HACKNET - revamp suggestion

[Netphreak]

So let me start off with: I tl;dr'd the OP.

I'll move on to what I THOUGHT hacknet would be like before I ever saw it.

1- An intense inter-connection of all genreps in the game, with spatial context. Not just OPs, faction HQ's, and neutral areas. It is my opinion that EVERY gr in the game should be accessible via hacknet.

2- Multipathing from about every point. No network is built light a highway, they are built like a city. There may only be one way out of your front door, but once you get on the road you can take one of 20+ paths to get to your destination. Hacknet travel should be the same. And, your starting point should be the GR you hacked, not your faction db or the UG gr.

3- faction agnostic. none of this doy travel/nc travel bs until you get to the faction dbs.

4- (tied to #1 & 2) hackers should be able to transport groups of players through hacknet to any destination in the game.

5- how the holy hell can we not hack the city com? hackers should be able to snoop on previous players' use of a citycom, and perhaps use it to identify the location of ANY runner in the same fashion that the NCPD list operates today.
-caveat, perhaps there should be an SL cutoff relating to lore. Something to the tune of 'NCPD secretly tracks runners with 50 <-> -15 SL, while publicly tracking runners -16 and below.' This way, if a player really really didn't want to be tracked, they could get their SL up above 50, which I imagine most players with a strong aversion to this would likely have high SL

6- alerts & counter-measures - hacking alerts/etc... just in the same way an op warns when a hack goes down. Notifications that someone is snooping your citycom sessions, notifications to clans when a hacker exits an op gr, if they haven't defeated the counter-measures first. difficulty of the counter-measure should be scaled if a hacker is transporting other players through hacknet.

7- random insano encounters with the AI's from the NC lore.




Those are pretty much all of the things I hoped/expected from hacknet. It is rather bland in its current state.

I like it. Especially point 7. That would make the whole hacknet thing/going into hacknet worth while from an RP perspective.

[Torg]

1- An intense inter-connection of all genreps in the game, with spatial context. Not just OPs, faction HQ's, and neutral areas. It is my opinion that EVERY gr in the game should be accessible via hacknet.
2- Multipathing from about every point. No network is built light a highway, they are built like a city. There may only be one way out of your front door, but once you get on the road you can take one of 20+ paths to get to your destination. Hacknet travel should be the same. And, your starting point should be the GR you hacked, not your faction db or the UG gr.

Multipathing sounds great, would need a complete rewrite of the HN layout. unlikely. but connecting all public GRs and starting from the hacked GR are great ideas. please!

3- faction agnostic. none of this doy travel/nc travel bs until you get to the faction dbs.

doy is gone, but the 12 tribes... uihm, factions are still alive.

4- (tied to #1 & 2) hackers should be able to transport groups of players through hacknet to any destination in the game.

yes. the HN is a mainly a travel-net. can we haz hacknet vehicles, like multiseated scripts?

5- how the holy hell can we not hack the city com? hackers should be able to snoop on previous players' use of a citycom, and perhaps use it to identify the location of ANY runner in the same fashion that the NCPD list operates today.
-caveat, perhaps there should be an SL cutoff relating to lore. Something to the tune of 'NCPD secretly tracks runners with 50 <-> -15 SL, while publicly tracking runners -16 and below.' This way, if a player really really didn't want to be tracked, they could get their SL up above 50, which I imagine most players with a strong aversion to this would likely have high SL

6- alerts & counter-measures - hacking alerts/etc... just in the same way an op warns when a hack goes down. Notifications that someone is snooping your citycom sessions, notifications to clans when a hacker exits an op gr, if they haven't defeated the counter-measures first. difficulty of the counter-measure should be scaled if a hacker is transporting other players through hacknet.

thats a different story. Hacknet is for travelling, Citycoms for info. What kind of info would you like to steal?

7- random insano encounters with the AI's from the NC lore.

Yes, but. Wouldnt that make the HN a noob-unfriendly place?

In general: the hacknet is a beautiful place. i went there numerous times just to be there. It should be a place of its own, not just another dungeon to level up INT and DEX. Speaking of which: no HN AoE!

[William Antrim]

Id like to be able to hack the citycom to GET hack missions in HN. There could be a whole story line for this. Deep cover operatives working in the shadows etc.

[Drachenpaladin]

Yes, but. Wouldnt that make the HN a noob-unfriendly place?

I'm sure there are also noob unfriendly places in the HN like high security areas and that sort of majiggery...

[William Antrim]

Hacknet should be dangerous, noobs should get one shotted by some mobs. There are a whole bunch of zones that noobs shouldnt go to in the Wastelands, why should HN be any different.

If anything simple and easy that HN needs it would be viruses. More mobs, different mobs. More stuff to do. More XP also.

Starting in HN at the GR you hacked would be a great start - if it is in the Wastelands. If it is in the city then perhaps there is a way to add some zones?

For example making a Plaza HN zone, a Via Rosso HN zone etc? give these places as an alternative to their real world counterparts - I dont mean with stores and stuff necessarily but at least have Citycom style terminals to give the hackers missions. These can then have portals to lead to the respective DNS (Plaza would have access to NEXT CA etc and Via Rosso would have PP, Tangent, Biotech etc) and THEN out to the travel zones. I recommend removing the names of the travel zones from NC and DOY to Travel zone 1-16 or whatever.

Battledome and Point Red and the other neutral GRs should be connected in their respective places too (they might be already - I only remember DRT having a HN space).

This is what I would do with the current NC HN anyway, and then implement the stuff above at a later date.