What exactly does writing your own programs as a hacker accomplish?

Do you just create a program with custom effects?

Or do you just compile effects from other programs?

it would also be cheaper.

If your time is free.

Given enough time whats to stop a hacker from programing rating 6+ program other then time and money?

Patching a hacked program can also be either time consuming or cash draining.


As far as effects of hacked programs rule wise there identical IMO.

A cracked Rating 6 hacking program costs 860 nuyen (assuming 1.4x normal cost for market conditions), putting it into the 1 day availability test category. The availability is 12R. You have a DP of 10 from a Charisma 3, Negotiation 3, Connections 4 Fixer giving you an E(X) of 3+1/3. You therefore take 4 days to make the test. If your distribution channels are not monopolised (and they shouldn't really be, since there are 10 major software houses in 2070) then it's even cheaper than the pittance it already is.

A dedicated hacker ought to be able to keep themselves in Rating 6 programs with Optimise 3 (Option costs are modifiers, meaning you pay 10 nuyen per Rating for pirated programs with them).

The costs of patches are also a pittance.


Essentially, the thing that is stopping a hacker from programming a Rating 6 program is that there's absolutely no sane reason they should do it by RAW. If you value 24-88 days less than 860 nuyen, your GM shouldn't let you program Rating 6 programs in the first place because you're clearly not talented enough a character to consider such an undertaking. Access to that spanky programming space that halves your intervals actually costs you more than your fixer hunting down a cracked Rating 6 program; costing 1 400 nuyen at the very minimum.

Rating 7+ Programs can easily be gotten for much less effort by finding the right Military hacker a custom-specced joygirl. You might have to visit Caracas and put some interesting brain benders into the poor girl, but it's still faster and cheaper to do this than program that kind of thing yourself unless you have honestly specced for some kind of Software God and, even then, you pay through the nose for that. You get to keep the PAB kit once you're done, after all!

Essentially, the only way that programming could be considered worthwhile is if it lets you do GM arbitrated plotstuff which doesn't obey the normal rules anyway. And a Technomancer will always get cooler stuff anyway, because Mundanes are not allowed to have Nice Things in SR.

yeah, in answer to the question "What does writing your own programs do?"

...

it makes you not a shadowrunner, because you're going to have to spend every waking minute of your life coding, with no time to actually go out and hack anything. and then, by the time you're done coding them all, many of them will have degraded so badly that you should probably have to rewrite them... and thus, the cycle continues...

maybe if you could upload your consciousness into a computer, crack it's copy protection, and then make hundreds of copies of yourself to do all the coding. but then again, if you can do that, i daresay you've got better things to do with your time than to code software...

can one improve bought programs with this skill?
so you don't have to actually code the level 6 write program code but only the increment from 5 to 6 for example?
that would make sense. build your own patches and upgrades, mod it to your desires using existing stuff.
get around some money/availability problems to boot *snickers*
get level 4 agent and improve to level 6 and give him the ability to write programs, now copy the improved agent and have them use the teamwork rules for writing software O.o

in our current game our hacker has a botnet of rating 4-6(can't remember rating right now) with code writing abilities, and he uses them for autosofts all of the time

The part that makes the "writing your own programs" bit truly ridiculous is the Cracker Underground. The existing availability rules almost work to keep some things in check, but when getting R6 hacking programs only requires you to make an Extended Browse + Data Search (18, 1 Combat Turn) test to locate, there's absolutely no reason to write your own software or get it any other way. You can buy it for 10% of list price, and probably takes you less than 15 seconds to find.

well in real life you only write something when you need a tool to do something specific that is either too complicated with the tools you have, too expensive to buy, or does not exist. I would say this applies to shadowrun to. You want to always buy first when you can. Sometimes that is not an option.

According to rules.... unless you are selling it there is no reason to ever do programming yourself. I personally think that the current rules are meant to discourage that so that hackers don't end up eating up too much game time with their we want to program every thing. There is nothing wrong with that, but my groups tend to work differently, so we ended up pretty much trashing that time table and working up one that works for our group. (Gave most programs a 1 hour interval and OS being 1 week, can't remember the rest right now...) Oh, i did note that you can't find the price to build or buy the Programming enviroment that halves the time necessary to build software.

It also Allows the Creation of Level 7+ Software

Rating 7+ software is out there, it just takes a custom tailored Joyperson experience to extract it from the current owner.

Unwired errata will clarify that self-written are immune to rating degradation as a result of cracking.

Now that's a great change. Does it also include new rules for such programs at chargen?