[OoSpikeoO]

There is a brief mention under that hardware skill that it might be used to upgrade your cyber deck has anyone tried this? If so what rules did you use to upgrade?  How much did it cost in time and money?  Thanks

[SlowDeck]

Rules should be in Data Trails when it is released 

[OoSpikeoO]

I guess my friends and I will just have to muddle through these rules 

[Namikaze]

Someone did some math and determined that if you took the square of each point in a cyberdeck's allotment, added them together, and then multiplied by ¥1,000 you've got a pretty good approximation of the price of a cyberdeck.  That should, feasibly, help to determine some basic house rules for upgrade costs.

[RHat]

I guess my friends and I will just have to muddle through these rules 

There are, unfortunately, no such rules to muddle through, because the deck upgrade rules simply don't exist at present.  Anything you do is squarely in houserule territory.

I would suggest something a bit piecemeal, though - where you upgrade each attribute in the array on its own (bottom-up, meaning the lowest first), along with program rating and device rating.  What that should cost, though, is hard to figure out...

[Forrest]

And how long it would take is important.  In earlier editions, upgrading a deck or creating yr own programs took significant amounts of time.

[OoSpikeoO]

The main reason I created this thread is that cyber decks are hella expensive and resale values is trash.  As my teams decker we have been playing for a year, and in total minus rent ammo and medical bills have scraped up 63k nuyen.  At this rate ill be able to sell my cyber deck and buy the upgrade in about a year or two.  I was thinking that there has a to an easier way to do this ... ta da the little blurp at the end of the hardware skill about upgrading your cyber deck.  Just frustrated that there is not more info on this subject when it takes them a year or more to bring out books.

[Namikaze]

The main reason I created this thread is that cyber decks are hella expensive and resale values is trash.  As my teams decker we have been playing for a year, and in total minus rent ammo and medical bills have scraped up 63k nuyen.  At this rate ill be able to sell my cyber deck and buy the upgrade in about a year or two.  I was thinking that there has a to an easier way to do this ... ta da the little blurp at the end of the hardware skill about upgrading your cyber deck. 

You could try asking for a deck as your payment on a big run.  Or the difference in deck price at least.  Or you could try stealing a deck and converting ownership on it - do a search on the forum to find the rules for swapping ownership and all the controversy surrounding them.

Just frustrated that there is not more info on this subject when it takes them a year or more to bring out books.

Let's not turn this thread into a gripe-fest.  Someone else said something similar in a different thread, and got smacked down with facts pretty hard.  Here is the truth: 5th edition has seen more books published in a year than any previous edition of Shadowrun, ever.  This has been proven before, so if anyone has a question about it I suggest taking it to PM.  I don't want to derail this thread any further.

[Michael Chandra]

The main reason I created this thread is that cyber decks are hella expensive and resale values is trash.  As my teams decker we have been playing for a year, and in total minus rent ammo and medical bills have scraped up 63k nuyen.  At this rate ill be able to sell my cyber deck and buy the upgrade in about a year or two.

True, but the other characters face the same difficulties there. What you want is to have your GM build up to a big campaign showdown where you get some really nice stuff, if you get job X done first... Otherwise, you'll have to save up for years, because that's how long it takes for about everyone to earn it. Even the big shot earning 20k/month after Lifestyle takes a long time for the best stuff.

[DigitalZombie]

http://forums.shadowruntabletop.com/index.php?topic=16008.msg291640#msg291640 Heres that thread Namikaze talked about.
Another way to calculate the pricing of seperate stats would just be to substract the cost of the lower level deck from the next deck. That value is then distributed out on all the stats that are higher than the current deck.
For instance you have a microdeck summit: rating 1 array 4 3 3 1 programs 1 cost 58000
you want to upgrade it to and azteca 200 equivelant deck: rating 2 array 5 4 3 2 programs 2 cost 110250
The price difference is 52250. the azteca has 5 more points of stats than the microdeck (rating array and programs) each stat increase would therefore be =52250/5 = 10450
Ofcourse you could rule that programs doesnt cost as much as ratings n stuff. + other factors like crafing time, savings when doing it yourself and so on.

[Xenon]

Ran some numbers and came up with the following house rule to upgrade your existing cyberdeck.

Cyberdecks come both with hardware (the actual device rating and the limit on how many programs you can load at one given time) and various software programs (your matrix attribute array).

The component cost to upgrade the hardware is [new Device Rating] x [new Device Rating] x 7.000¥ and require a Hardware + Logic [Mental] ([new Device Rating x 3], 1 hour) Extended test. You can only upgrade the device rating one step at a time. Maximum device rating for a cyberdeck is 6. When you upgrade the device rating you also upgrade the number of programs that can be loaded.

When it comes to the matrix attribute array you upgrade (or rather rewrite the code from the bottom up and burn it into a new set of hardwired components) one of the four ratings per test. The cost of upgrading one rating in your matrix attribute array is 8,000¥ (to eventually upgrade all four matrix attributes would cost 32,000¥). The test you take to rewrite one value of the array is a Software + Logic [Mental] ([new Rating x 3], 1 day) Extended test. You can set  the task aside for a bit, do something else, then pick up where you left off with the amount of hits you had remaining in place. The maximum rating your matrix array can be upgraded to is equal to your cyberdeck's current device rating+4, +3, +2, +1 (for example if you have a cyberdeck with a current device rating of 4 you can only upgrade your matrix attribute array to a maximum of 8765).


Slipped by DigitalZombie

[ZeConster]

Lessee... so with those numbers, upgrading an Erika MCD-1 so it's functionally equivalent to a Fairlight Excalibur would cost 5 x 4 x 8,000¥ + (2x2 + 3x3 + 4x4 + 5x5 + 6x6) x 7,000¥ = 20 x 8,000¥ + 90 * 7,000¥ = 790,000¥, which added to the 49,500¥ of the Erika MCD-1 gives you a total cost of 839,500¥, or roughly 2% more than buying a Fairlight Excalibur outright, in addition to requiring a whole bunch of rolls. Seems balanced.

[Xenon]

Goal was to match the numbers in the book as close as i could with programming and building times influenced by SR3.

The advantage of upgrading with the above house rule is not that the total price of the new deck is cheaper than if you had bought it from the start (it should be very close to the same price unless i messed up the math). No, the advantage is that if you already invested in a Novatech Navigator for 205,750¥ you could now spend a bunch of time and effort to upgrade it for 144,000¥ (one new device rating and all four stats on the array which will match the stats of Sony CIY-720) for a total of 349,750¥ rather than trying to fence your old deck for virtually nothing and buy the Sony for 345,000¥.

[RHat]

Given the potential for things like critical glitches, as well as the skill investment involved, I might suggest that it should cost less to upgrade up to there rather than buying it.