History of World of Naruto

February 2008:

We started off, Krator, Anya and I, on this great journey to start our own MUD. Anya was the co-founder (though I was the owner) and Krator was our resident immortal. Without Krator we would never have known what we were doing.

Sadly, Krator wanted to have us using Dragon Ball Z stock code and basically refused to work with Rom. He has given hints and has been invaluable but he hasn't done as much as he would have if we'd used DBZ code like he'd wanted.

Anya did so much work on the MUD, not only creating a whole range of ninja weapons but also redesigning the whole ninja academy, old konoha and new suna into being Naruto-like areas (they were all stock areas), before starting our first brand new area, the Land of Waves.

Sadly for Anya, my own mistakes led to me having to restore the code from stock, wiping my small amount of early coding attempts and, most importantly for Anya, wiped all of her work.

Anya was so upset that a month of her work was wiped that she didn't really do much after that.

In this time, we had our first ever player, Kazume, who started playing on the very first day we opened. He apparently did a search for "naruto mud", we were top hit and there we go. We were 100% stock code then.

Kazume had ideas for the whole stock of taijutsu commands, which I put in happily. Since he was the only regular player, it didn't exactly unbalance anything.

March 2008:

After Anya and Krator both quit, I was all alone, aside from our one and only regular player Kazume. I just built like crazy, booting all of the time and just decided that I would make the whole MUD in 12 months all by myself.

Kazume helped me to figure out what to do with Genjutsu, which was difficult as the series didn't mention a whole lot of Genjutsu moves so we had to invent them. We scoured the web for useful ones that people had invented and made up some of our own. Creating them was even more difficult.

It was at this stage that we got our 2nd regular player, Kira, and our first Genjutsu specialist. Kira complained at how difficult Genjutsu was and still found it difficult even after all of the genjutsu special commands were added.

It was at this point that I decided to make Kazume an immortal, as Kikane. He quickly created our first truly new zone, New Konoha, which he did very quickly. I was tempted to get rid of Old Konoha but felt that we needed it for a starting point.

April 2008:

Kazume kept going strong, also building Fire Country and Kira asked to help out as an immortal since he was struggling with playing. Kira opted to make the Valley of the End, which linked nicely at the end of Fire Country.

At this point, a new player called Selfu offered to be an immortal. This was against my policy, as I wanted people to be players for a while first, but he insisted that he was really experienced and good at building. With Krator gone, we could really do with some tips, so, against my better judgement, I gave him a shot. He wasn't used to the MUD at all and had never heard of Naruto. Selfu promised to show us how to do mob programs, how to give jutsu to item and so many other things. Instead, Selfu just created a wide range of equipment for himself, then went around repeatedly killing Itachi (then our most powerful mob) and other immortals.

In trying to control Selfu, Kira and I had the idea to get him to do the crypt, which was going to be underneath Valley of the End, a special high level zone full of dead ninja from the series. Then he could design it however he liked but then find the names off narutopedia.

Kira continued to struggle with building and Kazume basically stopped building for the time being.

May 2008:

May saw the arrival of our 3rd regular player, Kyo. Kyo chose Ninja Artist, which, embarassingly, was the one specialty that was incomplete (as ninjutsu had most of the stock commands). Kyo struggled with good reason, and we had Kazume at max level with both Kira and Kyo struggling, yet as the most powerful from their specialty.

The Valley of the End was moving ridiculously slowly. Then our 4th regular player, Tasico, and our first Ninjutsu Specialist, joined the game.

With this in mind, Krator had the idea to rename a whole range of stock spells into ninjutsu jutsu, including all of the chidori variations.

After a month in which he had made a crumbling fountain and 4 blank rooms in the crypt, Selfu finally went crazy, using the newly created award code to randomly award and penalise exp and mp to different players. He was promptly demoted, both for this action and his general lack of contribution to the MUD. Selfu logged on later to say "I see I wasn't appreciated".

We had a number of new players join towards the end of the month, including Dresq and Jenova, our first 2 power levellers. Dresq was genjutsu, who put Kira to shame, while Jenova was ninjutsu. They both competed for quickest to level and most powerful, at the same time.

June 2008:

June was an exciting month as we were planning the first ever live Chuunin exams. Selfu had told us not to do it as it was too early and we weren't popular enough but he was gone now so we went ahead with it. This was going to be every 2 months real time. I spent a huge amount of time on it, designing the crypt 1st level myself, setting it up so that the max level was increased from 51-101 and designing a huge amount of code just for the exams.

The exams themselves were something of an almighty great failure, with so many players not showing up, not to mention all of the complaining about how infrequently they were happening. There was so little appreciation for them. Once people were promoted, they too complained that there was nothing to do. It was an absolute disaster.

I was trying to making Exploding Notes as the first of the Ninja Artist skills, and I really struggled to get them to work, since there was nothing like it in stock code or in any code repositories anywhere. I just had to invent it from scratch myself. And it was hard. Finally I got it to work, only it then caused crashes. To totally upset me, a couple of the immortals were laughing and joking about the crashes, and one player really upset me hugely over it.

I had promoted Tasico, Jaga and Dresq (as Reki, Shun and Rico) from the Chuunin Exams and both Reki and Rico started building immediately. Reki built slowly while Rico built quickly. Shun just acted as the policeman basically.

I was sick of it myself, and just needed to get away from it. It had stopped being fun. I needed a break.

July 2008:

While I was away, Rico built Land of Waves, then Reki started trying to work on getting mob programs to work, finally showing Rico how to do it. Shun had said that he knew but then couldn't figure it out but Reki did. After Reki showed Rico, Rico and Reki started putting them in everywhere. Reki had his own mob program-driven quest in Land of Rice Fields with the peacefull farmer while Rico had Gato summoning guards and all sorts of stuff.

The MUD was booming and I wasn't even on there. Player levels kept rising and it almost seemed as if I didn't need to be there. Shun didn't build anything at all, in spite of promises.

August 2008:

August rolled around and I still wasn't on. A fellow called Bravo had convinced Rico he would make a good immortal and then I was contacted by e-mail, instant messenger, and in all sorts of ways before I said okay to him being an immortal, since Reki, Rico and Shun all agreed. Kikane had disappeared after the Chuunin exams, or at least wasn't on the MUD anymore (I still saw him on instant messengers).

With the knowledge of mob programs behind them, Rico and Bravo designed Forest of Death, with them randomly dropping heaven and hell scrolls. It wasn't officially a part of the Chuunin Exams or anything - yet - but they didn't even have to ask me. As soon as it was finished, I designed a system so that you could be promoted to Chuunin once you had passed, also creating FANKI and TANKI and excluding the zone from all missions.

September 2008:

Having seen the impressive Forest of Death, I was so happy that one of the two reasons I had left, the disappointing Chuunin Exams, was now healed. I was so proud of Bravo and Rico especially, but also Reki and Shun. Then Reki had the idea for how to do the Exploding Notes. It was a very simple idea but it could work. So I went with that, and it did indeed work.

I was back.

After making Exploding Notes, I then made all of the other bomb types and finally Kyo was happy. Then I got a bit stuck with the first puppet, Karasu, but eventually got past that too. Then I made forge and Kyo was really happy.

Everyone started going Ninja Artist then and that was great too. Finally the specialties were balanced.

October 2008:

October saw the max level being increased from 101 to 151, with the creation of a simple Tokubetsu exam, which was to master one skill and to defeat our 3 most powerful mobs, all without using healing or summons or resting at all in between. Then I made a 2nd level of the crypt to support it. Players were levelling past what I could create though.

At the end of it all, I got some complaints that 2nd level of crypt was too hard - and too poor. In spite of the items being worth quite a lot, nobody could be bothered selling it. I got accused of being too mean to players, that I was making the game too hard. I was just trying to make it challenging.

Again people weren't appreciative and I didn't much feel like being there.

November 2008:

While I was a bit upset by the attitude of some of the players about 2nd level Crypt mobs, I decided to carry on regardless. I had spent ages on those mobs to make them fair, well balanced, fun and realistic to the series, yet not only didn't I get appreciation, I got abuse for it.

I decided to make a high level area for people to play with, and called it Pain's Dimension. I started off with Konan and the 6 paths of Pain, with a maze, and then Pain himself. I then made this the Jounin Exam. Ihvron was the first player to pass it but then Mantis did too and the others all came to pass it too.

I redid the 2nd level crypt mobs a few times as people kept saying that they were too hard. Finally, what I have them as now, I could prove statistically was correct.

There was also a complaint that they were hard to find, so I made a detailed map. Then I rearranged them and made a new map. In doing so, I messed up and had a few ghosts you couldn't ever reach.

This was also when we had our first real cheater. Oh we had had bug abusers before, that had got themselves extra equipment or money or got into areas they shouldn't be in etc, but this one was much more serious. This was someone who, for at least 70 levels, had had twice as many attacks per round, every round while fighting and who consequently couldn't play at all.

They had covered it up with an elaborate series of lies surrounding them being the victim of bullying. The bug was so sneaky that it was really hard to find. It had existed since Diku->Merc->Rom, for 15 years, and yet I was the first person who found a fix for it. It had been found before but nobody had ever fixed it. It made me semi-famous, amongst the MUD coding community. I didn't ban the player though, but I did delete his account, at level 134, then the 3rd highest level player in the game.

December 2008:

In the wake of the cheater being caught, our top level player, Ihvron, was upset because he had let the cheater "borrow" some of his mission equipment, something that was illegal to do and he knew full well it was illegal. Because the account had been wiped, Ihvron wanted his mission equipment back. I of course refused, since it was cheating to give him mission equipment in the first place, and worse that this was a cheater in other ways. Then, in response, Ihvron created a level 1 character and gave it all of his own mission equipment, then power levelled it to level 30 in about 2 minutes, then to level 50 in about 3 more minutes, doing the Chuunin exams in about 2 minutes, and so forth, before I cut it short, forced him to give the mission equipment back and deleted the cheating character. Ihvron tried various ways to cheat until I had blocked every way that he could think of, changing the code in a variety of different ways to stop it happening.

After that, we then had an "incident" in which, after an argument in which Ihvron tried to argue that hitroll was meaningless (when it isn't, since it is opposed to armor), Ihvron started swearing and carrying on and then after I muted him he changed his title to swear at me and wrote notes to say it. Since the code didn't give me any other option to stop him and he refused to stop on his own, I froze him. I initially did it for an hour, then he kept it up, so 2 hours, 3 hours, then 24 hours. 4 days in a row I added an extra 24 hours before he calmed down. He told everyone he was banned. Actually, given how much cheating he'd done, his not being punished long-term at all was pretty generous. He responded by writing a nasty review on The Mud Connector.

Rico and I were working on True Pain, which was initially meant to be the final test for Ihvron, but he had sort of quit then (at least as Ihvron) so others were going to have to do it.

January 2009:

January was the time of the immortality jutsu. Finally it was ready and so was True Pain. It took an awful lot of work but it was there. And there were plenty of people ready and willing to try it out for S-rank.

Sadly, on day 1, the scrolls didn't drop properly and True Pain's mob programs weren't hitting either, making him overly easy to kill and not giving scrolls. The imms decided to give them the benefit of both doubts and to give scrolls to players who killed True Pain. The first lot were given S-ranks basically just for trying.

We were heading towards the 1 year anniversary and I wanted to do something special so made the imm mob quest, with a mob in the image of all of the immortals that had ever been, a quest that was never removed from the game.

February 2009:

All was going well with the imm mob quest and then after that I went to work at the next lot of high level skills, at level 112. The first lot had worked well but this lot was more complicated.

After spending basically the whole month doing it, I had them set. Then there were complaints that somehow Kuroari was crashing it. Why? Karasu hadn't caused crashes so why was Kuroari? Try as I might I couldn't figure it out. It seemed totally random.

March 2009:

Kuroari was really getting me down, having spent an entire month building the commands only to have this one not work right. Mostly it worked but sometimes it crashed. There was no pattern to it. No hole in the code. People gave hints but none of it made sense.

I tried to push on, blaming mob programs, and hired Mochimaru to try to get rid of the bad mob programs (mostly in 2nd level of the crypt - my own bad mob programs) but even that didn't solve things. Toi began as an immortal and struggled with Cloud Village while Mochimaru made Lightning Country, which worked quite well.

April 2009:

I kept going on regardless when we got a new immortal, Raichek, who ended up being one of our big immortals, rivalling Reki and Rico even. Rico was ill at the time, so others were playing. Raichek began work on Rain Country and then Rain Village, and, while the whole place is hard to navigate, it sure is a big zone. Just needs a good map.

One immortal, Argban, decided to create 2 mobs, Itachi and Kisame, which had nothing to do with the area he was meant to be making, Mist village. These mobs were over-powered and he was giving special over-powered weapons and armor to players who killed them, personalised just for them. He prided himself as the RP imm but in the end it created severe game imbalance. In the end, I put the two mobs in Akatsuki Fortress and then, to justify their huge strength, I gave them scrolls for the newly created level 112 skills. I also made my own mob, Tobi, and put the 4th scroll on Konan (it was later moved to Pain). Argban, like Shun and Selfu before him, never made a single room in any area, although he did at least make 2 fully formed mobs, albeit with odd damage messages.

We were building great guns at this stage with me making Fire Temple tombs and Fire Temple inner sanctum at the same time and there were finally things to kill for all levels.

May 2009:

I kind of got into a dead end with Fire Temple and, while nothing was actually wrong, I just simply had some new PC games to play so took a breather for a while. I still checked in every now and then, wasn't avoiding it or anything, but just wasn't all that active.

June 2009:

I was still AWOL and a couple of the imms went AWOL with me, namely Mochimaru and Toi. Mochimaru had been so useful but he just disappeared, while Toi never really got the hang of it. It seemed as if Raichek could do it all himself though and, with Rico returning from illness, they were both building up a storm. Bravo even returned briefly. We even had a brief return of Anya! And Krator returned back briefly.

Still we had the crashes with Kuroari though and still I was depressed about it.

July 2009:

The MUD hosts (MudMagic) decided to move our MUD onto a "bigger, better, faster" new server, and in so doing they neglected to bring the MUD back up again. It also had a whole new IP address and the old address (narutomud.mudmagic.com) didn't work anymore as only wonmud.com worked. Great. If that wasn't bad enough, in doing this they gave us an invisible control character, something which you often get when moving things like this, a conversion error from Windows to Linux and back again.

As best as I can tell, this invisible control character eventually ended up causing a big hang crash, which corrupted several players' accounts, effectively deleting them.

The problem was that I hadn't logged on for about 3 months and hence hadn't backed up player files for about 3 months. To make matters worse, I couldn't fix the code either as the invisible control character made it impossible.

Then, finally, I wiped the whole code by accident when trying to fix it. Oh I had a backup, but it was missing oh so much.

I felt like shutting down the MUD at this stage. The pfiles were wiped, code was wiped, everything was gone. I didn't know what to do.

Then the MUD hosts came to the rescue with backup files, including player files. We still lost a bit but we could cope. Phew!

August 2009:

In celebration of the MUD working again, I decided to add in some more commands, the Jounin-level commands, at level 152+. This took many weeks to do, and I was trying to get it all done before I went on holiday, with enough time to thoroughly test them before I went away for a month.

I had a few troubles with the zombies but not really. Sanshouo worked fine, in spite of Kuroari having so many problems. The rest were fine. All was set.

I put it in and everyone who tested it went great guns.

I had also given shell access to my 3 most trusted immortals, Reki, Raichek and Rico, who could fix things in case of emergency while I was away.

September 2009:

I didn't add in any new code for the 3 weeks before I went away for my month-long holiday just to be sure that nothing funny happened. All was totally stable.

Then Biran hit level 152 and decided to test zombies. And he hit level 152 on the night before I had to leave. And he tested it by trying every conceivable way to make them crash the MUD. Then he put in all of these error reports that were totally useless since I was going already. I tasked Reki and Rico with trying to fix up the zombies but they never achieved it.

I had hoped that they'd have found the errors and fixed them by the time I got back but alas that was never going to happen. Biran just crashed and crashed and crashed and crashed. As if Kuroari wasn't bad enough now we had zombies. And I had to try to ignore it for a month while I was on my holiday.

October 2009:

I came back from my holiday, having logged on a few times (via java through the web in internet cafes when I could occasionally find them) and the whole thing went from bad to worse. It was an absolute nightmare. I tried to stop myself from killing Biran, as he seemed to be the one to blame for it all, after "testing" zombies the day I was leaving, when I couldn't do a thing to fix it. It wasn't like he stopped "testing" it either.

I then couldn't figure it out at all so just told Reki and Rico what to do and left them with it.

I took a little bit of a break from it again, just out of a bit of frustration. Perhaps I would have some ideas for how to fix it eventually. I also didn't want to see Biran at all.

This time around, my break didn't last all that long. While I didn't fix the zombies, I decided to push on regardless. And I made elemental affinity.

It was a huge thing and I loved doing it. It worked remarkably well and just opened up a new pathway.

While doing it, I got some odd error messages about items to do with the chakra paper destroying itself and then afterwards trying to say something.

I thought to myself - is that why Kuroari had been crashing? Because I had made the object talk after it was already destroyed? Is that why it had caused crashes when the object was destroyed in the same attack round that it was used?

If so, the solution was simple. Change obj->kuroari with simply the text "Kuroari". Indeed, if that was the case, it would be all puppets. So I changed the lot.

Not a coding error as such, just a display error, yet it was causing crashes because it didn't like saying "NULL says". Oh what a hilariously stupid error to cause a crash. So hard to trace too. I had stumbled upon it. And all was fixed.

December 2009:

I continued on with elemental affinity, making it work more perfectly, then happily added prime dragons. I wasn't sure of power or anything but so few people were testing them or even vaguely interested in them. Eventually I made them more powerful.

Then, in the same breath almost, I made bunshins. And they were so beautiful. And then kage bunshins. And then I had the whole plan for 1 bunshin per village.

Then I got the idea for how to fix up zombies. Just have them work like bunshins. It worked perfectly. Not like pets as such, more just like followers who are only useful if in the same room as you.

It worked perfectly. Zombies were fixed.

All was right in the world.

January 2010:

For a while I continued on with bunshins but then they weren't working right and I couldn't figure out why. It wasn't so much frustration or a dead end, I just couldn't be bothered with them, so instead I finished off Fire Temple Inner Sanctum and thought to make 3rd level of the crypt, a Ninja Casino complete with 2 games (Chouhan and Keno) and did a lot of little things. I did briefly cause massive crashes by having a 59-line mob program for Raiga's 3rd level crypt ghost, but other than that we have been mighty stable.

All is right in the world.

The rest isn't really history at this point in time - it is more the present.

February 2010:

I wasn't even bothering with bunshins and found that there were so many little things that needed to be fixed. In many ways, I became a builder more, just with some support for a few little bugs that were found, as if the whole MUD was already created.

We had an incident in which the new immortal Tarki (Biran), who Rico had promoted against my wishes (one of only 3 immortals ever to be promoted by someone other than me - the other two being Bravo and Argban) deleted his account, live, with 7 people chatting to him, with no build up at all or any kind of explanation. It turned out that Tarki (Biran) didn't want to lose his position as "top player" to Rico's character Ditoke and quit in disgust, making various accusations about it. It also turned out that Rico had been somewhat manipulative in his creation of items that were supposed to be as part of demon possession and elite weapons but instead ended up purely benefitting his own alt, Ditoke. Rico too quit in disgust over it.

I decided to promote 2 players who I had been thinking of beforehand, who I thought would be better choices than Biran as immortals - Hishia (Banzeshi) and Kashii (Greed). Banzeshi had fitted my idea as the perfect immortal candidate, as a high level, helpful fellow who didn't want to be an immortal. Greed wasn't as perfect, as he had asked and begged and pleaded to be an immortal many times, but nonetheless he seemed appropriate. I thought that Greed's experience could help Banzeshi while Banzeshi's honesty could help with any issues that Greed may have had.

In doing so, I discovered that Tarki (Biran)'s building, in the 3rd Shinobi War, was the worst that we had ever had. Oh, Tarki had done a lot of work, but it was really bad work, which all had to be redone. Cheesy mobs galore, badly written mob programs, overly powerful items, lack of a map, not setting sectors, not designing rooms or mobs properly - the whole thing was a disaster. It was as if Tarki had no idea what he was doing. An absolute disaster.

Hishia was amazingly good, reminding me of when Raichek started, and had soon taken on 4 zones in skeleton form. Kashii was only taking over 1, but managed a mere 6 blank rooms in the same time that Hishia had made 4 skeleton zones, 2 fully complete zones, had helped to make couriers, helped to redo the 3rd Shinobi War and done so many other things.

We also finally opened up Jyoshiya's sand village area. This in turn meant that we had, for the first time, a Naruto-real world.

I eventually had a go at the bunshins again, although I was never able to figure out all of their issues. I figured perhaps that if I had them all set up then I could set up the copying issues all together, all at once. Sometimes it is best just to continue on regardless.