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Hi there, I've been a fan of Uplink and Onlink for quite some time, but there are some big issues that make it really hard for a beginner.
First, the mission difficulty ramps up way too fast, so the player doesn't have nearly enough credits for the required tools once those missions become available. Any missions that are lucrative enough for the player and fit in well in his toolset, are less likely to appear as the player's rating progresses faster than his toolset, leaving him with only high-level missions and forcing him to fastforward until a lucrative mission finally appears.
However, there will be times where nothing interesting will appear, so the player will choose a "sabotage a file" mission just to get a little money. The problem being with fast-forwarding and doing one of those missions again on the same machine, is that the security is upgraded. This is normal, a company would of course upgrade the security after one of it's machines is hacked. But having top-of-the-line security systems with Sentries, Firewalls, Encryptions, Proxies and Bandwidth Monitors for a measly Internal Services Machine for a measly "copy a file" mission you accepted for a measly 1400 credits, is just game-breaking for a beginner. Sometimes I'd even get missions asking me to hack in a LAN when I didn't even have a Connection Analyzer, for a reward of 7000 credits. I did have randommissiongeneration ticked off in the Options menu. For some reason in the 0.2.5n version trying to tick it off after having it ticked on causes the game to crash. Actually trying to apply changes at all in the Options menu causes it to crash.
Maybe mission generation should depend on the amount of credits and tools the player has.
If you are going to infect the internet with Revelation, your prime targets would be the now highly-secured Internal Services Machines, which can easily be bypassed, but cost valuable time. Having a "Bypass All (Possible)" button on the Connection Analyser would make things faster and less tedious.
Normally one would earn a buttload of cash after transferring the money to himself from an account tracked after a "Trace a recent balance transfer" mission, however the only way not getting yourself caught after a transfer, even after deleting the logs in the statement from the sending and receiving end (and InterNIC), is to use expensive bypassers. For some reason using a disabler during a bank hack gets you caught after a transfer regardless of what you do. I guess this has something to do with the bank instantly reading the logs during an Active Trace triggered by the disablers, which doesn't happen if you use bypassers. Since getting bypassers costs alot of money, players will have a hard time catching up with the missions without that huge sum of money. (Unless this was intended to prevent low-level players getting more than they need, I can understand that.)
Having some kind of toggle to hide all the names of the servers on the world map would be great as well, since setting up a huge bounce link becomes hard when all the boxes are obscured by server names. Aside from that, the only server name visible should be the one at the end of the chain, because right now if I look at the world map I have a hard time telling which server I will end up connecting to.
The store has descriptions on programs and what they do, but not how they should be used. Right-clicking a program in your HDD should make a message box pop up, telling you how to use the program properly. The first time I got my hands on a Voice Analyzer, I thought you had to use an actual microphone to input things. This should prevent some trial-and-error situations where you bang two rocks together until they actually do something useful.
And the VSEC 3.0 system is just plain hell. If it had a cracker costing more than 1 million credits, I'd gladly take it. It doesn't even seem to abide by the normal laws of Lights Out, and the fact that it locks you out after a several tries just makes things worse, giving you little opportunity to properly understand it's own rules. It's even a challenge for hardcore Lights Out solvers. I figured this was a hacking simulator, not a puzzle game. The first thing that comes to mind about VSEC is "artificial difficulty", where it's just hard for the sake of being hard, not to test the player's skill. Everything you have learned before is useless at this point. Luckily the wiki has the answers to these, but I'd imagine not being able to progress further without it.
It's like the second half of FarCry 1 and Crysis. In the first half the player can do the objectives in any way he sees fit, you can use all kinds of strategies and tactics to wipe out the enemy soldiers and mercenaries, like stealth, setting traps and diversions, or just run past them with the speed of light. In the second half the main enemies you will be facing are aliens and mutants. They have little to no life preservancy, using other methods to kill them like stealth is impossible, and are way less fun to fight than the humans, because the playstyles you had in the first half now no longer matter, it's just plain shooting.
The point is that VSEC 3.0 doesn't fit well in the progression as a hacker. The other versions can be done without a cracker if you know how, but 3.0 is torture. An expensive program to bypass it, or just puzzles that anyone 100% human can do.
I didnt got that version of tool, BUT ALL THE THINGS ARE AS EXACTLY AS YOU SAID,
The upgrades are hard to achive and mostly at begin of game, they are many unrelated security, some time i open up a massion say low security, and the server server machine has all the security system, and some time even higher than the marker bypasser version. and some time about a main frame it say heavily secured, and the main frame only have monitor, proxy, and firewall
i spend a lot of time at those go get file mission for this kinda issue, when i get a bit of money, oh new security come up, i ran out of memory, and when every things is good, oh you have lot of software, ram is not enough
BTW, hardly i got new secondary server today, and i ran from memory lack issue
the software are too much even at begining, and Gateways are not good too store minimum requirement...
AND YES, WHAT THE HECK WITH THAT SECURITY SYSTEM? The admin goes to panel and play like a child for half a day till the door open? if it was more like android lock screen it was better. hey and dont create one like that, i'm already ran out of money, BTW that's nothing like security system.
those internal machine may be easily to figure out, and there be no need to have very expensive gateway, but as they increase their security system, it's good too see money gain also increase...
also one more thing is if some one accidentally delete his proxy / firewall bypasses/killer/disabler, he may stay there for ever as there is no machine without these security system, after specific time, and as their level also grows higher at light speed
