It's always bothered me that sysadmins sit at home, all day, all night, just
waiting for some cracker to call them up so they can provide a suitable voice sample for analysis.
Real people sleep, they have jobs, they have lives, or at the very least they occasionally don't answer the phone before they're in a big raid on their favourite MMO. However, most people also have some sort of answering service.
While this would be a thematic change only, I'd love to see phones that sometimes
don't get answered. In which case we play a different voice sample, such as:
Quote:
Hello. I'm not here right now, so please leave a message after the tone. Thank-you!
Note that it still contains the word
Hello, it still has enough sound for the voice analyser, and so it still works for all the missions where you need to get a sample of the sysadmin's voice. However it provides just a little bit more realism to the game, without any loss in gameplay.
There's no need to try and simulate the person's wakefulness, either. Just a simple coin-flip would work just fine.
The downside of this is that more voice-samples are needed. For newly submitted voice samples, that's not a problem. For existing voice samples, it may be possible to mark them as "always home".
This could make a reasonable small-project for a coding intern, since it doesn't change core functionality, and we're not very sad if it doesn't happen.
Paul