Ueda

Oh god. You need to split your posts into paragraphs. I'll reply in point form. 1. It wasn't an exploit at all. It was the only viable way to play because it was the only way you could get to level 50 the quickest. Playing in any other way would be stupid because the game punishes you for not doing it by making you level slower. Which is the big point in my OP. 2. You contradict yourself when you say that that you don't want to be stuck at level 40 for weeks because missions suck, but at the same time acknowledge that the fun part of a good game isn't leveling up, it's playing the game itself. Which is something I heavily agree with. That's why missions are there to relieve the problem of it just being a grind to 50, by providing variety, which is all addressed in my OP. Your idea that you can only have fun in Nin Online when you're level 50 is exactly that, your own idea. Nin Online is not designed that way. PvP is designed to be fun at every level, if you're 40, you can PvP with your full kit without a second mastery with people at your own level, you're just not doing that. You want to be 50 and PvPing with people lower than you or people at 50 because you don't like being 40 and being killed by people at 50. But tell me a game where people like to die, no game is designed that way, most people wanting to be max level is a normal human thing. 3. The point of waging war is to cause factions to hate each other because the tension drives better RP. Having true peace between two villages when there is only two villages means there's nothing going on. What's the point in making multiple villages, multiple factions in a open world pvp game if there's no fighting. 4. Of course we want to create more things to do while you level up. The thing is - that has nothing to do with daily missions and this is a post about daily missions. The point of this article is to explain reasons why we limit daily missions and pace out the leveling. The game isn't designed for you to grind to 50 and I've said numerous times throughout the existence of the game that I want to spend time working on the features that aren't just PvP and missions. But that is just nothing to do with this topic so it's not in this article.

Added kill counters for CBK and WW. Raised XP for Time Off!? earlier today I'll look into that last one

Nothing to do with you. Traps have been blocked around entrances for months. This wasn't a change today. This is exactly what this article addresses. Why we don't punish people for doing exactly what you said. We just discourage it. And the reason why traps aren't allowed at entrances is as addressed as well. " It is not fun to be surprised by traps when you walk into a door with no counter play possible." And it's also mentioned in my last post how when something is fixed, people will complain. "Solving one problem creates another."

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

Update from February. We've eliminated placing traps on warp tiles and around important areas in the game, and we've also stopped rewarding players for spam killing people for their mission requirements. Here's my response to Waging War / Bounty mission complaints. Read this article from February. Then the message below. Solving one problem creates another. Now the player killers want to be rewarded for spam killing. Understandably, when something that was doable before due to oversight/incompleteness, it's not fun when it becomes harder. But that's inevitable. It's way less fun to be spam killed for somebody else's mission requirements.

Added No Trap tiles throughout Tanzaku Quarters entrance area. Increased XP Reward for "Time Off!?" and "Guilty Pleasure" daily missions. Removed Laceration/Bleeding from Scorpions and Wolves (this was a bug - yes).

That's never been what the test server is for. The test server is to test major feature (not content) additions that could break the game or create exploits.

Temporarily reduced cost of using Tanzaku Quarters hospital to 25 Ryo from 50 Ryo while we solve the repeat charging of ryo bug. Added White Hermit Robes!

Registration for Council Member elect is 1,000 ryo!

Dear Ninja, In the spirit of June being Nin Online's 5th Anniversary month, we're releasing a time-exclusive cosmetic item! It is no other than the White Hermit Cape! You can preview them in-game. The White Hermit Cape will be on sale from 1st June - 30th June. As with any future time-exclusive cosmetics, after it's sale period, it will not be available for purchase anymore, but will be tradeable in-game so that it may be passed on. We hope that you continue playing Nin Online, and look forward to more updates soon! Regards, Rory

Added Ninja Tool shop in between Sand village, Leaf village & Takumi village.

Mud Dripping animation for Mud River Technique slow. Confused animation for Wind Mask Technique slow.

Sand Military Police Building added!

Dear Ninja, First of all, I would like to congratulate and thank @TetsuHawk and @Deathmall Sasayaki as well as their council members on completing their time village leaders. They've both done a great job and will be awarded promotions to Jonin rank, and be permanently recorded in Ninja history as the 6th Kazekage and the 3rd Hokage. Beginning this June, we will be running the necessary events to pick out the new leaders of each village every 6 months. Once in June, and once in December. This will continue to be the case unless leaders lose their positions early due to any reason. This is to ensure that everyone continues to get the opportunity to step up and become ninja in power, and to keep the ninja world dynamic. Sand village As always, the Sand village is a monarch where the leader is picked from one of the 3 children of the current Kazekage to become the next Kazekage. The Kazekage then picks his council and Sand siblings from the ninja of the village. Leaf village In contrast, the Leaf village is a democracy, where any ninja of atleast Chunin rank can run for council member. 3 council members will be chosen, who will have to collectively decide on who becomes the next Hokage. Council Member Elections will take place on 30th May 2018 at 1PM EST Requirements for voting are to be atleast Genin rank and level 10. The election will take place in the Leaf village, and all ninja hoping to participate in the elections whether voting or as elects will have to stay online throughout. Attempting to use alternate/multiple accounts to vote will result in a permanent ban. Registration for Council Member elect is 1,000 ryo. Regards, Rory

Dear Ninja, With the eventual release of new higher level content, expect that a lot of changes will happen to current jutsu. A lot jutsu will have cast times and longer cooldowns, but people will have a lot more jutsu overall. Yeahhhh. Regards, Rory

Rebalanced Poison Damage Poison I (2 Damage -> 4 Damage) Poison II (8 Damage -> 6 Damage) Poison III (10 Damage -> 8 Damage) Poison IV (18 Damage -> 14 Damage) Poison V (20 Damage -> 16 Damage) Reduced Wind Mask Technique range from 9x9 tiles distance to 7x7 tiles distance. (The art was always 7x7) Lightning Spear Technique can now be cast while running and stuns enemies (0.5s/1s/1s) Heavily weakened Cursed Hosts, Snow Wolfs and Alpha Wolf. Poison Cloud Technique now ends with Poison III instead of Poison V debuff. Fixed Poison Cloud Technique range. All Basic Fire Techniques now only causes up to Burn III. Fixed Whirlwind Kick Technique Rank 3 description.

Added 40 Ryo reward for Waging War I. Changed amount of kills for Waging War II from 6 to 5. Added 50 Ryo reward for Waging War II. Changed amount of kills for Waging War III from 8 to 7. Added 70 Ryo reward for Waging War III. Changed amount of kills for Waging War IV from 10 to 8. Added 80 Ryo reward for Waging War IV. Changed Cold Blooded Killer ryo rewards to match that of Waging War missions.

Rebalanced Slashing Tornado/Slashing Tornadoes technique damage from (24/25/26/23/23/23) to (25/25/26/26/27/27). Fans now have a 20 requirement to take it out of the meta for non-fan users for it's knockback and interrupt cast. Fixed Ravaging Earth Spikes Technique description.

Fixed bug where using Tanzaku Quarters hospital was free.

May 2018 PromotionsLeaf VillageChunin: @Kuraen Senketsu @Fritzo @Persona Kurama Jonin: @Caio Mirana @Atrane @Ishyn SasayakiSand Village Chunin: @Booty Gang Pinku @Zelda @Huranza Specialized Jonin: @Nomady Hozuki the Adaptive Ninja Jonin: @Tresmorne Toitsu @Kenock Toitsu @Booty the Great Special Message It's always a privilege to watch amazing fights go down. That being said, I have to say that this exam probably had one of the more disappointing RP levels in the finals. I think it's very important to build your character and relationships with people in the community so that you have a story for yourself, and also with the people around you. Let's aim for that for the next exam We also had the first Tie in a Chunin Exam match up during the Sand village chunin exam between Booty Gang Pinku vs. Zelda. An amazing moment! It's always a hard decision to not promote everyone who deserves it, for me, assigning ranks is an easy task, and I know it is a big deal to you. So trust me when I say, it's harder for me not to just feel like giving everyone the Chunin/Jonin ranks. It's hard to see people lose. It's hard to see people win and not get promoted, but it's also what makes for a better story for everyone, and to maintain the rank system in the game. Getting Chunin rank will always mean something really big in Nin Online, and I hope that everyone understands the vision for why I have to hold back on giving everyone ranks..!

Snow Field maps now use new Additive/Subtractive rendering mode to give bright effect instead of normal rendering. Giving a more vibrant and less washed out look! Added Bee Hives that drop Honey Combs. Added Bee Infestation and Hornet Infestation daily missions! Fixed Takumi River being an indoor map.

Fixed Bounty Missions completing without bounty to claim.

No Traps around Tanzaku Quarters hospital and entrance maps!

Dear Ninja, Some organizations recently have been approved but did not meet standards for roleplay expected for organizations. These include but are not limited to "Sons of Akatstuki", "Mist Village" and "Hype-Beast". As a reminder, all organizations are for facilitating sensible and good roleplay, and are not to be used as PvP factions. Missing Ninja may also not form groups that parade themselves are villages. These should not have been approved in the first place, and I apologize for the inconvenience. Due to the abuse of the newly added feature, all organizations are now limited to 20 members at a time. This may be increased or reduced in the future on a per organization basis. Regards, Rory

Summoning scroll animation appears when casting some weapon mastery (ninja tools) jutsu! Just visual eye candy to make you feel more like a tools ninja. 2 new mobs "Bee" & "Hornet" added. 3 new items "Honeycomb", "Insect Wings" & "Honey" added. Proctor Uniform added for Chunin Exam proctors. There is now a bar in Tanzaku Quarters that sells "Sake". Sake can be drank to give a buff called "Drunken Fist". Drunken Fist lasts for 1 minute, increases agility by 20%, but reduces movement speed by 20%. [Experimental] Idea by: @Guinsoo Missing Ninja can now choose to respawn in Tanzaku Quarter for 50 Ryo. Maps and World Map is now semi-transparent so you can still move around with it open.