I'm curious how many players or GM's out there think that the Hacker can get all the information a group needs via the Matrix.

It doesn't seem to make much sense to somehow handwave every single bit of pertinent info onto the Matrix. Regardless of how wirelessly connected the entire civilized planet is, there's certain amounts of intel that just won't ever make it onto the generally-accessible Matrix. Some stuff might only be mentioned behind closed doors, other bits of data will only be stored on secured and/or inaccessible nodes, and other choice tidbits will reside solely in the brains of the the people that are keeping their mouths shut. If you want to learn these secrets you'll just have to do it the old-fashioned way--get out there and learn them face-to-face. (or at least through some up-close-and-personal surveillance or data theft!)

Everything is not on the matrix for the hacker to view. If its a techno using the info-sorteliege echo/sprite with the power, I'd allow for more information to be gathered.

One can not use data search for things one does not know of. Even if the info would be there. Contacts can provide that information.

Some information will exist only on secure servers. Contacts don´t need to be hacked (hopefully).

While I do agree with the spirit of this poll -- that the matrix is not the be-all-end-all of legwork -- you've phrased the poll question as an absolute. Obviously it can't always be true that every bit of information is online, so people are justifiably forced to choose the negative response. I'd be interested to compare these results to a more granular poll giving people a lickert scale (1 = information is almost never online, 5 = information is almost always online) to see what we come up with.

I always wonder my data search can't find a spirits true name.

It'd be ridiculous to have every piece of applicable information be on the matrix. If you're supposed to perform an extraction, and you want to know the subject's daily schedule, you need to have someone physically go tail them. It wouldn't make any sense for someone to have put his daily routine on the matrix. Same with lots of building plans. Maybe for some buildings, but your generic apartment building isn't going to have the floor layout posted on the matrix. And even if you can find the architectural plans on the matrix, the actual floor layout (arrangement of non load bearing walls and doors) could be different.

If the question was "Can all information be found on the Matrix?" I'd agree that it's loaded. But the question is "Can all legwork-related information be found on the Matrix?". There's a substantive difference. Obviously, few would agree with the former but the latter is a source of contention in terms of rules interpretation.

I'd like to see the granular poll but in a different context.

The question was phrased as an absolute purposefully. In another thread there was a point of contention where one user stated that the RAW in SR4 suggest that all information can be found on the Matrix. This has lead to behaviour in their group where the Hacker completes all necessary legwork for the run by rolling mountains and mountains of dice on every conceivable subject relating to the run (the person stated approximating 60 different searches are done, with multiple rolls for each), while the rest of the group's players go out for pizza.

Agreed. I'll start a better poll.

Edit: Go Here.

Really. I've learned about a lot of stuff that I didn't know existed from the internet.



Actually, using the matrix to discover a routine makes a great deal of sense. Various financial, security, and communications logs will provide an extended picture of a person's daily routines when viewed in aggregate. It is also substantially more reliable than just following him for a few days, since it provides a larger picture.

I think that getting someone's financial hoo ha and what not in order to form some sort of profile on them (useful for extractions) would involve something more involved than browsing the web. That sounds like a hacking run to me.

In fact, I'd say any of the info hyz mentioned would require hacking and not be publicly available on the matrix for free.

It involves paying, like, twenty bucks to a consumer data broker. At least it does in real life. Such data is big business, because it helps companies target their preferred demographics. Credit card companies sell their records to data aggregation companies which in turn sell the compiled data to whomever gives a flip.

Not as much as you might think. If I wanted to bother, I could set myself up as a business, and request copies of people's credit reports on the pretext that I was going to offer a loan to them. You can learn a lot from someone's credit report. You can also call a credit card company, tell them you lost your card: could they please tell you where the last purchases were, so you know if it was stolen? These are old tricks.

In addition, SR4 makes it perfectly clear that each and every transaction is recorded somewhere, and resold to whomever wants it. Sooner or later, it'll float into a data haven. If you discover that your target buys his coffee in the same place every morning, that's useful information that most everyone else would discard. It's also easy to track.

Yeah. But you´d have a damn hard time searching for it, while experts in the given field could simply tell you. How can you find data if you are blissfully unaware of the topic?

Even if you could pull all that data from the matrix, you're going to need some fairly sophisticated data and statistical analysis tools to put together all that kind of random information into a reasonable picture of a person's life. Certainly not the kind of programs that are available off the shelf to deckers. But, it's their game, so the GM should run it however works best for the group. If that means the decker does all the legwork by himself, so be it. But I'm not opposed to involving the other players in the legwork phase, even if it doesn't necessarily make the most sense in-game.

Fairly easily, actually. You start on one subject and then surf your way through to related subjects. Assuming that you know what your mission actually is, you'll at least have some idea of what you'll be doing, where you'll be doing it, and whom you'll be doing it to. And if you don't know these things, you'll be screwed, anyway.

Let's say you want to know if the guy you're kidnapping hangs out with any persons who might provide dangerous opposition to you, but you don't know who he hangs out with. Well, you start by going to his MySpace page and you check out his friends and their pages. The friend who lists his occupation as "Combat Mage" and his hobbies as "killing people with magic", that's a guy you need to watch out for.

Lets say you're raiding Mitsuhama Facility A for Secret Prototype B, you just Wikipedia Mitsuhama Facility A and notice that a shadowrunner who has been through it before you kind enough to give the brand name and model number of their security system. You've never heard of that system before, but since you have the model number and brand looking it up on the same wiki is fairly simple and there'll probably be a hyperlink to it in the text.





Dude, we're talking about a world in which seamless real-time on-the-fly intelligent automated video editing is widely available. Transforming a list of dates and times, locations, and transactions into a list of dates and times, locations, and transactions is rather trivial compared to that. And lets not forget the virtual secretaries whom are better than the real thing.

And then you find out the hard way that the "kind shadowrunner" was a MCT mole.

Um... you know that you can buy knowsofts in the SR world right? At Rating 6 right? You buy a knowsoft and you are an expert in that given field. A hacker/data searcher should be an expert in their field, and that field would be using the matrix to get what they want.

Even look at today how people can get away with being a "psudo expert" by checking up on various internet sights to give them the information they need. It is not always 100% full proof but hell if I could spend fifteen to thirty minutes on the internet I could be able to pull something out of my ass on any various topic and as long as I had some time to research my topic after every response why wouldn't it seem like I don't know what I'm talking about? I would like to point out that most people on forums only take about five minutes of searching to find what they want and then do 0 follow up and can be shown how inexperienced they really are.... Also I would like to point out that many people on forums ask for online quotes and sources to back up their argument, and most people won't believe "Listen I got my PHD in this subject, and have spent 10 years after that looking into this topic so I know what I'm talking about you arrogant little twerp." To which someones response would be "Yeah yeah, you say that but your probably gay and pulled all of that out of your ass." because, lets face the facts, these are forums we are talking about. And this is today, and the matrix is supposed to be

Harder
Better
Faster
Stronger

Work It Harder Make It Better
Do It Faster Makes Us stronger
More Than Ever Hour After
Our Work Is Never Over

and guess how I got that? 10 seconds of data search baby! (it took time to put in "harder better faster stronger written lyrics" on google and my internet is not too fast.)

So, how long will it take you to Google up launch codes on the net?

For the record, I checked 70% matrix in that other thread. It was the closest to 2/3...

You can of course get the knowsoft (cracked, so cheap), then conduct a search on any missing info. The assumption that you know the important fields is usually true.
Still, a connection has "soft" data, like personal experience with some of the factions involved in the campaign, that does not really factor into available knowsofts. Filtering wrong information is already becoming pretty hard, let alone researching a topic until you can identify bias. Either you invest effort, or you make a call. I see a role for both.

I can begin a nuclear war by whistling into a telephone.

Slightly longer than it takes a supercomputer to stalemate itself in tic-tac-toe.

Maybe, but that would be more akin to Hacking than Data Search.