I am a very scientific minded person and it is my believe that a things in a game universe (like Shadowrun) should make sense within in the context of this universe.

The Sixth World is based on our universe to a not small degree and while technology developed a bit different the foundations are the same, the science behind it is the same and the thoughts people have when designing something are not that different.

This said I can’t wrap my head around the new Matrix. If find the whole idea as presented in Data Trails so stupid that no amount of suspension of disbelieve currently helps me overcome this.

So I wanted to get you opinion on this and thusly turned from a long time reader into a first time poster.

I also want to add that this started with Technomancers, while Otaku made sense to me I also think Technomancers should not work in the context of the Shadowrun Universe.

But now to my point about the matrix.

Let me start with a quote from Data Trails:



Hosts are what makes the matrix and according to this quote hosts are essential for our existence. This might be hyperbole but not to far from the truth, the matrix in the Sixth World is essential for civilization.

Another quote:



THIS is the problem I have!

The matrix is technology, science, not magic and wishes. Actually it was established from the beginning that magic and technology don’t do well together.
So even with the matrix so vast, so huge that nobody can know the extent of it, the technology behind it, the science is something people should… NEED to know.

Why would the corporate world, after two devastating crashes make something and then depend on it for there very existence if they don’t even have the slightest idea about the scientific basis of it?
This goes against logic, self-preservation and basic human survival instincts in my opinion.

And how does this even happen? A system designed by (meta)humans even one so vast and based on such distributed computing (that is what the matrix is) does not suddenly change it’s scientific and technological principals to such a degree that nobody understands it.



This makes no sense as well. As is said the matrix is technology and has to run on something. In 4e my understanding was that this is basically distributed computing. The matrix runs on you commlink, nexus, toaster, t-shirt and all the other stuff.
With 5e they did not rebuild the matrix, they just rewrote the protocols and did something they don’t understand and is fundamentally idiotic?

Again…why would a corporation store their life blood, their most valuable information somewhere they not only can’t control, they also don’t even know where it is physically and scientifically.

Imho it would be more realistic if the Corporate Court looks at the matrix as it is described in Data Trails and goes “Nope… scrap that we start a new!” because nobody understands it, it is unnecessary complicated and at best dangerous as hell.
The whole idea behind the new matrix protocols was more control for them…. But they gave up all control of the technology, scientific basics… the things that actually matter for controlling the matrix? They gave up all physical control of their information?

Building a new matrix from scratch would be less risky by a factor of infinity!

can't disagreed with you..... my sense of disbelief must be better then yours.

@Sturmlied:

I can't disagree. This whole "Foundation" business is staggeringly stupid; no one is dumb enough to build the backbone of the new matrix on something they don't understand at all! Just stay with 4e - my slogan: "It's not perfect, but it's still better than 5e."

About the technomancers, our house rule is that they're Awakened, and essentially another type of magician. Because you're quite correct, there's no way their abilities work according to the laws of physics. But, no worries, this setting has magic, so they must be magical.

Mine is usually pretty good but this is bothering me more than I like.




Yea my last and current group both prefer 4e but where thinking about switching to 5e... but decided against it for multiple reasons.

As for Technomancers... we decided they don't exist. Otaku do though. The "it's magic" explanation is something I would grudgingly accept as well. But I find it a bit lazy of an explanation, because for three editions it was said that magic and tech don't mix well and suddenly a kind of magic appears that is specific to tech?

I think I would rather houserule that Technomancer need some device purely for the connection... any wireless enabled device that has a dni would do.

Pretty much the same for me too:

Yet another agreeing with you OP. In fact your arguments are ones I've made before when we tried to play 5th ed. Tech is not magic and must obey the laws of physics. If you are just going to ignore those laws then you may as well just be playing a fantasy game not set on Earth. When those basic rules we know are tossed it is very difficult to maintain your suspension of disbelief. It also makes it very difficult to play since you can't take those basics for granted.

There is also the idiocy of the "enable wireless to do (XYZ)"... a great many of them should have been BASIC abilities of the cyberware in question.

Catalyst was trying too damn hard to make Deckers vital to the game... and failed badly.

As for the technomancer thing... I always thought of them as real psionic ability (no, I think the "psionic" tradition was idiotic and insulting) because with the RAW, they were never affected by mana fluctuations, and even worked in space. Hell, I even wrote rules (and posted them here) for Psions in Shadowrun.

IIRC, a great many of them were basic in SR4, and IMO deckers were already vital to several game aspects then as well. Hell, a friend ran a brief SR5 game and the team decker never did what was intended of deckers in SR5 in combat, and that was shoot a full auto shotgun instead of trying to find something to brick.

One of the things I think that really hurt the suspension of disbelief in the transition between SR4 & SR5 is the lack of a time gap. There was a good gap between SR3 & Crash 2.0 to SR4, so it was believable about the implementation of the new wireless matrix, the disappearance of cyberdecks for commlinks, and technomancers. Between SR4 & SR5 it's like, snap your fingers, and all of a sudden there's cyberdecks all over the place, a heavily segregated matrix, and hobbled technomancers.

O_O I did not even think about this! I worked as a server admin for a few years and should have remembered how long it took to plan and implement major changes to just a few docent servers. Doing that on this on the matrix level would take ages!
Especially because you are absolutely right that a even semi-realistic matrix would have (like the internet) grown over time out or earlier iterations, different systems, different operation systems, on different update levels, running on different devices, where some maybe an old deck in some guys basement or a coffee maker from 2059 in an old office building, not to mention millions of rfid tags.



Here I disagree with your earlier statement:

Because metahumans are not inherently stupid and that goes for corporations as well and if something like the new matrix (technological and scientific problems set aside) would happen they would not bet everything they have on a system that they know can blow up in their faces at any moment for a illusion of control.
Starting from scratch with something they understand and can control seems more logical to me and the corporate court has the power to it... it would cost a shit load of money but far less than the new matrix would cost them if it blows up.



Oh, Dodger thinks it's going to be ok? Then I am ok with it. What could possibly go wrong?








I get that idea behind, to give deckers more options from their core skill to do in combat and this would be good thing but the implementation was stupid. My favorite example from this is a silencer that can hear other shots when wireless is on? WTF?

Q1: WHY? IN JEFFS NAME! WHY?
Q2: Why would I want to hack a silencer? Does the silencer not work anymore when I hack it? Can I after hacking disable the padding in the silencer so it suddenly does not absorb sound?

And again the general question with the whole "everything needs wifi, even my gun" thing is: Why should anyone want this if it makes a already dangerous situation far more dangerous?

My tip is that this is something every writer for Shadowrun should ask himself for everything he or she writes!

And there was already a lot to for a hacker with a smart gm and some creativity. I like the Watch_Dogs approach (while the game was flawed some ideas are great), hacking the environment to give the team an edge.
A few years back I played a bit with hacker that made it a habit to look at everything in and around the target building, from waste disposal, sprinklers, lighting systems, sound systems, etc.
In one of our first runs against some gang, he first slowly raised the volume of their music to give our team an edge sneaking in. When our streetsam could not resist killing a guy for doing things to an unwilling woman and combat broke out he turned of all the lights in the building, locked doors for the gangers and used a trid and a fridge to distrect some gangers.
He also made some of the gangers comlinks that he could hack into call their moms.

See this what Catalyst SHOULD have been thinking about rather than "Let's make it so hackers can brick peoples very expensive cyberware and cripple them!!!"

Also I would like to know WHY skinlinks (greatest upgrade for guns in SR4) so suddenly decided to fail?

I know the Catalyst reason ("Herp Derp!!! Got to make hackers usable!!! Herp Derp!!!"), but in universe, why did skinlinks suddenly not work?

*EDIT* Sorry for the edit, but here is a link to a 2008 article about NTT using the skin for data transmission: Skin Link.

One could (but should not) say that matrix tech is optical based and that is why skinlink does not work.

But....

a. tech was already based on optical data transmission when skinlink was still working
b. just because most of the data is transmitted via light does not mean that other form of transmissions don't work anymore, otherwise wireless transmission would all be laser based and would suck!

As for rl implications:

our body transmits electric signals all the time. I am not very knowledgeable in that field but the biggest hurdle that comes to my mind for this would sending signals through the body that are ignored by the body.

The point I wanted to make is you don't built a replacement for the matrix (all of it) and switch over. If the Triple-As had built a new matrix core and then forced the smaller corporations and all other stakeholders into the new infrastructure, a gradual expansion, that would be more plausible. I would still say sorry, you missed your chance to tell that story with the Crash 2.0 when it was really plausible. The corporations had the opportunity to built a tightly controlled matrix, they don't do it but a decade later it occurs to them that they really should have? Because Danielle de la Mar is a compelling public speaker??

Anyway, they didn't built a replacement matrix: There might be some new infrastructure but in the main the old matrix was converted to new protocols and for some reason the whole of the network surrendered.

Heh, background in computers, now I do security systems. If I could not ignore inconsistencies in shadowrun the matrix would never had worked for me. As 1st ed violated to many real world rules to begin with. And the wireless stuff starting with 4th ed makes my skin crawl of i think about it. So i just go cool story, no reality.

The thing is that the old Matrix technically never went away. Hell, technically the internet never went away.

Echo Mirage was using full VR direct neural interfaces pre-Crash 1.0. Theoretically, Matrix 3.0 or whatever it is, is probably backwards compatible all the way to ARPANET. The problem is that the old protocols are hideously insecure, so no one uses them, or if they do it's probably represented with a low firewall rating.

As for upgrading the entire Matrix, SR4 already established software patching rules and software degradation. So most people in the setting get free automatic updates without needing to do anything. Upgrading and patching are solved problems now, and by the 2070's it's going to be even easier. While its true that upgrading an Enterprise network is basically nightmarish in our modern times, people in the Sixth World have been forced at least twice to rebuild their entire networking infrastructure due to global crashes. What on earth makes you think that people haven't solved upgrading networks when it seems to happen every 30 years?

As for people using software they don't understand, you clearly are not programmers. I can assure you when you divide something by 0 and get 0, infinity, -infinity, null, 1, and sometimes just crash; depending on the language, you realize maybe computers are not all knowing and perfect. Where do you think bugs come from? In 60 years in the future our programming paradigms will be completely obsolete and the idea that people literally have no idea how anything works is actually a pretty realistic proposition.

I disagree on this one. Yes a programmer might not understand anymore how the matrix works in every details. That what programming languages are for, they are abstractions so that a programmer does not have to write code like this:



But show this to someone making a living designing new cpus and I am very sure they know exactly what this means.

As for the matrix, it is realistic that Pete Programmer sitting in his Evo office and designing new programs does not know every thing about how the matrix works. But it is absolutely unrealistic that there are no scientists or engineers anywhere who know exactly, to the smallest details how the matrix works (I am talking about combined knowledge).

That is especially true seeing your first argument:



We very clearly understand how the Internet works and not until the new matrix came along no iteration of the matrix was described as this "mystical" place (ok.. the Technomancer stuff but this also makes no real sense). But suddenly people forgot everything that computer scientists, engineers, system designers, etc. learned and created over more than 100 years?

Shadowrun is heading on a way where technology is more mysticism than science.

Edit:

I forgot this:



We are not talking about a software update. We are talking about a fundamental change in how the matrix is structured, this is a more massive change than the implementation of IPv6 and it happened more or less overnight.
Actually it is like saying:

"Here is IPv6 it's awesome! You have a week to switch the whole internet over to it by next month or nothing works anymore!"

To put that in perspective... IPv6 was first introduced in 1998 and it was suggested that all severs should be able to handle it by 2012. But IPv4 is still used today.

Actually I had less of a problem with the original matrix. It was this quirky Cyberpunk idea (from the people who brought you "cyber") of a computer network built around brains. If you think about it even inter-machine communication without any involvement of people is rendered for an observing brain as streams of datapackets. What makes it even more strange, is that the all of this virtual architecture was initially built just for specialists. The idea being if you want to get real work done you had to manipulate the matrix directly with your brain. I think it's only in the course of the 2050s that the datajack starts to become ubiquitous.

So, it was always obvious to me that such a network was really different from our technology. It had very special requirements to securely interact with a brain and the interaction was not about, say, reading and changing code but a more intuitive manipulation of high level objects relying on awesome subconscious brain computing power that did the actual work. It was easy to accept because it was so different despite that it's probably nonsense.

On reflection I could accept a semi-mystical "Foundation" in the same way. Let's say we go back to the idea of an arcane, layered network. To manage this monstrosity the corporations have turned up automation and self-learning processes and sacrificed understanding and now you have this strange matrix undercurrent that somehow works though they have no idea why -- fingers crossed it doesn't blow up in their face. I could buy that. My problem is how we actually have arrived there.

Why did the Triple-As agree to revamping the matrix in the first place? They wanted stronger control but that seems to be built on sand. I almost want to say literally on sand because one metaphor for the Foundation is the ocean floor. A different way of asking the question is: Did the Triple-As know that the new technology was poorly understood? Also it seems that the new matrix levels the playing field between the corporations. Before Renraku had a lot of control over the Asian grid. Saeder-Krupp was dominant in Europe. (Of course it was never clear what controlling a grid actually means. Though there is the example of Lofwyr switching off the European grid on Crash 2.0 which largely spared it from destruction.)

Why is everybody on board with overwatch? A corporation has a highly secure host but as a base-level function of the new matrix protocols information about activities in their host, even if only those taken by an intruder, are communicated to an outside entity.

Why are there no underground networks running the old matrix protocols? It goes back to everybody has surrendered. I guess the Foundation is the new underground network, but even before there should have been small networks that resisted migration. Let's say a highly secured AA corporate research PLTG because the company doesn't trust all the promises of GOD and the Triple-As about how this new highly classified matrix tech will make them more secure.

But your latter argument is exactly the problem. First to the software updates: Unless the matrix is built to regularly roll out new protocols as Sturmlied says we are talking about a something quite different from a software vendor with a robust update mechanism. Where do migration problems come from? Design flaws, implementation flaws, missing standardisation or missing standard compliance. I think you argue that those still exist, well then it is unlikely that migration has become a smooth process. In fact when a global crash burnt down a huge chunk of your network that might be the only time to consider fundamental changes at every other point it should be too expensive and too difficult to coordinate. And I would add that's especially true because the most important matrix stakeholders of the Sixth World are highly competitive and hostile peers.

On the other hand even if we go with the idea of a flawless update scheme for the whole of the matrix I would start to wonder how hacking is possible at all. Beyond social engineering hacking is based on exploiting the kind of flaws that should make such an endeavour difficult to achieve.

And let's not kid ourselves if we wouldn't be running out of addresses very few providers would be interested in switching over.

That's not true though, as processors are so complex now that people don't understand how they work. Here is an experiment from a few years back showing just that.




The idea isn't that people forgot how the internet works. The idea is that the Matrix has become so complex that no one understands it. It's built on high level abstractions on top of higher level abstractions. Everything has already been solved, and computer programs are writing themselves where it's basically unintelligible madness to try and reason out how it's really working. The most efficient code is the least human readable code.

I think the problem is that you have faith that computers work because we understand them, and while you might be able to understand one small facet of how a computer works; to understand the whole is something very different. The idea is by the 2050's they were approaching the singularity. By the time we hit the super AIs SR became a post singularity society. Computer programming is evolving so quickly that it's impossible to figure out how the mesh network actually works. Literally technology got so advance that it's rewriting metahumanity to add to the Matrix.

Maybe it's a ....Faith thing ?
Just like lots of People have Faith in a higher Being ( no matter what's the Name ) that helps and protects them
the People in SR have "Faith" in the Matrix.
And since You can't argue with Logic against Faith, those People in SR that know what a Risc the Matrix is can't get the Decision makers ( Corp Execs ,Presidents, etc)
to change their Mind .
(so they cross their Fingers, hoping that everything keeps working, knowing what a Danger lies ahead)

HokaHey
Medicineman

There could be some Singularity effect here: an evolutive Matrix system that self-improves to resist hacking and evolved past metahuman comprehension.
Sure, that would be a strange move for corporations that have faced the Renraku Shutdown and the Deus threat, but it's not technically impossible.

Yes it is technically impossible but imho highly unlikely that this would happen by accident. Technology is to a very high degree predictable. Parts can fail but they don't suddenly start to do something completely different from what they where designed for unless it is designed to evolve.

But my argument that this would not happen because the Corporations are not idiots and we come to the point Medicineman made:



After two crashes, Deus and a host of other AIs, a onslaught of hackers and even though I don't like them Technomancers.... I think it is very unlikely that enough people will have faith in a system that is 100% unpredictable, can crash at any second or even worth with all the computing power can become a sentient being MUCH more powerful than Deus.
It goes against everything corporations stand for. They inherently love and NEED predictability and stability. Faith has little room on the board of directors who want to know how much richer they and the shareholders will be in 1 year, 2 years and 5 years and where "Trust me! This will work even though nobody knows why" is not an argument for them when most if not all of their money depends on it.

Greed > Faith was, is and might always be true.

Using evolving circuitry might a cool thing to help design stuff, like it is sometimes used today, but actually using it to run the world is like giving a 5 year old access to your credit card and dropping him off at the mall saying "You go boy! I trust you!"... just a gazillion times more stupid.



The researcher in the article did not understand how and why some parts of the chip was used but that does not mean that he did not understand the chip. Even the best processor might be complex because of the many parts but works on logic gates who are not that difficult by themselves.
And there is a difference between not understand how something works and not knowing how something is used.

And there are reasons why this tech is only used to create other stuff right now. Because people are not stupid enough to use unpredictable technology where it counts.

The assumption that a system can get so complex that nobody can understand is also imho false. Quantum Mechanics is not just complex as hell it is also confusing and very very very hard to research. Yet here we are learning and understanding more things about it.

There are tons of things we humans don't understand and much much much more we might never understand, half of what we know might be wrong but the thing is that we strive to understand, to learn. Humanity at a large is the universes toddler asking a gazillion stupid question all the time in order to learn!

Give it a few more years, a few more decades and maybe we will know how evolutionary computing works.

But would we know if one of the components understand was in fact replaced with something that works the same from a black box perspective (just looking at inputs and outputs), but whose internal workings are absolutely unfathomable? Let's say Google has some kind of magic box in their basement, which computes their Page Rank algorithm super effectively, but if you open up that box all you see is gray gel and a few cables going seemingly nowhere.


That is basically what I would imagine the foundation like: The interaction with the rest of the matrix is specified, but how it does its thing is not. Of course the story for the general public is not "we have no idea, something emergent" but something involving proprietary trade secrets, need to know, and security through obscurity.

That is not how technology works, unless we assume some alien intelligence build it according to some logic we are not capable of understanding. Even the brain is something we learn more about everyday, we know a lot about the fundamental principles of how it works.

If google had a device like this, someone at google build it and has some understanding of it. Even if we assume that it is based on self evolving circuitry it would still be based on technology we understand and we would only need time to understand how it does what it does.

also, before putting it in charge of all the things ever, we would make sure we understood it first. especially if just last year, technology that we didn't understand which was connected to everything just broke all the things. and even more so if that's the second time poorly understood technology broke all the things in the past few years. it doesn't take long for people to start recognizing that kind of pattern.

My thought on this is this: If the Corps allowed some "unknown factor" to control the Matrix, what's to stop that factor from deciding "Screw you guys! I'm going home!" and crashing the Matrix in such a way to make The Crash & Crash 2.0 look like an erotic massage from Playboy bunnies?

There is WAY too much money in the Matrix to allow ANY "x factors" to exist.

Well, a self-modifying intelligent system that develops faster than its change can be tracked could be regarded an alien intelligence.

The way I understand it the Foundation developed without being monitored by the corporations. They discovered it and thought, hey why not built on that. I guess there is the alternative it is an emergent phenomenon of the new matrix coding/technology and was discovered afterwards. But since it seems you have to "grow" all hosts from the Foundation, they had to be aware of it from the beginning, after all that's a basic feature.

My point was that hypothetically assuming Google had such alien tech, nobody would notice as long as that alien tech works with the same inputs and outputs the regular tech which did the job before. A more mundane example: I currently do development in a project which works with a good dozen of backend services. We have extensive documentation on how to talk to those services and how they will talk to us, but we neither know how those services work internally nor do we need to know anything about it for our work.

The moral of the story: Building upon the Foundation would be a stupid decision, but one only a small cabal needs to be aware of, not something everybody working with the matrix needs to accept...until it leaks.

The matrix is still based on technology made by humans and as I mentioned a lot in this thread, therefore there is an understanding of the underlying principals of the system.
It needs to run on something and that something is build by humans. So there is some level of understanding

Here we also come back to the point that it is unimaginable stupid to build the system that basically runs the world and that has brought the world to is knees two times before on a construct that defies logic as we know it and nobody understands.





I am not saying that everyone working with the matrix needs to know how everything works. My point is that because "our" society build it on the basis of technology that someone understands that there are people who know exactly how it works. My use of "we" in this context is the (meta)human species not an individual.

In this regard you are correct it is not important for most people to know how "something" the work with functions to the smallest detail. Most people only need to know how to work with this "something".
This is ok as long as everything works as intended but if something goes wrong than there needs to be someone who knows how this "something" works in order to fix it.

As mentioned above I agree that building the matrix on the foundation is a very stupid idea and this cabal would be the corporations and they are not stupid.

Also it is clear that it is the worst hidden secret in the sixth world that nobody knows how that stuff really works.

Well, the self-modification could extend to custom hardware. There is (quantum) logic gate production that's either fully automated or has a production chain that can be co-opted. The self-modifying system can come up with its own designs and use existing production capabilities, logistics and maintenance routines to spread them without people actually knowing how they work and what they do. This could go as far as a different technological base. It's what happened with Deus and nanotechnology.

So for obscure hardware: Digital intelligences of all kinds could have modified the matrix, as well as plain old people. Maybe someone cut corners and reconnected Jormungand modified system instead of replacing them. In addition there is the technobiome dimension, computing done on biological "hardware" wirelessly connected to the matrix, and thus potentially not even on the radar.

But even with unmodified and fully accounted for hardware, if you have a complex software with no interfaces for monitoring, that uses strong encryption and runs highly distributed, the only way for you to understand it, might be to shut the system down and dissect it. And I think the implication is in the case of the Foundation that would mean shutting down the whole matrix.

Of course none of this means, that the underlying technology or code can in principle not be understood by metahumanity, but it's certainly conceivable that self-modifying systems hidden away in a layered and often deliberately obfuscated network infrastructure could produce something hard to fathom.

At the end of the day, some poor asshole in a work shirt still has to replace failed HDDs, even if they're on optical chip instead of spinning platters. No matter what magical bullshit they want to write in, the Matrix is still grounded in the hardware layer, and figuring out what causes the Foundation to exist is as simple as cutting network connections until you break the mesh.

Frankly, I find it doesn't pass the plausibility sniff test, because something that requires that much system resources to exist should be making any number of sysadmins bitch to each other about systems not performing to spec. No matter how big the corp is, the hardware budget isn't infinite, so all that 'missing' power is going to get tracked down.

Remember, no matter how enamored you are of The Cloud, it's just someone else's computer.

This right here is something I think whoever wrote up the new Matrix fluff forgot. Cloud = someone else's computer. I guess maybe they just hoped the rest of didn't know that either.

Maybe they should just come out and admit "Ok, ok, the Matrix is just a big magical construct. When we said magic and technology don't mix...well, we lied. See ya!"

Perhaps all the deaths in the previous two Crashes were a massive blood sacrifice to create the Foundation.

Yep... hence the reason I have my own NAS (with 8 TB of storage) at home, and a 200 GB microSD chip in my phone and take-to-work laptop. I don't trust other people with MY data.


OK, quick question for everyone... how much storage space does a commlink/cyberdeck have? Was that ever defined? Also how much space does a datachip have?

Years ago, when I used to do outsourced tech support over the phone, I had a manager try explaining to me how the new call queue was going to work (for handling two or more different contracts at once) by starting off with, "The call comes from this magic cloud..." She even had a grease board and was drawing a diagram for a visual aid, and started off by drawing a cloud with magic lighting and such. Right off I knew she was full of it in the technical area.

Even now, when I hear about "the cloud" I'm imagining a server room filled with banks of storage drives and air conditioners, as opposed to the data floating up in the stratosphere somewhere.

And in answer to the storage question, IIRC the old "megapulse" data unit was roughly 350MB of current volume (one CD = 2MP). Now, there's no real defined limit as it's all a plot device (like carrying weight).

A number of megapulses, with the actual data content of a megapulse in bits best defined as 'whatever seems plot relevant'.



At one point in my career I worked for pre-Google-buyout Youtube's hosting company. Let me tell you, the internet loses a lot of its glamour when you spend 10 hours a day swapping faulty hardware that's hosting someone's cat videos.

Honestly, I saw a Reddit quote the other day that pretty well covers it :

"The Matrix of Shadowrun is effectively designed by someone who is confused about how computers work and assumes that everyone else must be as well. As a result, networks, databases, and wireless communication are mysterious and poorly understood. In the real world monitoring the local network for traffic that looks like smartgun calculations is trivial. In the world of Shadowrun you need a decker explicitly watching for devices sending that data. Where the data comes from, what processes it, and how it's transmitted is all a bit nebulous and confusing... TL;DR. The Shadowrun Matrix is a magical construct created by the collective unconscious of everyone who "is computer illiterate.""

Perfect.

Yeah, I remember that. I was hoping someone knew something a little more concrete.


I never understood why you needed specialized gear to run a smartgun. I mean you can fit the HW/SW in your damn EYES... and a some of that is just the ability to display the data and to communicate with the gun. If you've got a cyber commlink/deck, you should be able to run it just like another app. Hell, with the amount of computing power in a commlink (even the SR5 version), I can see that as just another app that you run. The interface would be projected into your field of view via DNI.

*************************************

Off Topic: If you have the cybernetic commlink/cyberdeck and you want to upgrade, is it just pulling the old 'link/deck "chip" and inserting a new one, or is it a lot more involved?

Tried bopping around in the old SR3 core rule book, and found pocket sectaries (SR5's commlinks without a cold SIM) had a storage capacity of 100MP. Optical chips (described as being "thin memory storage devices, about 2 x 3 x 1 cm.") apparently had no limit beyond cost, at a rate of 2MP per 1¥. The old cyberdecks had a range based on the quality of the deck. A Fairlight Excalibur (top end in the SR3 book) had 3000MP of "RAM" and 5000MP of storage. Custom cyberdecks could exceed this, from what I found in the Matrix book.

Considering how computers actually evolved over the last thirty years, I can kinda understand why SR4 and SR5 effectively threw all this out the window.

Again I liked the matrix mystery when it was confined to hidden corners, recesses of the network, or even -- in the case of the arcology -- a dark tower overtaken by an evil force. I also think its existence was justified by the same conditions that allow shadowrunners to exist. Competing extraterritorial jurisdictions balkanised the network leading to weak oversight. The cold war between the corporations meant a lot of secrecy: shell companies, hidden specifications and tech implementations, black budget accounts, forgotten or scrapped systems. UV pockets for strange beings to develop in the matrix.

Cloud: Though maintenance of the matrix infrastructure is probably much more automated. Less wage slaves switching hard drives, more maintenance rigger directing drones.

Of course, our stuff was built by someone on purpose, and there is no other sapient species around which could build something we don't understand. SR is a bit different, and that's assuming the Foundation was built at all and isn't an emergent phenomenon (which would also ruin binarywraith's plan of "dissecting" it)


Corporations can be extremely stupid, and even more greedy. So the question would be what the corps were promised in return for agreeing to that plan, "catching hackers" obviously does not suffice...




Slight correction: Somebody else's data center, running virtual machines which float freely around the actual hardware to maximize resource utilization or seamlessly bridge hardware defects. The cloud metaphor is not bad, even on the infrastructure level, as long as you keep in mind that it's a metaphor...

It's terrible as a metaphor. An administrator of a cloud infrastructure cluster can tell you down to the machine and drive within a cluster where a particular program is running from, because hardware addressing is still required to manipulate data. All the cloud services do is use virtualization to make that addressing transparent for the end user, and treat multiple machines in the cluster (or multiple clusters scattered around datacenters, although that's woefully inefficient for most applications due to capping at the speed of the network) as a single logical machine.

The only 'gaps' for some emergent phenomenon to run on are those invented by a writer who does not know enough about computer systems to understand what he's writing, and thus considers them black boxes that could be doing anything without anyone the wiser.

I think you take too little account of automation of matrix maintenance in combination with the obscurity of the network resulting from corporate secrecy. I mean shadowrunning shouldn't be possible with the kind of mass surveillance systems we are building up today and that the Sixth World supposedly also has. Apart from just ignoring the real effects of such an environment, the solution seems to be bad computer security, so that deckers can constantly sabotage the surveillance systems and thus data retention on their team. System administrators hardly seem to take note of this. So why shouldn't some entity commandeer network infrastructure or steal cycles all over the matrix.

What I would concede though with building up GOD as a central authority which controls the whole matrix (rather than squabbling with individual corporations over jurisdiction) the whole setup that eases suspension of disbelief--at least for me--has been weakened considerably.

If anything, the automation should make it easier for something like the Foundation to be noticed. A single jacked in maintenance rigger can literally experience the state of the hardware as physical sensations, so massive load on systems that aren't being used by anything would be even more obvious.

Not to mention the simple accounting questions. "Ichinase-san, why is your datacenter drawing six megawatts and running a cooling bill of two hundred thousand nuyen? We do not have any projects assigned to it."

Sometimes, I Wonder CGL have a testing group and if they ask precise questions about the game-logic.

Is this a trick question?

/sarc

Sure the admin can go down to the nitty-gritty, but (usually) there is no need for it...which is basically "the cloud" in one sentence: It provides stuff as a service if your use case does not care about the underlying details.


GOD wouldn't say "nothing to be seen here, citizen", because there obviously has to be something hosts are running on. All the stuff the Foundation is running on could simply be explained as the metal the hosts are running on, or the matrix equivalent of root servers.

The SR5 Matrix, at the level presented in the core rulebook, makes a fair amount of sense. It's abstract, but contains personas, devices, and hosts, the latter of which are a form of distributed network. Authentication through marks is a fun idea, but needs a little more depth to explain how the system would work at scale.

But Data Trails goes off the rails. I enjoy a little mytical matrix stuff. Being a magical world, I can accept a global mesh network developing some mystical elements. But I can't for a moment accept the idea that Hosts are grown from the Foundation in a process that nobody understands. Or that Hosts keep an archive in this Foundation.

What I could accept is that Resonance and Dissonance each have their own meta-plane-like existence alongside the matrix. In the Resonance Realms, everything connected to the matrix has an expression, and where everything that once was on the matrix has an echo, thus letting you get at archived or deleted data. But these realms aren't the Matrix. Their some other kind of manifestation born of and drawing from the Matrix.

This is essentially what we've done, and explicitly defined technomancers as a type of mage as well.

Yeah, I just excise all that shit and treat Data Trails as written by a hippie neo-pagan trying to assign mysticism to a technology they understand so little that it might as well be magic.

Part of what I -like- about Shadowrun is the hard contrast between magic and science, so blurring that because the writers don't understand how computer networking works isn't my jam.

have testing group: yes. they have playtesters and proofreaders, in addition to a number of freelancers who freely volunteer their time to provide feedback, last i heard.

actually listen to those people and act on their feedback? they're not so good about that. which makes you wonder why they have them in the first place. it's like they heard that you need those people if you want to produce a good quality RPG, but have no idea *why* you're supposed to need them.

See, this sort of thing makes me really frustrated. On the one hand, it's nice to know that these steps are taken. The rules are play tested. Feed back is gathered. This should all lead to a better product. But on the other hand, it seems all that effort is just tossed out the window.

I mean if the published product is the result of proofing and play testing and still so awful in so many places then it looks like the play testers and proofers are incompetent. But you're saying you do the job and it just gets ignored. Is the SR line at Catalyst really such a petty dictatorship that feedback that doesn't toe the party line gets turfed? What's more important here, a good product or someone's ego? It really just boggles the mind.