Best Of

I don't think health artifacts are going to be cheesing people out of death in Starmourn in quite the same way. 

HP doesn't factor into any of our killpaths, though there are some things that would indicate devs want us to attempt it in some way...?

Utility/Cosmetic things ftw, but I feel like atm the stat investments and other stuff aren't justified by costs, and I wouldn't want them to be too significant either.

So, because you broke into a locked door, you want everyone to fall over themselves to reward you? Most of the rooms you are hacking into are secured storage facilities. You are commiting a crime... why would the people behind the doors be happy to see you?

Honestly, I am surprised more of those rooms don't have guards that attack on sight.

There are multiple reason that we're the only company left in the world launching a new, traditional MUDs, and a large part of that is our business model. Were there a large market for MUDs in 2019, it would make sense to try to charge substantially lower prices and get more people playing, but alas, that's not the case. 

I want to be able to hack enemies by hacking into their wetwiring, disabling them in a pacifist manner, thus completing quests without murdering anyone.

I want to be able to hack items to upgrade them, or risk destroying them if I fail.

I want to be able to hack bugs and drones and change their logic.

I want to be able to earn marks by hacking INRs to significantly magnify their XP gains (but only to the player who died; don't want an INR theft economy).

I want to be able to hack NPCs' mindsims to get a list of all their quest triggers etc. and risk being aggro'd if I fail.

I want to be able to hack PCs' mindsims as an alternate form of PvP.

And more.

Indecision said:

Seconding the request for more hacking love.

Also requesting terminals WAAAAY above level 16, please. Level 16 just isn't challenging enough.

There's kind of a point of diminishing return the way difficulty currently scales up. At some point longer passwords just cut into the number of possible passwords. And otherwise the main driver of difficulty is just bumping up the GigaOps health and GigaOps damage of ICE, which is really just stat bloat and not particularly fun.

The next step for increasing difficulty should probably include different challenges (like Black ICE) at higher skill levels, but I think the vast majority of players are a long way from needing the extra challenge. I was top 5 in the hacking rankings last I checked and RNG still kicks the crap out of me enough to keep high level terminals interesting. I've yet to encounter a Level 14-16 terminal that didn't require treading carefully and you can still find yourself stuck in a clusterflakk.

Bottom Line Up Front: Hacking doesn't generate marks for users (unlike Bashing/Incursions - both create junk and player-desired commodities), rooms behind hacked doors lead to unresponsive NPCs and inconsequential areas (No quests or lore for my efforts??). Hacking could use some love in the form of rewards as well as more depth to make it attractive to players. Y'all have ideas, aside from the addition that is coming to the 'piercers? Currently just a hobbyist's game.

Okay, so I'm not going to claim to have hacked every available space in the game just yet, but at this point I feel that Hacking deserves a bit more attention thrown its way. I know @Tecton is busy incorporating hacking into PvP aspects of Starmourn, but the general use of hacking is lacking in comparison to bashing and dealing with incursions. Both of these ventures make money through junk and cargo as well as the selling of items for player usage, whereas hacking is just a hobbyist's sport right now. Many of us enjoy it so it isn't really a sin for it to be such, but I think the problem lies in that inequality of Time Spent vs Reward and the fact that a lot of these rooms lead to mobiles that don't interact with the player at all.

To be honest, I don't have any wild solutions to this and would have to defer to the creative minds out there. Having quests locked behind doors or simply siphoning marks from the fictional organization that you're hacking into would be interesting, but I don't know if that is too simple of a solution - it would certainly answer some of the problems I've brought up here and involve the least amount of work for coders. I feel like something bigger would be more interesting and bring hacking to the forefront for those looking for something to do besides bashing, but what do you all think?

Should hacking be a desired skill for some of these NPC organizations? I haven't done the newbie hacking quests in the other factions, but Scatterhome's involve the theft of information to benefit others. An information trade between parties would be interesting, even if it were just NPCs. Since the piercer change will benefit factions, I feel anything else should benefit the player in some form. 

I like the idea of other hackable mediums that provide rewards, but come with high risk as well (deployed security bots in an area, countermeasures that recognize your mindsim signature that need to be bypassed before another attempt can be made). Maybe even terminals with multiple levels of security (with Ops resets between levels)? I'm just spitballing things that sound interesting to me as someone who enjoys hacking and I'm hoping there are others who either enjoy or absolutely abhor hacking that have their own suggestions as well. 

It is notable that tri-trans is very achievable with just leveling up and the $70 investment into the game ($20 lessons, $50 for the 300cr package), and the subscription makes omni-trans reachable in a short time for Starmourn. $70 isn't a lot to spend on a game - new games usually drop for $60 without any DLC, and including DLC can sometimes be another $50-$100. As far as games go, I personally have found IRE's basic price to be very normal; not to say that the cost of things isn't sometimes insane (lol $500 weapons), but so far Starmourn's been extremely reasonable. 

Lock-on indications for smol boys (anything displayed with an &). If there's a color change, it's not obvious to me.

Minor xp gains for repairing damage and systems (support the tanks!)
XP gain on hits/damage dealt/any future 'afflictions'. I'm okay with the killing blow getting the bulk of the reward, but I'm also not opposed to a pure damage-based xp split over current.
Flag cargo as 'claimed' for anyone in the crew of the person getting the killing blow (or alternatively first aggro but not my preference). Trying to recover claimed cargo would result in you being open shippk. Not sure if there should be an alert for it.

Those three together would make fleets more of a possibility plus add some potential SPACE DRAMA.

Nykara said:

RocketCat said:

Rest easy with the knowledge that 50-60 bashing is harder than 60-70.

Another handy trick is to take the .+ moves in to attack you message and make it play a warning sound! That way you'll be alerted to those pesky wandering aggro mobs.

or spammed by the sounds of schwarzenegger screaming GET DOWN over and over and over again as the bug of them spamming "moves in to attack you" persists

I turn sound off so I use a text echo, but I'm totally modifying this advice to change the text from "NEW AGGRO" to "GET TO THE HOVERBOARD!!!"

While I do agree that it would be nice to not be policed for designing purely out of convenience, if I were making a game from words I would want the words to be consistently styled. Particularly if people are paying me to play with my words.

I don't think that terminals are intended to be the only way to have a storefront. They are super convenient though. I would be willing to bet that as things get established, we will get the chance to get actual stores.

What IS going to make for a super rich RP environment are places like @Kestrel is describing. I hope I get to visit it eventually.