Well, not really though.
No offense intended, but this is the second time you've started a response with this type of snark. It's not appreciated.
In unwired it makes it very clear that piracy is very difficult, with warez nodes constantly having to move as the Grid Overwatch Douchebags Division roots them out. Hell it took a test, and money to get pirate software, that took hacking skills to find. I had to spend the better part of my down time every month either patching or looking for up to date code for my software. It wasn't easy or simple, most shadow nodes had to be well hidden or on the move, or such a tool of the corps that they left it there, shadowsea being one of those tools.
All of which were advanced rules, not core rules. So once
Unwired comes out, I would hope you re-evaluate your position on this.
The amount of infrastructure needed to stop, scan, test, identify and halt malicious code for every single packet transfer is just ridiculous. The whole point of hacking and cracking is that you're tricking the machine, or the human element, or both. What you send out looks innocuous to the machine, and makes it do something within its operating protocol and it goes "Okay, that seems fine, I'll just do that little thing, I'll run a troubleshoot diagnostic on that part or move that actuator or run this computation." Thing is, you're making it do those little things, maybe a thousand times, or in a sequence that makes it do what you want. Spit out a credstick or a bag of gummy bears, turn off some of its censors so that an authorized vendor can restock the product which by your spoofed ID you very much look like to the machine. There was no shortage of clever you had to be to make things happen, and you were still a minority in the population.
And all of those thousands of processes were being done with your commlink in 4th edition. What I'm saying is that the upgrades to the Matrix have made this whole process even more difficult by removing the capability for commlinks to perform several of these types of processes. This is the Attack and Sleaze attribute from 5th edition. These attributes are an aggregate of your device's capacity to perform the types of actions necessary to bypass or otherwise fool a system into performing in a way that is counter to its designer's intent. The fact that commlinks can no longer do these tasks has led to an overall increase in the capacity for Data Processing and Firewall, allowing the public to get more secure and more powerful commlinks for the same price as before. This is a marketing strategy that I think no one can deny is effective.
As John Q. Public, when you buy a cell phone, you're not looking to hack with it. You're looking for something that will handle a lot of data, have a lot of the features you want, and be secure. That's what the megacorps have done, and in the process they also managed to take the opportunity to hack away from the general public. It's really quite genius if you think about it from an in-game perspective. Ignore the rules and mechanics, and think about why the corporations did what they did: security. They wanted to make their systems more secure and make the public less able to fight back. It's the same rationale for any country that bans gun sales. The purpose is to make the public feel like they're safer, and also it prevents the public from fighting back against the corporations and/or governments. There's a reason the Second Amendment was so important to Constitutionalists: it prevents the government from being able to march and army through your town without your say-so.
The corporations have built on the idea of presenting safety to people at the cost of the freedom of the people. This is a common recurring theme throughout all dystopias, and Shadowrun is no different.
I could totally accept that corporate security started tightening up, like allot, started instituting more stringent protocols whatever. But even previously, most offices were all wired, wifi blocking paint, and polorized windows. If you wanted anything important you still had to go inside or tap a land line near the premise, you had to physically be there and either you were clever to bluff your way in, sneak in, or take a risk and shoot your way in. Important data on premise was in proprietary format, so you had to be running the same OS as the company working on it (Why you just didn't need their builder program I don't know, but that's the way they wrote it.) to even view the file. Let alone if you want to sell it, you have to move it off as certified data, which erases the original copy, and find someone who can appreciate the value of it and find a buyer.
Except this wasn't the normal experience for most people in 4th edition. Read through the old decker stuff on this board and on Dumpshock, it's full of people describing hacks that they did from around the world. Hell, one group hacked the Zurich Orbital Bank from the ground. Your gameplay experiences are not everyone's gameplay experiences. Also, there are things in this that you're describing - again - from
Unwired. You can't take four years of content and compare it to one. It's just not ever going to match up. When
Data Trails is released, I think you'll find some of your old favorites are back in the game. And at that point, I hope you give it another try.
I understand they want to tighten things up for gameplay or whatever, but the general path they've take has been on the side of hard scifi, not explaining away things as super science. They do explain away fantastical things, but using the logical progression of technology. Like ASIST, which was something of a rarity in 2nd ed is now everywhere, that's given the matrix a 3rd dimension of travel, you can be in it, think it and make it. That's already fantastical, and the corps with their infinite funds use it to no end to out think the general population and make some fantastic things to sell, and some real wiz brutal things to protect their profits. But today, we already have ways of using mental impulses to control things, I'm reminded of an experiment where they had a monkey bound up, hooked to basically a trode net, controling a robotic arm to give it bananas. You can see where that'd go, you can see the influence -both ways really. It's not fantasy, it's science fiction, you take what's loosly probable today and see where you can imagine going with it.
You're comparing the modern world to Shadowrun's technology. *shakes head* You just can't do that. As many freelancers have stated over the last several months, it's just not a realistic comparison. Shadowrun is built on a timeline that diverged from ours back in the 80s. It's had global catastrophes that we can't even imagine. The whole of the earth has been restructured and rebuilt so many times that it's just completely impossible to look at today's tech and say "we have that now, why don't we have more in the future?" The simple answer is "because it's not
our future."
Not only that, but think of it from a setting standpoint. You have greezy little gutter urchins scraping to get by out there, toughest one gets to eat. Then you have the little one not too tough by street urchin standards, but he's smart and he's got a 2 bit link he lifted, and he's helping his little friends get by by hacking a vending machine or two, or a maglock to let them get some place secure to sleep for the night, whatever.
All of this goes counter to your earlier point that security in many facilities was too tight to hack. Now, you have to use your Hardware skill to break into that maglock, and the SINless have to suffer even more. This is called a dystopia. It's supposed to be brutal to the poor and downtrodden, and the corps don't want that street urchin to get into their goodies with a "2 bit link."
THAT is the setting.
There are mountains of people struggling to get by and some of them are clever enough to exploit the system, not because they have the budget for some 50'0000 nuyen skateboard but because they're clever. That to me is way more gritty cyberpunk than: The system is so wiz powerful that your machine literally lights on fire, and you spend another 25'000 nuyen fixing it. Yeah, there goes street level play.
I think, but I can't be sure, that we'll see some serious changes to cyberdecks in
Data Trails. When it comes out, we can start to compare apples to apples.
The gibson is so powerful that your machine explodes, and on sight security tries to melt your little decker buddies brains, sure. 7-11's slushy machine is connected to the omnipotent grid and sets your head on fire when you try and get a free slushy, that's just ridiculous.
No one would bother spending the nuyen or resources to protect a slushy machine with a host and IC. Those are devices that have their own built in Firewall ratings and they exist on the Grid openly. I think you have not actually read the 5th edition Matrix rules, or at this point you're just making strawman arguments.
Low level machines should have some cheap tricks, measured in nuyen not brilliance, to fend off hackers, be tightened up, not wireless whatever. But steamrollering the whole setting was just another unnecessary thing in 5th ed. Looking at it now, my Commlink from my last character was 28'160 Nuyen, that's hacked programs and all, way out of the reach of most people who don't live and die by it in the shadows. Any way, I'd be happy to debate this at length in another thread about the matrix, but not here - we aren't going to see eye to eye, but I do enjoy a healthy debate and I always learn a thing or 6 in the process.
This will be a healthy debate when you compare the systems on an even playing field. Without
Data Trails, a lot of the content from
Unwired simply doesn't exist. You're comparing a system that has advanced and optional rules vs. a system that's designed to be core and basic. That's not really a fair comparison. When you realize that and you just look at the core rules for the Matrix from 4th edition and compare them to the core rules for the Matrix in 5th edition, it's a whole different picture than the one you paint.
In addition to taking away custom programs I also proposed the following: Corporate controlled internet. This way when you pop open Safari on your iOS-device you connect to the apple-cloud. You can't go to wikipedia or to youtube. You have to go to Apple's equivalents. So Apple, Microsoft and Google would be in a constant war who has the best wikis, the best video services, the best music provider and the best content in general. Websites that are accessible from any browser are gone. If the internet developed this way, it would be kind of how I understand the new Matrix 2.2
What you just described were the Browser wars of the early 90s. When AOL, NetZero, and Mosaic all had their browsers that allowed you to only see the content that they put through their filters. It was awful. In the end, the open internet is a better solution for everyone because the providers now only have to worry about their content, and they don't have to police everyone's content. It's like having one GOD instead of ten. I think the new Matrix rules reflect that decision to go with one powerful GOD pretty well. The hosts all have their own content to worry about, which is where the demiGODs come in, but on the Matrix, it's open and it's a unified police system.
