Dear Brothers and Sisters (huh? Do we have any?) of Navy Field,

I hope all of our family is doing well. I guess it…s a bit early for my updates since I
normally try to update the news towards the end of the month. Recent events have
left me with no choice but to give some explanation regarding the drama in NF.

1. The NF Drama Season 2
Here it comes again; I guess we have an annual drama once every year. It always
seems to stem from players who guess and speculate about things without knowing
any details. Therefore, here I am with my story again. Obst and Gruven have left
ONF as you all know. However, it…s not as a result of us having kicked them out or
us making them leave. First, they have been very busy with their personal lives.
Second, as you all know, the new ONF patch progress has been going very slow
from Korea as that dev team is lagging on their work. I am really sorry about this.
Also, the "Big Thing" that Gurven talked about is raising the "Level Cap" in the
game. As you may know, ours is different compared to the Korea server. We have
level caps for sailors. Basically, because of this cap, level 95 and level 120 sailors are
no different except higher level sailors can have bigger ships. Therefore, I have
decided to raise this cap for the veteran players and discussed it with Gruven, but
he obviously did not like it. I believe that this may be the main reason he left the
team. I feel really bad for losing both Obst and Gruven since they have done an
incredible job, but since ONF is based on volunteer work, I am respecting their
decisions. I really appreciate their work done for the community. Thank you, Obst
and Gruven.

This is the story between us and ONF head players; there is not a conspiracy or
anything of the sort. It's just that we have different views and ideas plain and
simple.

2. Raising the Cap Plan
As I mentioned above, we are going to test out the new ability cap. We are
definitely not removing the "Ability Cap" Just trying to fix it. The plan is to change
them very slowly and little by little. So, we may start with a 5% increase in the test
server to be tested by testers and then will apply it to the normal server to see how
you like it. If you do not like it then we can just take it out. Isn't this simple? So
let's just try it out to see how you guys like it.

3. ONF
Since ONF heads, Obst and Gruven, have left the team, I guess we have to form the
team again. We will discuss this with members of TNF and will let you know further
details once available. Also, please remember that recent ONF work will be patched
to our server whenever they are ready. I will try to push to have it done soon.
Thank you for your patience on this.

4. About My Regular Update
Some people seem to be misunderstanding my updates that I keep providing in
order to give you ideas into what we are doing and planning now and into the
future. These are ideas and goals of ours and not exact predictions. I keep seeing
players calling me a "lair", a "fake", or that I "never keep promises" among other
flames concerning the delaying of projects. If I were the one who did all of the work
on the game, then I could give you an exact date for everything we do. I am not a
developer though and do not even know what C++ looks like. I am just checking
with our developers and getting the progress reports and then updating on my
update. I believe we have some programmers playing; if you are one then you
should understand how it…s not easy to work on a project. It just does not work as
expected; there are always problems and unexpected happenings. This is why I
cannot give you the exact dates even if it…s something which has been patched into
the test server. So, I will leave the decision up to you guys; I will let you guys chose
to either have me stop providing my normal updates and to not reveal any plans
that we're working on until they are ready to patch (this would be much easier for
me), or for me to continue providing the sorts of updates which I've provided in the
past with no promises on exact dates. Let me know what you think.

5. Patch between Korea and NFNA server.
The other thing I kept hearing were comments about patch delays from Korea to
NFNA server. Those who allege that we are ignoring NFNA make me laugh. Why
would we ignore NFNA which has the most NF players? Stop making drama please.
The reason we are patching something in the Korea server first is because it's a lot
faster to recover the problem there and we have a different balance system (There
is no ability cap in the Korea server). For example, last week new anti-sub weapons
were patched to the Korea server and there were errors, so they had to take the
server down in order to fix the problem. If we patch them on NFNA at the same time,
it would take double the amount of time to fix the problem and we would probably
(definitely) still get flames from players like "This is how $D works, I knew it! They
suck" So basically, given the choice of being flamed in either situation I would
rather take flames for having to delay the patch in NFNA.

6. Storage System Update
Almost Done! :) Our dev team is currently testing it out and fixing some bugs.
Planning to patch them in Korea server first within two weeks and if no problem is
detected then we will patch them to the NFNA server as soon as possible. I would
place bets on it arriving here no later than next month. Thank you very much for
your patience!

7. About our trade system
One of the most common comments I receive from players is about sailor trading.
Currently, Premium sailors and elite sailors are blocked for trading. Players are
telling us: "You're evil $DE! Why can't I trade something which I've paid for! You
swindling money guzzlers!" I feel kind of bad about it. I am curious to see how
many people really want to trade all sailors, except BO. I am not saying we are
going to unblock the sailor trade locks, but let me just see how many of you would
want this to happen first.

8. Premium CVs
Most likely, many players have already seen this. I'm sorry, it was supposed to be
on my last update but I just forgot to include it. It's a bit late, but please enjoy:

Hindenburg


Ticonderoga


Implacable


Zuikaku



9. New Ships for New Nation Project
Here are more photos for our new nations (I like Bolzano Personally; it looks really
nice.)

BB Richelieu


CA Bolzano


CA Trento



10. SDE vs Blizzard?
I see lots of players making comparisons between us and Blizzard. It's funny
because it's somewhere along the lines of comparing a Hyundai Sonata vs a Rolls
Royce Phantom (I'm not trying to be disrespectful towards my company nor our
country's car company here). Personally, Blizzard is my most admired company. I
love their games including Diablo, Starcraft, and World of Warcraft. In addition,
World of Warcraft is the best game in my gaming life. Every time I play it, I am taken
aback and often say "wow" to myself. I've learned many things from playing it. It's
just such a well-made game. I apologize; we are not Blizzard. I believe Blizzard had
a hard time when they started their first project and also that they made lots of
mistakes until they were able to really succeed. Navy Field is our first project and we
are making lots of mistake and we might not look professional to you. I am sorry for
these problems we have caused you, but please understand that even if we cannot
be as good as Blizzard, we are working as hard as them to provide you a better
game experience; this I can promise.

BTW: Does anyone know the exact launch date of Diablo 3?


As always, thank you all for your support of Navy Field,

-yuno


Navy Field: Created by SD EnterNet, Developed by 25,965 Navy Field Players

edit by rolleso: correct the spelling on CV Implacable. (04/09)