The Hacker Project - a free online game

Right now as the game stands the sky is the limit.

My group will soon have 5.0 and higher programs.   That is just stupid when the software all starts at .1

I mean password cracking time has a cap.  It caps out at an hour no matter how high your Password Protect is.

So why shouldn't everything be capped?

Or at least provide diminishing returns.

Lets take research for example.
Right now to go from .1 to 1.0 takes 150 hours.   With some software being as small as it is I know I can do .1 to 1.0 in under 10 hours.

Yes I am a top player but is that really fair?

Everything should have a limit or at least something that makes it to costly to go beyond a point.

What I suggest is either a cap be placed or dimishing returns be put into place.

If diminishing returns is used then I suggest something like this.

Research.
Time to research each .1 be increased by 1%,5%, or 10%.  Or keep it the same but increase the cost by the same amount.

Overloading.
Each overload should cost progressively more and the bug fixed that provides more than .033.  When Overloading first came out it would only provide .033 which while useful was also very costly. Currently it provides .33.  And has no real negative effect.
When you overcloak computer hardware you run the risk of ruining it when you push it to far.  Someone like that should happen with overloading.
Say each X1 = 10% failure rate.  When the software fails it is destroyed and made unusable.

Server stats
Where is the point of diminishing returns here?  Right now you can have a server more powerful than anything in real life even the linux cluster used for Titanic.  But there is no draw back.  Maybe make it like in real life.  Try running a Dos game on a new computer.  You will run into the problem that the newer computer is to fast for the dos game.  That is why they have programs out there specifically to take up clock cycles and allow the old game to play.


Right now as the game sits it really is fair to easy to abuse the game.  There are no set limits and nothing ever increases in cost.  But The exchange rate and the bonus HPD from gold has increased.   When I went gold I got 500 hpd.   Now you get 4000 HPD.   That is 8 times the HPD when nothing has changed in price.

hmm. nice ideas, but i do believe a 10% failure chance to utterly render your software unusuable is a bit harsh...

Any harsher than overclocking your CPU by 10% for a good chance at frying it?

Granted those that are Gold are practically immune to it but still.

maybe reset it tops, because a 1/10 for utterly destroy? no.......... takes up too much time and resources to download and store bypass/breaks

I like open ended with no caps, but sometimes it is imperative to cap things...  :14: but software is good with no cap.

eventually server can't run without hardware tho...........

hardware is good with no cap... anyway there is a cap, it's the limitation of how many digits the server can store for one variable, float or integer... it just takes a few years to reach.

I'm going to post based on my own game. The game I speak of is a Pencil and Paper combat game I'm working into an RPG. The core mechanic is you take your EXP in a skill, add a d100, and your opponent does the same. High roll wins.



In the beginning, EXP was gained based on one's opponent's skills: If we were evenly matched, we had the same chance to gain EXP, no matter who won. If I was better, and I won, it was harder for me to gain EXP if I won, and easier for you. There was no cap, except that provided by your opponent's abilities (if you were too much better than them, you couldn't gain EXP from them). The exact chances have been tweaked over time, and still get tweaked occasionally.

However, there was one problem with this: I could spend a long time trading blows with a creature slightly more powerful than me, then fight a weaker creature, and be practically invincible. I could spend time advancing some other skill up to a point where I could take on creatures as powerful as me with it.

I've messed with caps since then, but where it's at now is that after a certain point, your advancement slows down. In my game, which has a fantasy theme, I can divide characters into classes, and vary how much it slows down (Fighters don't slow down much when they hit the cap in Melee combat, but stop almost completely if they hit the cap in anything Magic related). Not sure if you can do that in this game, although it might be an idea to bring up later.


The second way to advance is to kill monsters. When you kill an enemy, you get a small EXP bonus, which can go wherever you want. This has gone through several phases:

During the first phase, it was a flat amount based on the monster. This broke down because you could kill weak creatures which couldn't threaten you, and which you would gain nothing from through an entire battle because they were that much worse than you. But when they died: free EXP. Even in that skill you had capped.

So I made you roll for it, same as if you won a roll against them. I'm thinking over this summer how to change this a little, because there are some things you can spend EXP from one neglected skill on, and benefit a skill you've gotten really good at.




Where I'm going with this is that capping skills is useful, but you don't want to make in an absolute cap. Ideally, you set it up so that people who are ahead of the curve are slowed down, so that they stay ahead, but can't be complacent; while people who are behind the curve are sped up, but not so much that they can overtake someone who is working just as hard as them, but got a head start.

With the current system, I'm willing to bet Soviet could take a day or two off (maybe longer), and still be on top. If not, he'd still be in the top ten: X Ray, at 9, is 1/10 as powerful as Soviet is. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt I am.


What I suggest is that there be three restrictions:

1) Each person has a hidden value based on who they are hacking and being hacked by: perhaps the average value of the Power of each interaction (an interaction is a crack, a debug, a virus capture, or any such thing. The power of the interaction is the Power of they player it is with, reduced if they are unsuccessful for any reason). If this hidden value is lower that their own power, their research slows down. This should never stop a player; but it should be able to slow them down noticeably.

2) Overloading X(n) should increase the costs (n)fold, but increase the effective version by the base version times Sum(1/2, 1/3,...,1/(n)); or have some other limitation that means that the more you put in, the more you get, but in diminishing amounts.

3) Hardware costs should increase by 1% the base costs per previous upgrade. Yes you can always buy more computation power, but it costs money to buy the space to put it, and to make sure it's working with everything else; and as you get more, that gets more and more costly.


Finally, as a bonus, whenever you use a program to beat a better program, there should be a small chance that you find a way to optimize the software slightly, adding less than .001 to the software used. Likewise, if you beat a program better than one you have, the same things happens: A small chance for a minor upgrade. These small upgrades will keep newer players advancing, while making the better players tend to seek out challenges.

Mind you as is right now Overload is more powerful than the negative reprecussions it provides.  That is why I gave a 1%, 5%, or 10%.  At least I think I did ;)  as it stands right now you could have gobs of CPU and Memory and never research Password Break or Firewall Bypass and still have a chance at breaking the top notch defensive software.

Take Neo's current actions since he was kicked from SGP for not playing by the rules.

I disagree.   Mainly because of usefulness.  Right now the most useful software in the game is Delete.  Nothing other than Delete.  With Delete you can make yourself untouchable.  Granted IP Change is more powerful and cheaper to use in the short run but still.

Mind you these suggestions would also drastically hurt SGP as a whole.   It would also keep the bell curve more in tune instead of a small group of people pulling far ahead of everyone else.

I think the 10% crash rate being could be a good ideea but maybe we can add on one more extra to the server hard ware, cooling. I know a guy that in real life he overclocks his computer so much he needs liquid nitrogen to cool the prosser. Cus of his cooling his computer has never crashed. So maybe there could be temepeture and when you over load you program the failure rate can be reduced.

i wish. Stupid anti-hacker missions and ip buying circumvent that philosophy of stealth =/

this is all true, and maybe we should also have cooling in hardware? with us being able to run only as much as our cooling allows??? would be a good way to slow progress down and keep things reasonable!

Glad you like the idea i just hope that the Administrator thinks so to.The cooling is mainly for the overloading. What I mean is that your server will have a starting cooling systeme, it can be called "Cooling Power" and measured in electricity so"Watts" so 100 watts. The server cooling default would run at 50 watts. When overloading a program the heat of the processor will start going up when the cooling power load average is over 51% there is a chance that that file will crash. The closer to 100% it gets the more likely it will crash.

the crash! i can agree with, straight delete, NO!

What do you mean by that.

If you add in cooling then you really need to have it take the amount of CPU power into consideration.

Granted up until Intel came out with the Core 2 Duo which can run at 100% with only a heatsink and not overheat, all CPUs ran into heat issues with AMD being the big one.  The faster the CPU the more heat it generated so the more cooling it would take.

Could have it also affect Memory and the HDD.

It can not effect the RAM an HHD but when over loading the Ram usage of the overloaded software does go up.

Usually part of overclocking is boosting the speed of the FSB which affects RAM.   The HDD comes into the scene due to the heat it generates.  Hence why there are HDD coolers out there.  To reduce the heat in the case allowing it to run more stable than otherwise would be possible.

Here are some examples of HDD Coolers

Mind you SGP does not endorse any of the following.  The links are only provide as reference materials to the discussion at hand.
Xoxide (http://www.xoxide.com/hardrivcool1.html)
SVC (http://www.svc.com/hardiscool.html)
Vantec (http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/343)
Zalman (http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1588)

The problem with overclocking, as has been said before, is that there is no limit. Using my current computer specs and a .32 firewall bypass, I can crack a firewall of over V 16. That clearly doesn't make sense. Not only does it invalidate the purpose of upgrading protection and bypass software, it nearly makes protection altogether useless. Overclocking is, in and of itself, an imbalance. It makes sense for early game play, but later on it doesn't. A V10 firewall bypass, when overclocked once, can crack a V 13 firewall. The person with the v13 firewall put an extra 500 hours of research into that software, and it's basically useless after a slight hardware upgrade.

Overload  makes it hard to defend so that's good enough for me. A higher player will almost never have need for an overload of a lower player, it's the other way around.

So higher up players need to research more defenses? That's good, they have the means to do it. Or maybe they have to change IP once in a while? That's doesn't bother anybody. Just keep in mind that you're not invulnerable and you should be fine.

Think of overload as a protection for lower players against higher players.

That's just it though.   Right now the only non-SGP person who has the capability to hack anyone is a top 10 player with a 40ghz CPU and 2gb+ of ram.   Overload makes it so that you DO NOT have to do research.    One of the guys in my group tested it out with some old software they had.  They took a .37 firewall bypass and were able to overload it over 10.0 without maxing out their system.

Add into that the fact that SGP publishes their min reqs for all to see and everyone is shooting their hardware up to those kinds of levels.   It makes research currently of protects and breaks useless.  Well I wouldn't say useless.   Password Break 3.002 is 2.55gb in size, uses 6004MHz and 375,250mb of ram.   So I will say the only semi useful research for protection is Password Protect.  Heck Scan Blocker is to resource heavy to take it above 2.0 for a top 10 player at this stage in the game.

I am not saying gimp Overload.  I am just saying that there should be a penalty to using it which there is not at this time.

Heck even a 1% chance per multiplier to have it do something bad would be nice.   As is right now there is zero way to lose your software if you are a gold player.

I understand that virus man, it's just not a priority at this time because we need new players and overload helps them acquire secret servers without any high research investments.

It may be re-balanced in the future but for now it won't be changed because the top 10 think they can be hacked by the lower people. They will just have to deal with it and defend how they can.

Too many people depend on it.
I have to look out for the majority of the players, sorry.

Oh trust me SGP is not worried about being hacked.  I am enforcing the min reqs on all members including myself.  So that is not a problem.   My concern is how it will overall slow the progress of the lower 3/4's of active players.  Heck I found out tonight that someone is trying to say they are part of SGP.  SGP doesn't kill processes on missions unless the person is disinfecting one of our Virii.  So that is someone else in the lower 3/4's that is abusing the Overload to make us look bad as well as harass others.

But I see you are focusing on how it affects us.  The whole idea of the CAPs is to close up the gap which your AP idea now will widen but that is another thread and I will not go into it here as well.  Suffice to say without CAPs no one and/or group will catch up to us without spending massive HPDs on the software store.  And even then......  It will be a massive uphill battle for them.

When Ebolla meant put a cap.. I think he meant cap the software level and not limit the play time of players...

When I was talking about overloading I was meaning that maybe we can overload any file.

just like to point out:

I dont mind that we're not invulnerable.

I do mind that its piss easy to find out where your gateway is, on top of being not invulnerable.

I don't care that people can overload their software to break into my gateway. I do object to the fact i cannot stop my ip from being located with a single payment though o_O

he has a point...........

I agree to, although im not the high players im in the top 30. People can EASILY find out my server IP and im weak compard to the one that are buying these IPs. I think buying IPs showed be stopped.