10

Top of the line military quality is 10 (as defined in WAR! and Unwired). 6 is Street-SOTA (aka "normal level").

SYL

War! isn't canon.

But it could be shot out of one

Technically it is, even if some wish that it weren't.

I beg your pardon? Of course WAR! is SR4 canon, for better or worse (and increasing the link/software rating range from 1-10 ist perhaps so single good issue in this book).

SYL

Can someone give me a quick primer on Ultraviolet Hosts?

Do they still exist after the Crash 2.0?
Where can I find rules about them, through the editions?

Yes, War! does introduce military comlinks with Rating 10. Unwired or the Core book, as I recall, however, also talk about the possibility of rating 7+ programs/applications, but go on to specify these as either experimental, or stuff that is basically not something that you can effectively steal and use for any extended period of time, because it will either be associated with the official owner in some way, making it non-functional for anyone else, or it will degrade down to Rating 6 or less in (very) short order. Basically the information is that while higher rating stuff exist, in practical terms within the game, you are not going to get your hand on anything above rating 6 as anything but a plotdevice.

We can argue over whether War! is "official" or not, but hopefully we can agree that outside of War! and Technomancer "boosted" Complex Forms, the game describe Rating 6 to be world class, and "unique" people like Steven Hawkins and Einstein Rating 7.

#ThatWasTheJoke

Ahh... Your Joke Emote was missing.

War! Slow spell........ nuff said

The Book contains more than just the Slow Spell... Much of which is good.

The SR wiki has the basics, http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/Ultraviolet_hosts .

VR2 rules that only a hot deck may interact with a black or ultra violet system. The decker's persona has attributes of a meta human with their own mental attributes while physical attributes are dependent on the deck ratings. Damage is real rather than virtual.

UV host rules are found in VR, VR2 and Matrix. No idea beyond Crash 2.0 though.

Unwired had rules for UV nodes. They were rating 10 commlinks.

Thanks guys, I will go and check those out.

Bringing back fluff like that would be awesome I think,
AR introduced a mundane-ness to the Matrix, which I just can not appreciate.
Hearing someone describe how his character hacks something on a smartphone is about as interesting to me,
as watching him google stuff with it in real life.
'I am entering an ultraviolet node.', sounds funky and psychedelic. It's awesome.

I am under the impression that Matrix Hosts gained Processing power, as they raise in colour grades,
and through that their security, as well as their capabilities of realistic simulation improved,
tonight I am going to read through the books and see whether my assumptions are right.

The only mention in 4th Edition I remember was the short story in 20A in front of the Matrix chapter,
where FastJack fights Jormungandr in a UV node.
Gotta check that reference in Unwired, I seem to have missed or forgotten that one.

Minor Nitpick:
UV Nodes required a Rating 10 SYSTEM, not a Commlink. While you could construct a UV node on a DR10 Commlink, no one else could really experience it or appreciate it. It is meant for much larger applications with many persona using it, not just a single persona.

Shame, though I'll agree the example design and fluff for pre VR2.0 was terrible in every sense of the word. Irony is that SR4 is basicly a return to the orginal matrix rules but simplified the numbers and didn't show us 30 node system maps as average. It was really a terrible presentation. I also think the crazy sometimes three digit program/memory numbers didn't help any especially since it was all formulas. They needed to just slow down the fluff so you could use it as cut scenes without ignoring the fact that all this matrix stuff supposedly happened in less than a second. Shadowrun Returns basicly does what most GMs i knew did, ignored the fluff and just made it regular combat time. They also would have had to describe how to manage cut scenes though and limit those system maps to much much less (6 nodes is pushing it). Instead I feel like many groups abandoned it until 4e came out. Which is a shame but understandable.

My experience was that a lot of people abandoned Decker PC's during SR1 and 2. As I recall, Sr1 decking ran on a different time frame than regular combat, so it was impossible to run it side by side. SR2 fixed that, but it was still hard to keep decking and real-world actions together.

In Sr3, I largely bypassed that problem with offline storage becoming the norm. The decker had to penetrate physically, then do their thing. Admittedly, decking was still an isolated act, but it was just a small scene as part of the bigger run, instead of being a separate run all by itself. Like you said, SR4 was largely a throwback. They clearly wanted to make decking more like astral space, which was the whole point of the AR matrix. However, they failed to account for the fact that a lot of people were glossing over astral space anyway, and adding another layer didn't solve the problem.