Decking Improvements
THEY'RE TRASHING OUR RIGHTS!!! TRASHING!!!!!!

I do understand that these complaints are largely a result of Grid 4 still being very new and work-in-progress. With that in mind, though, I think it's worth (at least temporarily) allowing deckers to transfer data between decks. This would cut down on deck hoarding, and make poking around in places you probably shouldn't more viable of an activity. Or maybe deckers could manually add devices via their device ID! There could be hardware for changing the device ID of something to keep deckers out, and corporations could make a habit out of having their NetSec code monkeys cycle out the device IDs of important infrastructure on a regular basis.

Building on this, while it has been said a few times in the past that staff want to keep Brlang simple enough for players without any OOC programming background to not be at a disadvantage, it does seem like this idea formed at least part-way through its development. I say this, because despite this being the given reason for there being no conditional statements, loops, etc, a lot of commands that are available, including on certain geocodes and devices, really do seem like they were created with the intention of being used in a conditional or a loop. For example, the "is_transmitting" command, which just returns a boolean. Why are there datatypes in the first place, if everything seems to just be treated as a string and nothing needs to be compared? I think it's possible for Brlang to be more fleshed out, including things like conditional statements, branching execution, etc, without leaving players at a disadvantage. It's hardly quaternions.

But also, yes, while pulling out those heists can be satisfying, the payout is just not there yet on it's own, though it can absolutely be worth it as part of a wider scheme. But then this needs constant balancing so you do not get too much power from your closet.

I especially dislike being able to remotely add anything, or zap someone over terms. This just pushes people to be more in the literal closet, if a decker pisses you off, id them, and hire someone to shoot them.

As for being pushovers, this is the same as any other character in the game, if you want to be able to scrap directly, put the time and train for it, or build a rep so people won't dare, or other RP solutions.

I think people grossly overestimate how much other 'jobs' make out of skillchecks in general, and then see what they make as little. Mechanics, nurses, doctors, arms tech, drivers, security techs on average I doubt pull more than few kay a week out of the skillchecks.

I understand the reasons for this to a degree, people managing their finances/transactions/sending large amounts of information between each other entirely from the grid would negate a lot of the in person interaction, but I think more things could be possible. Scanning something in the bank, for example, could allow you to monitor it and scrape data of people's accounts and steal money, or hacking an employment terminal let you fake being an employee of a corporation (obviously this would likely backfire epicly but I can think of creative ways to use it)

At the moment, a decker is a really difficult type of character to play because they just simply aren't worth engaging with for the most part.

They aren't a threat to anyone and aren't really useful to employ, either, so they don't really have a place in either the mix or topside.

I come at this with the prospective of a new player, so take what I'm saying here with a pinch of salt.

This is just from what I've observed and from my own interactions.

The more interconnected the world is via the grid, the more useful it will actually be to have deckers.

More grid enabled devices is a great start, and there's certainly some things you can do there, (provided you can get the information you need without having terms stolen) Trying not to say to much here because FOIcC.

Requiring it need gridsight would be fine too.

I personally just think the grid should be more of an underpinning to the world, rather than something that just happens to be a part of it.

I want people to have to explore and for there to be risk in losing a term.

I don't want that rush to be so great that people never take them out.

I don't want you to be able to copy them or people will just copy infinitely.

I want to avoid the problems we have with camera networks.

I don't want life for deckers to be too hard.

Transferring between terms of the same type is an interesting possible solution. I don't really want to deal with emem if we don't have to. That system is annoying to work with.

Directly transferring from one term to another of the same type is a maybe.

Can anyone think of other solutions that wouldn't make it too easy while also not making it as hard as it is now?

As for the issue of scans, the reason terms are horded is because scans are forever. If they expired or could be rotated manually in the case of corporate/personal devices by a decker, then there's no need to hord terms as the thing you're hording it for will expire anyway.

This probably won't stop people buying all the terms and then using one per scan or something, but having to go out and scan more could result in more terms being stolen and making their way back into the market.