I can only find one action in the matrix were the books state a time differential in doing said action in VR or AR.

That's probing the target. it takes 1 day in AR and 1 hour in VR.

That is a time difference at 1/24.

Why is only that action different?

Spoofing a lifestyle for example has an interval of 1 day, shouldnt that one too have 1 hour in VR then?

After all, VR is faster and hot-sim ever faster still so an action should be quicker.

I'm thinking of adding the following (or rather changing the rules) for matrix actions.

Each IP the character has will affect matrix actions and matrix actions only - meat initiative will always be slower and meat initiative bonuses will not apply.

1 IP (AR) : Regular Interval
2 IP (VR) : Interval -1 level
3 IP (Hotsim) : Interval -2 levels
4 IP (Simsense Booster) : Interval -3 levels
5 IP (Simsense Accelerator) : Interval -4 levels

So, something that would take a week would be split down to the following

1ip: 1 week
2ip: 1 day
3ip: 1 hour
4ip: 1 minute
5ip: 1 combat turn

The fastest speed you can gain is 1 combat turn.

For probing the target in VR and doing it in hotsim instead would make it take minutes instead as we move it to the next interval.

This would make a lot of hacking very, very fast but also improve the point of going in VR or hotsim and use such hardware, and things that could take weeks (spoofing a high lifestyle) would not take that month to do but rather hours at most.

I've always wondered. The only explanation I've been able to come up with is that it's a nod to the story about the original Echo Mirage Deckers slicing through 2020s-era computer security like cake when they went up against the crash virus.

Which actually doesn't make any sense ruleswise as it makes the rules more confusing.

Making one action 24 times faster when describing AR vs VR is easily interpreted as being 24 times faster than a meat hacker.

1IP: Speed 1
2IP: Speed X24
3IP: Speed X48
4IP: Speed X72
5IP: Speed X96

So with that description a 5Ip hacker should roughly be 100 times faster but they arent.

I understand the problem. However, I think 1 combat turn for actions like spoofing lifestyle is ridiculous.

Probing in VR can take advantage of the highly developed pattern recognition systems of the human brain by associating a plethora of variables to various kinds of sense input and then running them in sequence through the brain. At least, that explanation makes sense to me.


Spoofing a lifestyle requires more than just the hacker hitting commands. It abstracts away the process, which will doubtless involve credit checks, scanning through innumerable databases and waiting on hold for an agent to take your call so it can be elevated to a real human.

By that, I mean that a lot of the computing actions that have longer time periods will have those time periods because they require response from sluggish organisms, or else a lot of data processing by the human aspect (which isn't going to speed up all that much just because you're acting faster).

I agree that 3 seconds for spoofing sounds fast but take then a high lifestyle with a treshold of 48...

Say that you get 4 successes per roll (Or buy successes) , that would mean by the RAW you would hack the lifestyle for 12 days straight just to get 1 month.

Not much of a paycheck for the hackers DOING such jobs as a paying job. They would have time to hack two such lifestyles a month...and only get a paycheck of 10K a month...

Besides, it would take 12 combat turns ith the above example in full hotsim VR with 5IP - and a hacker would have to pay for such speeds.

For a regular cold sim hacker it would take 12 hours.

I can buy that it takes time the first time you do it but when you have a pattern and managed to create a clear set of instructions it should not be a hard thing to do rather quickly.

After the first one/two months it should be a rince-repeat and a cakewalk to get it done.

Yep, and some computing actions still require you wait on other processes that don't care that you've got all this down to a nice mechanical routine. The credit assessment routines don't care that you could get all your stuff done in a few moments if needed, they're still going to put you at the end of the queue and you're still going to have to wait until they're done before you can make your next choice (which relies on the outcome of that work). For some tasks you'll spend most of the time doing almost nothing, trying to to "get into the zone" and able to focus on the work, or working out where you got to last time and what you have to do now.

I can be extremely productive (more than 5 times as productive) when I'm in the right conditions and mood, but getting there right takes an investment of time and effort that is unavoidable.

That i can agree too.

Still, being able to be five times faster than regulare joe means that you can do five different processes in the time it takes someone to make one.

Either to speed up one project by doing different part of it (contacting five different companies that are vital to the lifestyle) or by doing multiple projects at once.

The rules suggestion i put in IS flawed as it is rather gamebreaking but they DID put a speed differential in the rules and it bugs me as VR and IS faster and it should show.

How about this solution.

In extended tests the characters extra matrix initiative passes can be added to the tests (1-4 D6).

This doesnt make the process faster but it makes the hacker a bit more effcient and thus lower the time it takes by a few days.