GlassJaw said:
From what FanPro has said so far, the Matrix will undego some kind of crash and it will become completely "wireless". So yes, deckers as we know it now won't need decks anymore.
Oh, there'll still be decks. You can almost guarantee it. There won't be the need for
jack points. Your hackers will carry a transponder in their pocket (too small to be a "deck") as will Otaku. Of course, Otaku transponders will be smaller and either last longer or have more transmitting power because they are just radios and not full blown computers.
I've said it before but IMO, one of the main reasons for SR4 is that FanPro got sick or hearing how people don't use deckers in their games because either the rules are too difficult or they slow down gameplay or both. I've always thought the same thing so I'm very curious about the new system.
One thing to remember about SR was that it came out when the world wide web was a research paper by Tim Berners-Lee. The notion of a globally interconnected network was hypothetical. SR started out very hardware centric (first you hack an IO unit, then you break into an SPU before finding the CPU). It evolved from that to the "true" VR in SR3. I disagreed with the notion of the VR motif impacting application efficiency but that was a technical detail most people wouldn't be concerned with.
Now the SR designers are looking around their office at people SMSing, using cellphones to access the internet, and their PDAs playing music wirelessly through their car's stereo system. Why in the world would they *NOT* integrate a wireless existence into SR4?
I suspect they've done a bit of real-world research to get some decent ideas. The matrix should be simplified into layers. Most people will have a public "outer" layer (corporate website, business card, etc) that is totally unencrypted and possibly on a separate system. Then you hit the private data, protected by various layers of security with the choicest data at the center. You can assume that valuable data is only accessible from certain locations, much as in the old days. Midget Otaku that can be crammed into a vacuum cleaner will be all the rage as they are snuck into the CEO or CTO's office to access their "black" network.
Hackers (and as someone in IT I'd prefer if they'd called it "cracking" since hackers often write code) should break down to a data search followed by either a upload/download or a security override to get to the next "layer" and repeat. The system will oppose the security overrides and a traditional combat should ensue when it finds the hacker.
Personally, I'd like to see the mechanics for magic and software sync up to clarify the overall system.
