuff that people actually care about.

We wanted to do this, but due to recent feedback regarding our time spent reworking core systems to make anything rather than late game content like more jutsu. We've decided to pivot focus into just working on the stuff that people actually care about.

Dear Ninja, 7th July 2021 to 7th September 2021 - we'll be hosting our first ever LevelUp! Event to celebrate our 8th Anniversary and as a way to encourage a new beginning for old players, as well as make it a good time for new players to enter Nin Online. The event which will introduce prizes for creating a fresh ninja/character and leveling up. LevelUp! Event Details All characters created after this announcement (Or currently under level 10) is made is eligible for the rewards. For new characters, once you finish the Academy/Tutorial segment, you'll be given a Mission Chain corresponding with your village. Eg. Welcome to the Leaf / Welcome to the Sand. This mission gives new players Blood Pills to have a smoother time grinding solo and EXP to reach level 10 faster. Once you are done with that, you will receive a mission called "Reach Level 10". This starts you off on your LevelUp! event Mission chain. Once you reach Level 10, you'll get a second mission for reaching level 20 and so on! For each 10 levels, players will receive a combination of Event Coupon, Stat Reset, Daily Resets and Blank Scrolls depending on the level. On top of that there are special prizes at Level 30 and Level 60 if you can reach that before the end of the Event. These items will not be available once the event is over. If you have a character under level 10, that character is also eligible join the event by taking on the mission from the LevelUp! Event NPC in each village. Level 30 Special Reward Level 60 Special Reward Anniversary Exclusive Items On top of the LevelUp! Event, we also two time-exclusive cosmetic items that will only be on sale from 7th July - 7th August, they are... Anniversary Summoning Robe Ceramic Furred War Armor Other new Cash Shop Items We're also adding two new cash shop items permanently, they are... Inoshishi Mask by @Master Ant & @Fuze Eye Wrapping Bandages by @Sezu Regards, Ueda

8th Anniversary Event for Leveling up new characters (LevelUp! Event) Added option to skip Genin Test if the player is feeling confident. When you get your forehead protector after finishing the Genin Test, you will be teleported to the mission assignment desk. This should make it clearer for new players what to do, instead of expecting them to find their way there. New Missions Chain Added for New Characters, in line with Event announcement. To make level 1-10 easier while introducing new players to the locations in their villages. Also gives them blood pills to train solo easier. Added Anniversary Summoning Robe time-exclusive cash shop cosmetic. Added Ceramic Furred War Armor time-exclusive cash shop cosmetic. Added Eye Wrapping Bandages cash shop cosmetic. Added Inoshishi Mask cash shop cosmetic. Added free stat resets for all new accounts that reach level 10. Reworked some graphics that were directly referenced from Naruto series. Renamed Leaf Village Aviary to Leaf Aviary to match Mist/Sand. Improved Icon Artwork for Summoning Robe. Fixed Chain Missions feature.

I've been transparent all this while. People saying I've kept this from people for years. I've not mentioned that we were working on it all this while. I've in fact been saying the opposite. Everything I say in this community is lost in the void and at the end of the day, any form of communication just seems like a mistake. Every criticism put towards me, is appalling to me because I've specifically addressed all those things and responded to all those questions, many times on streams, in announcements, in discord all these years. Nothing gets through, everyone's been self-hyping this for years despite my best attempts at telling people not to. This is my attempt at making it clear. It's only resulted it hate, and I'm done with that. Things are going to change in that regard.

And yet again more people missing the point: Nothings changed. We've not been working on Advanced Masteries the way people have been hyping for years now. We've been focusing on reworking the entire game so that when we eventually work on expanding content vertically, it will be worth expanding. The problem is as we were working on Advanced Masteries we were tasked with creating hundreds of new jutsu, it became apparent - everything new being made was just a scaled up reskin of jutsu that already exists with bigger hitboxes or more damage. This wasn't fun. The reason we're reworking the entire game's engine is so we can add more features to it so jutsu aren't just reskins of each other. The reason I announced that Advanced Masteries is cancelled is because the amount of hype people have been having is unproportional to what it would've been if we just "hurry and released advanced masteries" like a lot of people want. Instead, over the past 3 years we've increased content in other ways besides just adding further linear progression to higher levels, we've expanded content by adding more ways you can make your own ninja unique by introducing clans and summons for example which will be two other ways players will be able to build their character differently. Advanced Masteries in the way that was announced in 2018 and soon after stopped being worked on is cancelled. Any further content progression will be something entirely different and is being worked on from the ground up with the new capabilities of the new engine in mind and has always been, but will not be what we announced back then.

Dear Ninja, Someone said something about how I'm taking forever to release advanced mastery and hence that nothing is being done. I've said this many times since that development timeline was made mentioning that we were going to start working on it in 2018 that we're NOT currently working on Advanced Masteries and have not been for years. There are bigger priorities at the moment than expanding the game content further vertically. We are lacking in major features, lacking in our core technologies for more expansion and we're focused on reworking major systems of the game like Organizations. Advanced Masteries has been on hold in terms of development since around a year after that dev log was made. Since then we have released the 3rd faction of the game, clans, summons, toad village, land of iron, remade the entire game in C# & modern technologies, added hundreds of items, dozens of new mobs, a new mastery. Plans change. If you're using when one specific feature that we've specifically said has been not the development focus for years as the benchmark of what is progress for the game. You will be sorely disappointed. As of today, to make it plain and simple, Advanced Masteries is cancelled. It will not be happening. Don't wait for it. If that is the thing that keeps you going, don't let it be. EDIT: Nothings changed. We've not been working on Advanced Masteries the way people have been hyping for years now. We've been focusing on reworking the entire game so that when we eventually work on expanding content vertically, it will be worth expanding. The problem is as we were working on Advanced Masteries we were tasked with creating hundreds of new jutsu, it became apparent - everything new being made was just a scaled up reskin of jutsu that already exists with bigger hitboxes or more damage. This wasn't fun. The reason we're reworking the entire game's engine is so we can add more features to it so jutsu aren't just reskins of each other. The reason I announced that Advanced Masteries is cancelled is because the amount of hype people have been having is unproportioned to what it would've been if we just "hurry and released advanced masteries" like a lot of people want. Instead, over the past 3 years we've increased content in other ways besides just adding further linear progression to higher levels, we've expanded content by adding more ways you can make your own ninja unique by introducing clans and summons for example which will be two other ways players will be able to build their character differently. Advanced Masteries in the way that was announced in 2018 and soon after stopped being worked on is cancelled. Any further content progression will be something entirely different and is being worked on from the ground up with the new capabilities of the new engine in mind and has always been, but will not be what we announced back then. Regards, Ueda

Fixed, thank you!

I'm just going to close this thread. This has just become a way for people to complain and blame the dev team about things out of our control that people don't like about human nature and laws of physics. If you don't like your ISPs cheaping out on sea cable routes, complain to them. If you don't like players cheating, actively discourage, call out and not participate in cheating activities outside of the game.

You can't call a game P2W because people are cheating by buying things outside of the game illegally. There's no real way we can prevent that, and we can't design the game to be easier so that nobody feels the urge to cheat. There'll always be cheaters. Your suggestion is the only way to make the game not P2W is to not have anything in the game that has any inherent value, so that nobody is incentivized to get any item and that everything should be easily obtained so that nobody will find real world monetary value in items in the game. That's not a solution, that's the destruction of any form of exclusivity, and value in anything in the game so that nobody wants to cheat because nothing is worth anything and everything is a waste of time anyway. ie. That's like saying The Witcher 3, or any single player story game is P2W because people can pay someone to send them the completed game save file.

That's nothing to do with being P2W. You're complaining about the location of our server. I'm terribly sorry I can't afford to move everyone who wants to play Nin Online to the Americas to experience good ping. But the idea that this somehow means that this game that has literally zero ways you can officially and legally pay to gain gameplay benefits that a non-paying player gets is garbage. Once again, if Pingzapper or ExitLag helps. It just means your Internet Service Provider is cheaping out on their contracts for cable routes to other countries. If it doesn't help but lag is still an issue, that's just due to the server location, and we can't bypass the laws of physics to beat theoretical limits on how fast information can travel through cables under the sea.

I have to say this is a really bad hot take. The only reason Pingzapper and ExitLag improve ping at all is because your service provider is cheaping on on network routes to providers in other countries. You can learn about how tunnel programs work on on ExitLag's own video. By that definition every game is P2W because you get a better experience if you don't have a bad internet provider. Even single player game is P2W because you get more FPS and can predict the enemy movement better if you buy a better computer, or get a better monitor with less input lag.

Reduced Across The Sea Ship Ride from 5 minutes to 4 minutes. Added 30 seconds waiting time before boarding Across The Sea Ship Ride to prevent using it to escape PvP encounters. Added Supply Boxes that spawn randomly on Across The Sea Ship Ride. Added Straw Dummy on Across The Sea Ship Ride.

Great detailed post. Thank you for taking the time to write it. This gives me a lot of ideas.

The first winners are: @Adarya @LionGod @Spooks @Sky Walker @Sin @Esty @Traps For their entry below