Electronics & Security Recycling
It's good for the environment!

This might encourage securitechs, deckers and other gearheads to shift their loot, or the loot of others (heh) to these vendors in a more predictable pattern rather than simply incentivizing mass yanks for other, much lower profit sales methods.

Thoughts?

I think that if there were a dedicated vendor who didn't require someone with fixer skills, that would be worse than the current system. It could potentially take fixers out of the loop.

In the long run, I would still like to see the possibility of clearing linked equipment with the right tools and skills, as Jameson mentioned.

Make them hard to take down by hiring someone who knows what they're doing.

Hire someone to watch the feeds when you can't / don't want to, and alert muscle to get the baka taking them down when you spot them. If you've got cameras up, you have the flash to do all of the above, you just don't feel motivated to spend it.

It's not an issue of cams and other hardware necessarily being to hard to come by. It's that it doesn't make sense for the market to be bloated with second-hand gear that's basically useless, when it could become an avenue of RP and biz for undeserved archetypes that also lessens bloat that otherwise just sits in the MOO for no reason. It's themely, and it's cool.

Yeah, cams are gonna get attacked more. I think that's a benefit not a problem. It creates opportunity and friction.

The concerns can be balanced against in ways already mentioned. Community rules, mechanical tweaks, such as the length of time it takes to remove installed cameras, etc.

There's no counter-play to well-performed anti-surveillance play, it's basically balanced around it not usually being worth actually stealing things from people unless it's punitive. The rewards are meh.

Security gear suddenly all being reusable completely transforms how the entire concept works, and now the side with the best tech not only gets to deny everyone else use of one of the core systems of the game, they get all the gear too.

And they can do all of it when the opposing player is offline.

The whole system would need to be rebalanced from the ground up and tons of new rules added. For what benefit? Good techs getting free cameras? I feel like there are better ways of increasing the supply.

I brought this thread up as an @idea because right now, today, there's players going around wholesale mass-ripping down tech to pawn for change.

My idea here is that instead of these items having a general 'market value' that gives incentives to people to log in at 4am and literally farming money, that perhaps, a NPC could be instituted that offers a once-a-week reward for things being ripped or taken off the market.

The best case scenario is tossing deckers a bone off the scrap heap and letting them reprogram links, but that's just a longshot idea that came up via discussion. Then it's a purely player-driven incentive, which is great all around.

I "know" (as much as any of can really know anything in this game) that the number of techs in the game who can run around wholesale ripping tech down can be counted using about half of the fingers of one hand.

The dynamic that @0x1mm mentioned is exactly what will happen if the system changes. THE premiere tech will corner the market (or could if they were so inclined), and everyone else will be out of luck.

ICly there would be zero recourse because although we'd all "know" who did it, ICly we couldn't know because there COULD BE dozens (hundreds?) of "other" NPCs out there equally skilled who "could have" taken the camera.

One thing that I think might be cool is if there were a way to engrave or serialize cameras. That way if someone's cameras end up in the market, they could presumably go find it, or send a fixer to find it and because they are identifiable, they wouldn't have to play market lotto and buy every camera available in order to get their specific gear back.

Another potential way to change up the dynamic would be to have a Chatter like system for electrical / security gear resales. "Last Tuesday an average gal with maroon sneakers unloaded a (device name) at the (market) name." That would help equipment owners track their gear down more quickly. It would encourage would be thieves to disguise their identities. And it would provide some potential accountability and risk to mitigate the relative ease with which devices can be pulled down.

I don't know what to say then. There's a massively disproportional amount of effort to put up and maintain camera networks, as opposed to ripping them down. It can take weeks or months of real time to source cameras outside of a onesie-twosie situation, and the effort for -maintaining- a network is not exactly trivial when compared to literally anyone in the game getting a 500c item and rendering them useless.

This disproportional effort in sourcing the gear and installing the gear, versus the relatively trivial effort required to rip the gear down is a large part of why I feel like there should either be reworks to the existing system, or that pulling cams needs to be governed under the 'help farming' rules.

Because ripping cams when nobody is awake on the MOO essentially feels like farming chyen in a way that's basically outright banned or heavily restricted in every other avenue of the game. I feel like it's a situation similar to when people go and chain dip(players), but unlike dipping, you aren't forced to go and get face-to-face with people to steal their shit and go vendor it to NPC's. It's entirely possible to mitigate most of your risk via an OOC alarmclock, and that feels again, extremely gamey.

This is a sort of fair claim, and I don't really know how to address it in this or a separate thread. As I mentioned above, there's a self-fulfilling cycle to undeserved archetypes. If you play a [whatever] and it's not very supported outside of niche situations if even those, well you can easily become the best [whatever] with like a couple months in the game, potentially, and then you can dominate that niche. This is only something that can be solved by 'giving love' over time, which then culturally encourages more players to want to play those archetypes because there's actual RP and biz to be had by doing so.

The small-worlding around this is vicious too, as Hek points out. Deckers are arguably the biggest victims, you basically can't take a 'big' job because literally everyone knows it was you even if they can't prove it but drek collapses on you anyway based on the tiniest evidence. Some of these things can't get healthier in the game unless they are more populated, but the simple fact is they won't get more populated if there's no There, There for those skillsets.

I'm less concerned about the 'giving from the large, to the fewer' aspect -- there are more players doing other things because those other things have outsized coded, financial, etc. support. They already have the leverage. They can use it to squeeze 'the few' as needed, I think they'll be just fine.

I don't want to democratize anything.

Make nerds valuable and there might be more of them, imagine.

Cam nets are valuable and OP. Not everyone should have eyes.

The Big 3 are the Big 3 not the small three.

Things are already not 'balanced' based no what's going on. People win, people lose.

"Kwisatz says loudly, "Since I don't have anything fun to share about builds I can tell you about a new idea Fengshui and I had that was just signed off on by Johnny."

Kwisatz smiles, We're going to be using the existing Security Analyzer object to expand secure_tech gameplay.

Kwisatz says loudly, "You will be able to utilize your secure_tech expertise and access to the tool I mentioned above, to attempt to remove the output and input data stored on uninstalled security equipment."

Kwisatz says loudly, "What this means is, if you are able to steal security equipment from other players or organizations, you will be able to hire a secure tech professional and get them to reset these devices back to factory settings as if you were buying it brand new."

Kwisatz says loudly, "My goal is for you to allow hire security professionals to enhance the 'score' on these devices too, to protect from this kind of factory reset as well, but we still need to see what we can accomplish within the existing code first."

Kwisatz says loudly, "I think you'll find that this opens up a nice new market for tech gurus who may find security install work too few and far between in general.""

Considering that a factory reset was put into the game for another item, I don't see why it couldn't be the same here unless the plan was cut for some behind the scenes reason. If this was still in the works I think this along with a shift to move mass theft of this equipment to fall under farming too would go a long way in helping issues that might be popping up.

You're making a lot of assumptions, almost all of which are completely incorrect in your response to me. Nobody is saying that solos with skillsofts should be going around installing unremovable cameras. I don't even know how that came into the conversation.

I, like pretty much everyone else in the game, rely on technical characters to do technical work for me. You basically perfectly addressed my point in your opening statement: That a tech can basically run around ripping down cams for fun and profit and there is very little you can do about it.

If anything, the discussion here has basically settled on a few points: that resetting cams with a difficult level of skill required would be cool, but in the meantime, just putting cameras on the list of shit you can't farm out will probably address the problems until securitech gets overhauled.

And I'm in agreement with the tech characters posting here. Techs need love, and securitech does as well, despite it being one of the more codedly robust of the 'tech' skills.

Similarly, if a solo went around murdering every other solo for their gear that would also be frowned upon. Not saying that murdering other PCs shouldn't be allowed, but there always has to be a limit.

Having run a network, your assessment is obviously right on.

There is a very steep curve when it comes to setting up and maintaining / protecting a sector wide surveillance network.

It is extremely challenging to stay alive as a tech character while investing the UE into skills that you need to get good at.

My question is whether or not this is a feature, or a bug.

That is why I am curious to have staff address the question at the town hall as to whether or not surveillance networks are intended to be democratized and available to most characters, or if they are a luxury of the elite (like a couple of other pretty bad ass tech items that I'm not going to mention here).

As a middling tech, I had to do a lot of "other" jobs unrelated to being a tech just to pay the rent / tolls / etc that come with staying alive in Withmore. I still consider being a tech something of a side gig. In fact, I remember earlier this year having an admin tell me something to the effect of, "By playing a tech you're taking what was originally intended to be a niche / secondary skill and attempting to base a character around it."

Luckily there are jobs for electricians that pay well and do not involve setting up surveillance devices that can be taken down by "better" techs.

Although I have previously said in this thread that I think taking down devices is fairly low risk, I have come to realize that I think that because I invested in a fair number of auxiliary skills that mitigate the risk of getting caught. Even still, there is still a fairly high risk. And the consequences of getting caught are extremely dire. It's not a game to take lightly.

It's almost safer to attack corporations than it is to mess with established camera networks.

Because of that, I don't think that limiting device theft with 'farming' rules is necessary at this time. Though if it becomes possible to unscan stolen devices and reuse them, then I do think there might need to be some throttles put in place to mitigate device turn over.

If this is the case, I think making the uninstall threshold lower so that you could be a tier or two below the installer and still rip it. I think this could help a lot as well if the idea is to democratize secure_tech work, if we're looking at implementing something like the way briefcases are unlocked ICly in game as a mechanic to restore functionality to secure_tech items.