The Hacker Project - a free online game

Legally, depends a lot on the wording of the ToS when you signed... If it doesn't include some of the standard boilerplate, you're perfectly right inn that you have no obligations to actually pay attention to any changes, regardless of what happens.

So basically, it overloads if you're the one who owns it... but if you're the person disinfecting the server, there's no negatives to the server cleaned up. It's still ready and willing to take another virus immediately, and all it takes is another ~2 hours for the upload and then waiting through the activation time.

And yes, I know that there are SS above 1.8 now. The point was that even if SS do get damaged, having their stats get lowered would encourage people to eventually run Revelation... and by that I don't mean to do the Russian Roulette "I think I can overload a server and kill it before we hit 10" that won't be appealing to most players, but the "Let's blow away the whole world and start over" that Sir Emi keeps trying to push us towards.

Emm... that's not a spelling thing. That IS a typo, but you spelled both properly. You just completely changed which side of the virus equation you were complaining about.

Regardless, the newbies aren't the ones trying to load up v10 FS virii. They don't need a Revelation-sized server.

The reason the newbies complain about not having enough servers is because they keep wandering the public servers and don't realize that there are hundreds and hundreds of secret servers just waiting for them to find them. -_- Once they find a secret server that HASN'T been claimed by a group yet, of which there are many, they're basically set for virus space for weeks/months. Until they aren't newbies anymore.

You ARE aware of the Hardware requirements to run a Revelation virus, right? Reminder:

Let me restate those without some of those 0s, as well as with actual bits:

With those requirements, you won't actually spawn a server with 400kb Bandwidth for virii until you pass version 1.75... Most of these will likely be installed on private servers.

An easy alternate suggestion would be to make that instead of completely removing it, the server goes to base (newbie) levels. So even if before the server was a 1.8 SS with 405kb bandwidth, if you try to turn it into part of the Revelation destruction (and fail, remember that part), it goes to the player newbie levels of 5kb bandwidth, 550 mhz cpu, and all the rest of it...

It's still useful as a delete/download site, but becomes useless as a virus site, until after the next Revelation. This also has the benefit that even the players who are initially against Revelation may want it to trigger eventually, to refresh those servers that have been made useless. ;)

The issue is, what benefit does any player currently who wants to cause Revelation have? To do it, you really have to be someone big enough to not want to wipe the game...

As well, what does it cost to try to trigger it? Currently, if you fail, the only negative is that you have to trigger the change IP job and download/try again. If your crackers are sufficient, you can keep your files all safe and untouchable... Takes a decent amount to do that, sure, but if you fail, no loss... just try again in 30 minutes when you'd grabbed the file again. -_-

Making it so that failure actually affects things would make that with time, there would actually be reason why normal players would WANT this, instead of now, when all the players are still very against.

My proposal is that disinfecting a Revelation virus should trigger the virus on the computer on which it was installed. As such, it should be destroyed... and the server should be completely removed. This should make protecting your server much more important when triggering this, as well as making it more of a group event (planning involved) rather than just something that happens more randomly.

The point that I was making is that multi-researching is already in the game. To change it to work the way you want to though would take some severe changes to lots of little backend things and likely cause multiple exploits, not all of which would immediately be reported. At some point in 9 months or so, someone would offhand mention it in a post, and Sir Emi would then go nuts with the "WHA? That's not supposed to be that way!" thing that all coders do when someone mentions a bug as if it's supposed to be that way, and either multi-research will be completely removed or he'll end up getting very frustrated wandering through and figuring out what else can get exploited. At that point, the players will get annoyed because it will be different and more locked down, and this change, created to make YOUR life easier and not have to click the refresh button (Hint: F5 works too) will have been removed and caused further issues between Sir Emi and the loyal players just wanting to enjoy the game.

AD, you realize that what you just said is basically this...


Somehow, I don't think that is really hugely likely to be his choice. ;) Ultimately, the game is owned by the owner and/or coder. Whatever they see as the important changes WILL happen, and either the pbase stays or leaves. But in most cases, any actual good coder won't let most comments sway their vision... else you end up with a horrible hodgepodge. The issue comes when the changes actually cause more problems than they fix... then the coder is working at cross purposes.

I agree with Witcher in this... as he says, it's not adding anything 'new' to the game, and while it has some slight benefit for the lazy, the risk isn't worth the additional time needed to verify it's not going to break other things.
And please don't pretend that being a copy/paste coder counts as being aware of the consequences of completely changing the way the AP system works. ;)

Nagitof, it's not a matter of questioning whether or not it's POSSIBLE for Sir Emi to do it. Of course he COULD do it if he wanted to. The question is whether or not it's worth his time, what with all of the other issues waiting to be done, that actually DO add functionality or fix problems. This is the equivalent of having a scientist research how to make a pogo pole for vaulting with. :D It might be sort of cool when done, but it's not really worth his time. :D

No... How many of you guys are actually coders? With over 5 years working on games and how that part actually gets done and affects things, in a variety of coding languages?

What this would do is make him have to completely change the part where AP cost is triggered, as well as likely throwing in another value to keep track of how many instances are being run per process. All he has to do right now to calculate AP cost is check on what type of job is being finished. With the multiplier, that doesn't happen, as he is having it actually use more than just the hours to calculate how many points of research have been added...

The point is, it's a relatively major coding change that would need to be poked in lots of areas, not just the one. -_- And would almost certainly have highly exploitable bugs for weeks, and that's only if it's babysat... the bugs could last for months/years otherwise.

Really, do you want to make something that screws with Sir Emi's AP calculations? Right now, it's 30 AP regardless of time... for the incredibly rich/bored, you can research up 100 points in an hour as 100 jobs for 3000 AP, or 100 points in 100 hours as one job for 30 AP. Why screw with what works? If you can't be bothered to remember how many times you hit refresh, you probably don't really need it. -_-

Yeah... your suggestion would take out the only limiting factor currently existing keeping me from researching everything to v100 in an hour. Well, besides the 1,332,000 HPD needed for each. But seriously, if I could just overdrive my research and get it for 30 AP for a 2000 power research... that would be pretty. -_-

I'd like to make a vote for this one as well... seems stupid that, for example, a Sniffer Daemon (beneficial virii that you'd actually install) would lose the connection talking to the same computer that it's installed on... Really?

If the unmasker runs like the unhider, and you don't actually have to kill a process but just run one to make that people without can see... don't see that it should be any sort of a problem. Depending on how it's done, shouldn't be difficult to code...

3-6? My first research job was 50, I think, and that was before AP was even implemented... -_-

Actually, I was more meaning whether it would spawn a process on the remote server regarding the masking... as if there's nothing tracing it back to your server, after 3 days you basically have a godmode process.