So i've been thinking about all the threads poping up about hacking and what you can and cannot do with it and one thing i'm really starting to think is Hacking, especially full VR hacking really isn't fast enough. Does anyone else feel the same way? The more I think about it the more i'm starting to think a full VR datajacked hacker really aught to get two actions for everyone their meat counterparts make. (effectively doubling their overall actions) now obvious problems I can see with this are when it comes to things like operating meat world things like drones and the like.

Any thoughts, this is fairly stream of consciousness for me?

Well... First thought that I have is that it will bone every meat person out there, as Drones become the best thing out there, even if they only have their Pilot doing the operating, as they are always effectively in Hot VR... Not sure that I want to have that as an issue...

However, there is an optional rule that restricts AR passes (the ones that tend to make wired people equivalent to Hot Hackers) to a single pass per turn. Using this rule, your actual hackers in Hot will be 3 times faster than the ones in AR, which could even out your problems with the speed of Hot VR... and could even net you more, as Hot VR can obtain as many as 5 IP... and operating Drones in AR would still only provide the operator a single pass vs. 2 in Cold VR and 3+ in Hot VR, so that would not be problematic either I would think...

Not sure what you think about that.

Keep the Faith

The drones thing is a concern i'll grant you that, i'd like to table it a moment.

My biggest concern is not that Full VR hackers are slower then AR hackers it's that their slow compared to all meat world actions. I mean if the whole point of VR is to bring the wetware up to the software speeds and software processes thousands of transactions a second on the slow end why no matter if i'm full VR or not can i only perform one action, a few keystrokes or exploits at the speed of thought at the same speed a completely uncybered human runs up and hits someone with a hammer.

Your average metahuman in the meat has 1 IP. VR automatically gives them 3 IP.
With the right combination of magic or augmentation, a metahuman might aspire to 4 IP in the meat. With the right gear, you can get 5 IP in VR.

So to put that into perspective, somebody needs to be Awakened or implant serious 'ware just to get as fast as a normal person is just by jacking into their 100 commlink. After devoting a considerable percentage of their magical talents or dropping hundreds of thousands of nuyen to being Speedy Gonzalez, a guy in the meat can get 4 IPs - something a hacker in VR can equal with a couple thousand nuyen worth of gear, and exceed with a few more thousand.

So no, I don't particularly see the problem.

Sure, a person can think faster than they can act, but all the kinds of actions which take place in the matrix are more complicated than the simple mechanical actions that take place in combat.

There are free actions, and simple actions, and complex actions. Same as in the meat, same as on the Astral.

A fair opinion however there is a counter argument that getting things done in the matrix is considerably more action intensive then it is in the meatworld.

Lets look at the classic case of a Street Sam VS a hacker.

Street Sam
First action: I shoot him, then i get to shoot him again, or his friend.

Hacker: First action I search for his pan. Did I find it? Maybe
Second Action: If I find it I start my hack on the fly.
etc etc

So even if the hacker has more actions they doing things slower and this is assuming the enemy isn't doing things like nesting comlinks or databombing every piece of cyberware they own or something like that.

That's my complaint, maybe the problem isn't the need for more actions but better actions.

Well, what do you expect, when you are getting shot at, hacking into a commlink isn't the most prudent choice of action. A hacker in combat should do one of three things a)shoot back, b)tell their drone to shoot back, or c)disable the sami's wired reflexes they hacked into 20 minutes ago.

Depends on how you approach it. This isn't D&D4 where every class needs an equal and opposite action and reaction, because we don't have classes. You assume that your hacker is going to try to hack instead of returning fire, and that the street sam is going to fire instead of trying to home in on the character's PAN. Given their personal skills and the situation, the two characters might do either - in a big dark warehouse, a smart street sam might try to triangulate the commlink of the person he's chasing so he can find them; a hacker hiding from a street sam might desperately download a Pistols activesoft so he can blow the bastard's head off. Hell, maybe he'll just try to jam the signal from the street sam's PAN to his smartgun (possible under the right circumstances)

And let's really look at this: if the hacker is is in VR, he's not even going to be aware of his physical body until and unless he gets shot. So odds are he and the street sam aren't even in the same room.

Things in the matrix taking considerably more tests to resolve is a problem. But the problem is that "things in the matrix take considerably more tests to resolve". That's annoying. If you double the hackers actions, he gets to do his stuff faster ingame, but the player still rolls half a dozen tests to get a file from some dude's comlink.
The better approach would be to drastically reduce the amount of dice throwing the matrix requires.

You guys are forgetting the game design perspective.

None of you ever player GURPS cyberpunk, i suppose. Well the Hardware was even MORE important to hackign than it is on shadowrun because you built up your system speed on the Milisecond (!!?!) scale. That mean that a SOTA sistem had a action phase of 250 milisconds would act 5 times before a 1.000 milisecond system (a combat turn) could do anything. As Black Ice (or Flatline, as it was called there) was generally found on servers and other hardass systems, it generaly could hit you 2 ou 3 times before you even screamed OUCH. And i could generally KILL you in one or two.

But more to the point, it grinded the combat system to a HALT. Hacking on the fly was impossible, and hacking as solo as it can be. After all, in those times, all as wired hacking. It made the Decker a completely distant character to the rest of the party. When one player was playing, 4 were just waiting. It also happens in SR, but it's not that extreme.

how about:

hacker first action: spoof smartlinked gun into diagnostics check mode
second action: spoof drone or vehicle in area to ram the sam

?

First action: Eject smartgun's clip.
Second action: turn off all street sammie's cyberware.

For many tasks, you can't really think that faster than you can act. Consider playing the piano. Your fingers move as fast (or faster) than your brain can proccess the music. In fact, if you stop to consciously consider the music, you won't be able to play at all. If you were mentally controlling a synthesizer, you wouldn't be able to play any better / faster, or play more pieces of music at the same time, because the limiting factor is your ability with music and your ability to process information, an not so much that of the interface.
Hacking a computer system requires human attention; that's likely to be the limit on speed, not the interface.

And how praytell do you do either of those actions in one turn?

My point isn't to make Decker's directly analog to Street Sam's in combat, my point is while full VR deckers get a lot more action a signle matrix action doesn't do much.

Um... By having more IP than one per turn. Initiative Pass > Combat Turn. Or did you mean by hacking his PAN with the first IP, ejecting his clip with the 2nd, and turning off his 'ware with the 3rd? Then I still have 2 IPs to use.

I think one thing you're forgetting is that hacking is more complicated than >run exploit.exe >run ownsystem.exe >run getalltheimportantstuff.exe

My guess would be the +2 bonus to things you do while in hot VR simulates your ability to real time modify code or give potential exploits a double looking over, and generally being able to do more than a meat counterpart.

Also keep in mind that even with 2072 tech, lag will still exist, because there is no way the information can move back and forth faster than the speed light (and likely notably slower). May not seem like alot, but even a .0001 second delay adds up quickly if you're talking about a time frame of about .5 seconds and having to send and receive dozens of commands. Also human reaction time has to be taken into account. People tend to overestimate how quickly the human brain works on higher level functions.

Try doing a reaction test some time (Plenty available online) and see how big of a reaction time you have. Now take out the amount of time it takes you to move your finger, the amount of time it takes a command to go from your brain to your hand, and the amount of time it takes info to go from your eyes/ears to your brain (none of these amounts are that high). That is how quickly your conscious mind can react. It's actually fairly slow, so this is why you don't get to hack with your pure mind much faster than you can hack with just AR, the main difference you get is the removal of bodily motions, which isn't massive, but is notable.