upgrade other ip adresses

[virus man]

The only possible way I can think of to avoid it becoming exploitable by that much would be to limit the amount of upgrades you can make to a percentage of what the player has made to their own server.  Example

Lets say I am player A and bontrose is player B
I hack player B's server and find it has the following stats (made up stats for this example)
CPU 100,000 HDD 1,000 RAM 30,000,000 BW 1,000

Currently he has all of the stats used up with Virii.
10% cap
I could upgrade him by
CPU 10,000 HDD 100 RAM 3,000,000 BW 100
Not that exploitable and would actually be useful for a group to help out new players with hardware instead of just software.

Now of course that means a LOT of DB work on the backend.  Every server would have to have original stats and remote upgrade stats linked causing a spaghetti of DB links and possibly allow a slow down.  Especially if there was a coordinated effort to purposely generate unneeded DB calls by the following example

You get 100+ players all upgrading 1 person by just 1 upgrade in 1 category.  Now every time that server's stats are accessed it would generate 100+ accesses to generate it's current stats.  If for nothing else than when someone goes to do a remote upgrade on it.  Now if the remote upgrade DB info was kept by the remote players entries and not the actual server being upgraded then it would require fewer DB accesses.  In this case there would only need to be 2 sets of stats for each server.  The players actual stats and the total remote upgrades done to it.

Basically it all comes down to how it is implemented.

[Donn]

I'm not in favor of it because at the moment:

Possibility 1 of many:

Top player gives new player all his software
New player only upgrades HDD and Kbs at first (not too much Kbs)
Afterwards upgrades CPU / Mem just enough to fit huge malwares on it and drop the Kbs to a minimum.. Totally safe..

This won't get you into the top 5 perhaps but will get you very far already..

So making it possible to add hardware also.. Hmm.. It's already easy to get into the Top Ranking page by just downloading some softwares while doing almost no effort.

Many people claimed I was ranked so high last round thanks to my stolen software only. I can guarantee you that perhaps 2 players had better hardware / income than me..

That's why I'm in favor of making several Hall of Fames where not only "best ranked" counts but also "most highest softwares", "highest hardware", "highest income" and even "researched highest file" and "researched most hours"..

In another game I've played in the past, we had many different stats which could be gained by being good at several aspects of the game. People are too much focused on that POWER instead of becoming a good player in all aspects that are featured..

This would also give a much better picture of who really deserves to be in the top 10..

So all the "lucky" guys get their fame in the "best rank" page but the real good players of the round get their deserved fame also.

I'm not saying it's all about fame.. But who doesn't like to get respect for the things they've accomplished..

PS. If many start to discuss this idea of mine, I will make a separate topic for it and move the off-topic posts.

[termul]

Plz do create a seperate topic for your suggestion Donn; I like this idea very much.

I can think of several different area's for the various rankings (earned virii income, earned mission income, overall earned income, software, hardware, hours of research).
And offcourse the overall ranking which takes all area's into account.

[bontrose]

yeah and tell us where it is