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This is probably pointless, cause it seems development on onlink has stopped, but I felt like leaving a suggestion anyways. Playing onlink through, there's a lot of neat ideas in there and some legitimate difficulty that counterbalance the normal "money=win" mechanic uplink normally had, and I can sort of see where they were coming from when they designed things like the DENIAL program, but tbh that specific feature feels like someone fell asleep in game design class.
It makes SENSE, but I don't really think people join uplink to do essentially the hacking equivalent of un-automated office excel spreadsheets.
You crack an internal services machine or whatever, going through all the motions with bypassers or whatever you're using, then pick up the denial file and put it in the filesever, then go into console and run the program, shut down the server and wait for reboot, exit out and delete logs, then disconnect and delete logs at internic.
Congratulations, you're now 1-50th done!
Yeaaaaaah...
My suggestion: Social engineering.
Keep the current mechanics as is, so you have the option of doing it manually, but also add new servers like message boards and email systems and public shareware stuff, etc.
Teir 0 would be without tools, and the steps would be:
You'd have to find one of these sites, and craft a message or file entry that looks legit. Game would look for certain keywords and there would be certain patterns that would work better than others. (You could probably have an ingame hint about the stuff you could talk about in the research lab help)
Then attach denial renamed or something, post and clear your tracks, and wait an ingame day or two.
The upside is that instead of knowing your index finger off in boredom, you're trading that tedium for only needing ONE or TWO hacks, and it taking some ingame time to take effect. Also that they would be detectable and degrade the number of clients you have over time back down. (Hopefully you've done your hack already by the time they drop off.)
Of course, tier 0 attack would be the easiest to detect and would have the least clicks (10-15 computers infected at peak, news would talk about some virus and your denial clients would start dropping off as they clean)
Tier 1: A tool from the internal services machine, lets you craft a malicious link people click instead of a file. Same as Tier 0 but slightly more effective.
Tier 2: Now you can bundle denial in with an unwanted toolbar or program, thus getting more effect and a longer cushion than Tier 1.
Tier 3: You can automatically craft denial into a malicious picture or audiofile, that triggers when viewed. Hardest to detect and most effective of these three.
In the labs, there could also be a "Wrapper", essentially "Tier 4". The difference being that you have to actually go out to internal services machines and lans and other personal computers or whatever and find a cool new program that people would want. Games, software, etc. Use wrapper to hide denial in the executable, and then distribute THAT.
The most effective and hardest to track, client amount based on how interesting the file you found to wrap it in was, but if you use the same file too soon to attempt it then it becomes quicker to be tracked.
On an aside, you could probably use a file besides denial in the same way to harvest links of pcs in an alternate way of finding pc links to Nameservers. Tracer.exe or something.
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