Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I run a few HoneyPot servers to troll in kiddy scripters and other nefarious nare-do wells. I enjoy dissecting the latest malware or rootkits because its just damn fun and some of these evil programmers are just damn brilliant.

Anyway. When eve announced exploration and hacking my inner programmer went "Squeee!!" like a little girl.

The reality is I feel like I'm playing wack-a-mole. Eve is one of the most mentally challenging games on the market. Even PvP is not about how fast you can twitch and mash buttons but is rather about planning and strategy.

Ideally I would like to establish a connection to the Relic and be presented with a Unix prompt and have in-game scripts we could write to brute force a password and then attack the Relic network. However, being a realist, I would settle for anything that would make hacking less of click, click, click, SPEW.

I was. When I learned what hacking was like I didnt bother. Odyssey was a little more interesting but now its boring.

Personally I think that if you fail hacking attempts too many times the AI attacks you and if you don't successfully defend your pod auto-ejects and you lose your ship.

Eve will become very unpopular with governments and law enforcement agencies if it contains realistic computer hacking mini-games. It's never gonna happen.

We are fortunate they decided to remove loot spew, let's not press our luck.

Unfortunately, you won't. If I got it right, CCP decided to make all parts of ingame content as much accessible to general playerbase as it possible. Thats why probe scaninng so dumb and straightfoward, and hacking conts doesn't fill like hacking at all. You know, there are plenty of people who think that even current hacking game is hard. You get it.

What I don't understand still is why CCP won't add some end user content in fields other than PEW-PEW for those who want excel in them. So let current relics and data be accessible by anyone, but add something else, that would require much more thought and problem solving to excel in it. Probably it is when their second cornerstone of current gameplay design strikes - it's not game what should bring you fun, but some other player to create competition and threat you. But in the end there is you wandering nulls dying out of boredom, scanning mindlessly all those siganatures and once per 30 minutes solving some no-brain-required riddle of sort. It's not even close to what one expect from job of space explorer, more like mundane rescources' gathering in any other mmo.

I'm curious, why do you think that?

There are tons of online hacking "games" that utilize and teach actual, real-life hacking skills to varying degrees. hackthissite is a well known one that covers a pretty wide breadth (but not much depth) of skills. Microcorruption.com is another, slightly deeper one that deals specifically with software reverse engineering and finding and exploiting traditional security flaws.

There's nothing about hacking that is inherently wrong or illegal - unless you're living under some third world totalitarian regime, you are free to learn it, teach it, practice it, and simulate it. You're just not free to do it against systems you don't explicitly have permission to attack.

Loosen up that tinfoil hat, nobody gives a **** if a game implements "realistic" hacking.

I don't think real hacking is a valid basis for game design. Actual hacking is only fun to a very small subset of people and a game needs to appeal to a large audience.

CLI hacking tools like Nmap, Aircrack, Hydra, John the Ripper, and Metasploit aren't exactly flashy looking and engaging. Nor are they particularly user friendly. Even graphical tools like the Zed Attack Proxy, Sqlmap, Wireshark, and Armitage don't look all that impressive really. Their GUI interfaces are mostly masses of text that are pure gibberish to most people.

By the nature of what it is real hacking will never be very fun for most people and it would make a poor basis for designing a game that is supposed to be fun.

There's a lot of wiggle room between, "Click on nodes until you find the magic node and then click the magic node until it goes away!" and, "Overwrite the return address of a vulnerable function to point to your lovingly crafted shellcode," though.

I think CCP would be more receptive if you could think of what form this new hacking would be, other than just being 'better' or 'more interesting'

What would this new hacking be, how would it work and what would be its risks and limitations? Also, what purpose would this serve? Does any other mechanic already cover this.

These are the questions that you need to answer before CCP are going to listen to you. At the moment - its just a vague sentiment.

Sure, when uplink pays out isk and costs ships when I screw up, I'll do just that.