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     Post subject:Bouncing System Change
    PostPosted:Sat Oct 11, 2008 6:40 am 
     

    Joined:Sun Oct 05, 2008 9:05 pm
    Posts:48
    Bouncing in Uplink and Onlink has always annoyed me. Sure, they're a cinematic representation of the cracking experience, but I've always felt it odd that pretty much any system in the world is willing to allow source routing facilities to any other system in the world, even when there's reason to believe such systems are actively hostile. The result feels wrong, and I think it ignores the opportunity for a very useful gameplay element.

    Instead, I would love to see systems deny source routing (bouncing) to unknown systems. When you crack a system for the first time, you then gain the ability to bounce through it. Unlike admin access and other accounts, this sticks around throughout the entire game, although having admin access makes your bounce more difficult to trace (as it does now). One can make up some flavour text about having installed a simple network trojan if you like.

    The advantage of this system is that one can't go and bounce through half the systems on the planet at the start of the game, which as others have mentioned isn't much fun. Instead, one continues to take missions as per normal, but most missions will result in an extra bounce you can use, which is an additional reward. The player has an increased motivation to crack systems they don't even have direct missions for, since every new crack yields a new bounce.

    This does require a little rebalancing, since the player is going to have very short bounce routes, especially near the start of the game. However it does provide another valuable way for the player to "level up". There's also some nice fallout in that protected systems (eg, mainframes) can't be accessed until a corresponding internal services system has been compromised.

    A variant on the above would be having public access servers and/or some other machines always allow bouncing through them at the start of the game. This yields many of the same benefits, but with less need for rebalancing.

    All the best,

    PJF

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     Post subject:Re: Bouncing
    PostPosted:Sat Oct 11, 2008 10:47 am 
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    I... really like the variant of that idea (allow public access servers + other machines (Uplink Corp. + aux. gateways, perhaps?)). Heck, you could make things a bit more difficult by actually requiring the installation of a trojan/backdoor... but that'd probably get tedious and boring, so nevermind.

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     Post subject:Re: Bouncing
    PostPosted:Sat Oct 11, 2008 1:43 pm 
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    Yeah, that's definitely one of the better ideas to come out of this forum in awhile.

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     Post subject:Re: Bouncing System Change
    PostPosted:Sat Oct 11, 2008 6:23 pm 
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    Joined:Mon Sep 22, 2008 9:51 am
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    I had thoughts of something like this once, but I realized it would probably be rather tedious to compromise all the systems repeatedly to have a bounce point (as I was being realistic). I also had ideas for multiple operating systems with various different security systems and some more realistic methods (real hacking) ways of going about things in the game. Such as e-mail and virus tracing via analysis, gathering info on a person to guess thier passwords, replacing the password breaker with a brute forcer (ergo slower), setting up password servers, which is simular to the library breaker but has a different arrays of already hacked passwords. I had tons of idea for my dev cd but I never really bothered to put any in.

    But in any case, if this is done you might as well also add a bandwidth limit to the interconnecting routes (ergo making routing through phone systems a really bad idea for thier extremely low bandwidth, but can be bounced through via hacking the phone directory service).

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     Post subject:Re: Bouncing System Change
    PostPosted:Sat Oct 11, 2008 7:38 pm 
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    Quote:
    (ergo making routing through phone systems a really bad idea for thier extremely low bandwidth, but can be bounced through via hacking the phone directory service)
    IIRC, Miah said he's disabling bouncing through phones.

    -- Griffinhart

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     Post subject:Re: Bouncing System Change
    PostPosted:Sat Oct 11, 2008 8:43 pm 
    Literally Nine
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    And disabled systems. How can you route through an offline system?


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     Post subject:Re: Bouncing System Change
    PostPosted:Sun Oct 12, 2008 10:11 am 
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    Quote:
    And disabled systems. How can you route through an offline system?
    Aw dang, that was my favorite.

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     Post subject:Re: Bouncing System Change
    PostPosted:Sun Oct 12, 2008 10:59 am 
    Literally Nine
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    I know. It's a sad day when I start listening to you for *sanity* checks.


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     Post subject:Re: Bouncing System Change
    PostPosted:Sun Oct 12, 2008 2:39 pm 
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    Quote:
    [...] *sanity* checks.
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    -- Griffinhart

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     Post subject:Re: Bouncing System Change
    PostPosted:Tue Oct 21, 2008 10:34 pm 
     

    Joined:Tue Oct 21, 2008 7:27 pm
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    I think maybe opening ports or adding your own ip to the systems exception list then deleting logs would be a step although it would be difficult, maybe just on rival systems?


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