Actually I have a much more benign reason why play testers don't seem to work. It's the same thing with Games Workshop and 40K. They play testers that play the way the designers imagine it would be played. They don't send it out to groups who will look for ways to break the game. Games Workshop just put out their 8th Edition of WH40K... and guess what it's already breaking!

You don't play test by sending it to your buds. No. You send it to the assholes who will find EVERY way of breaking the game and then closing those loop holes.

This is the same principle behind programmers not being allowed to test their own code. They'll unconsciously shy away from anything that might cause an error, because they know how it's "supposed" to work. Real stress-testing is giving it to a group of people who have no idea what it's all about but will happily bang away at the keyboards and cause lots of errors. I had to learn this the hard way early in my programming career about two decades ago.

Yeah, except even the storied ivory tower at GW is breaking down because they actually got tourney players to playtest 8th edition, and are publishing it in a way to allow hotfixes faster than 'new codex in a couple years'.

You and I must play very different games of 40K. There is one guy who's favorite list is 3 Baneblades and just enough IG for a battalion. To put it bluntly... he ALWAYS goes first because of the rule that the first person who finishes deploying unit goes first. 3 Baneblades put a LOT of hurt on a camper.

Known defect. Baneblade rules were done by Forgeworld, and like CGL they do all their rules writing in a vacuum, and outside of entirely self-contained stuff like HH, are incredibly hit or miss.

The 8th ed Forgeworld stuff so far has been a big miss. Probably going to get re-statted when the actual IG codex comes out later this year, because it's bad and the publishers should feel bad for letting it into the wild.

Besides, how big of a game are you running that he can rock 3 x ~700 point tanks that qualify as Lords of War plus infantry? Better question, why are you bothering to play the game with someone who would run a list like that as opposed to doing literally anything else with your time?

BaneBlade is no longer Forgeworld. It was in the Imperium 2 Index. And also the way he had it set up, it only cost 577. So in a 2000 pt game he could have three of them without any problem. As for playing him... I usually don't, but come tourney time...

Anyways, back to Shadowrun and play testers... like I said, I think that Catalyst had play testers, but they were friends with the Devs and they didn't break the game the way assholes out in the wild will.

Second, the play testers didn't take one look at the wireless rules and went... "NOPE! Stupid as drek! Rewrite them!"

Finally, Catalyst Studios and Games Workshop both suffer from the same mental disorder. That disorder is "My drek don't stink." So if some thing is not working right. It's OUR fault! Not their's!

They should learn to kill their babies. This was advice given to me in art school. Your first idea is never your best and you need to be ready to kill it and look at alternatives, no matter how much you may like it or think its the best thing ever. If everyone is saying it's shit don't ignore them, look at it critically and then if needed, into the dumpster and back to the drawing board. Learn to kill your babies.

I'm glad I'm a Med Lab tech... so much easier than to having to destroy something you love. I get specimens, run them, report the results, and then forget about them. SOOOOO much easier!

You all realize that the Matrix has never been a realistic simulation of computer networking, right?

The core fundamental concepts for the Matrix came from William Gipson's Neuromancer.

Why on earth would you want it to be realistic anyway? It's not fun or very playable to read through lines of code looking for a place where you can cause a stackover flow so you can start reallocating bytes of data to access the data you actually want. Likewise with real network security it doesn't take minutes or hours to do a hack, but months or years to find vulnerabilities in a system, which is unplayable in the scales that Shadowruns happen.

It's easy to criticize CGL, but the real difference between a hyper abstracted game system that represents hacking, and that of a realistic simulation of hacking; is basically playability.

You guys will either create a system that betrays the core concepts of the Matrix, or you'll just make something insanely unfun. A mystical magical Matrix is the right move, because there is no reason that a fantasy computer network in 60-ish years from now should be anything like what we currently have.

There's a line between 'this should be perfectly realistic' and 'well, I know one of our basic setting conceits is that magic and tech don't mix, but the Matrix is magic'.

Like I said, if the Matrix is magical, they need to finally come clean and admit it. And really, it is functionally magical now, but they keep up the blatant lie that magic and technology don't mix - clearly they do, or the Matrix wouldn't function.

This is the reason we've been retconning some Matrix functionality in our house rules, to try to bring this under control (or at least dial down the more ridiculous bits). That one of our players is actually a high-level engineer for a major telecommunications provider is helping me considerably.

to be clear, i am neither a playtester nor a proofreader for catalyst. i have been credited for proofreading one product (after it had been released in PDF) iinm, but that was a voluntary thing where i posted such a long list of errors on the dumpshock forums that i think Adam would've felt bad for not crediting me. also, that was 4th edition, not 5th.

i just know what we've heard on these forums from people who *are* proofreaders and freelancers. and what we've heard is that there are people doing those jobs, and that the corrections they make are not incorporated into the final version.

Even if that is true Stobe, it would violate one of the laws of magic in Shadowrun... you need a mana sphere for magic to work. Last time I checked, the Matrix was quite alive and well in space.

Now they could have explained it that with quantum computing (or other appropriate sounding technobabble) that the ability to find a security hole in an OS is something that can be done in minutes, but that the computing technology needed to do this can't be fit into anything smaller than a Deck.

If the Devs went with something like this the I can see the return of the SR2 Essence cost for a Cranial Cyberdeck. It was not small... If I were to GM a Shadowrun game, then I would have it that a cybernetic cyberdeck would cost 2 Essence and NO CAPACITY! None of this "well it only takes 4 capacity to put it in a limb, so I'll get my hand chopped off and install it there." garbage.

Part of the reason I would have it that you HAVE to install it in your skull (if you go that route) is that a cyberdeck has to have DNI in order to function AT ALL, as it uses the human brain's ability in pattern recognition to assist it, and it has DIRECTLY wired in as even the few milliseconds it takes the signal to travel down the nerves, get processed by the deck, and transmitted back would be too much of a roadblock to on the fly hacking.




So, just to make sure we're on the same page, James Hardy is paying people to proofread other people's work and deciding that it doesn't matter he'll publish what HE wants?

If that is the case, then I fear for the future of Shadowrun.

The Matrix being mystical doesn't mean magical. It means that its so complex that it's incomprehensible. Once again, this is a post singularity world. People don't need to understand how the under lying system works, but how to use the 3D abstractions to make it do what they want.

I pull a level and a secret door opens works both in a mansion in meat world and a host system in the Matrix.

This is a world where a computer virus destroyed the internet in 2029, and cyber commandos fought it in virtual reality across the entire internet. This is a world where the Matrix somehow became self aware and started to rewire children's brains to interface with the Matrix. This is a world where an elf decker fell in love with an advance computer program and gave it sentience. None of that can be done realistically.

The Matrix was just rebuilt from the ground up not five years ago in-game, for the second time in the last few years.

This isn't some lost, forgotten mystic knowledge. The new 'wireless' Matrix was designed, by metahuman experts who are still around.

You are conflating the writers being bad at explaining (and keeping in mind) how their setting works with in-world physics.

It'd actually be almost 15 years as SR is now in 2078 or 2079.

This is also a world where all encryption became breakable in 2065, and all devices are also routers and work perfectly to create a mesh network with no lag.

This is a world where an elf was able to copy people into the Matrix, and a dragon gave a known criminal a computer program that also copied people into the Matrix.

Do you expect that someone knows how Project Imago or JackBNimble works too? Or maybe they're just emergent Matrix phenomena because the code can't be understood. Once again, after 2029, no one understands how technology works anymore. The sixth world is a post singularity society. You can literally connect to an off the Matrix device from the Great Connection in Resonance Realms. And all this weird mystical shit that I've been talking about was before CGL, back with Wizkids and FASA. The Matrix having mystical elements has been core to the setting since at least second ed.

Except the mixing of magic and technology has always been one of the features of Shadowrun and does exist, even if it's so rare people think it doesn't.

In the first few pages of the 1st Ed core rulebook it talked about the 'Double-domed techs at MIT&T', academics who had advanced degrees in both Physics and Magic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Thaumaturgy.

2nd Ed introduced Cybermancy, 3rd Ed FAB and other Manatech. It's always been there.

Cybermancy is specifically using blood magic, with all that entails, to get around the magic/tech limitation by essentially binding a metahuman spirit into it's own corpse.

FAB is just a novel use of a dual-natured organism.

Neither of these is remotely relevant to the entirely artificially constructed reality of the Matrix.

Except there is no example of technomagic in the game. There is no magic commlinks. Yes the commlink can be made into a focus, but being magic does NOT enhance the commlink at all. It doesn't make it faster, better at ANY function, or even tougher. It's just a focus in the form of a commlink... no different than a focus in the form of a ring.

The cybermancy thing was just tricking the spirit to stay in the body. There is nothing truly special about the cyberware other than being delta grade. In fact considering delta grade cyber/bioware and, in SR5, gamma grade ware, why is being a cyberzombie even matter anymore? I mean give me 10 million nuyen and I can a pretty sick street sam with ALL the augmentation you would ever need. Granted a lot of that would be bioware, but the character I would be able to build would be able to do pretty much anything a cyberzombie would be able to do, but would not have a big flashing neon sign saying "HEY GUYS! LOOK AT ME, I'M A WALING ABOMINATION!!!" Which is why a Cyberzombie fails miserably. He is as subtle as a tac nuke. And yes, while his Essence would be below 1, it is still not in the category of a Cyberzombie.

Yes, my Gamma Sam would not have built in weapons other than cyberspurs, but lets be honest a cyber gun is a cute trick, but it's NOT a game changer. It's hard to change the ammo, and it takes up too much Essence/Capacity. An external gun is much easier to use, reload, and cheaper. Yes I know a Gamma Sam is not cheap, but compared to a cyberzombie, he's positively a bargain basement steal.

The Blood Mage Gestalt is an another example.

And of course there is The Lucifer Deck: Usually mana-technology combinations are rather low tech or function largely separate and interact just on a mechanical or similar level. Don't remember whether Lucifer was a true counter example to that.

The whole.mana sink abomination part.of making a cyberzombe is, for some of those doing it, a feature rather than a bug. :/

Considering it DOES make the Cyberzombie harder to nail with magic, it's not that great of a feature.

well, probably a number of them volunteer their own time, and "payment" for many is probably in the form of "here's a coupon for X dollars worth of stuff at the catalyst shop", where it happens at all (as an example of where compensation isn't given, i understand that the freelancers have a forum provided by CGL where they can talk to each other, bounce ideas off each other while not violating NDAs, fact check each other's work, etc, and one of the things that happens there is many of them are willing to help in proofreading stuff before it is submitted, for which to my knowledge they receive no payment).

but yes... they do actually have a track record of being told when a bunch of stuff needs to be changed (for whatever reasons) and then doing absolutely nothing with that knowledge. it's a big part of why many of us have been surprised to see that actual errata is coming out for anything, because that's not something CGL has been good at, typically (though quite frankly, that errata is more the result of a freelancer (Patrick Goodman, i think) going the extra mile than anyone permanently employed by CGL... not sure if Patrick is being paid or if so, what form the payment takes, it's probably "unprofessional" and possibly a violation of contract for Patrick to share that information in any event).

but yeah, you know it's not a sign of confidence when the fans are surprised to see errata even when someone else is doing all the work to compile it.

(oh, and the missions team is usually a decent place to look for stuff that isn't errata, but *is* a change that needs to be made for something to be playable, because while the regular CGL employees can stick their fingers in their ears and pretend there are no problems, the missions team actually has to deal with the results of the poor editing and make rulings on how it works for official missions games, so they're often a pretty good place to look).

Did they fix the wireless nonsense? I mean honestly that is the one thing that bugs the crap out of me.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the tabletop world, GW's already got a FAQ out with errata, two weeks after release of the Forgeworld book and comments from players as to issues with it.

Catalyst is relying on a freelancer to do this how many years after release?

no. that doesn't make the game unplayable, just dumb, so i presume they're not allowed to fix it.

they're also allowed to make changes that come up as a result of missions often being played with different groups every work, so for example a whole bunch of qualities (positive and negative) are not allowed in missions play.

but just as an example... in missions play you cannot spend edge on a quickened spell (which would allow you to spend 1 karma for a force 1 spell but get the benefit of the quickened spell at several hits because spending karma allows you to exceed the limit of the force rating). that isn't an official errata, but it's probably something you'd want to consider for your own games

Of course they didn't - this is why you stick with 4e and cherry-pick a few things here and there from 5e. Magical wireless bonuses are the stupidest thing in all 5e, I swear.

Force 1 Quickened spells are way too easy to dispell... and are stupid susceptible to wards...
Force 8 Quickened Spells on the other hand...

*shrug* it's still prone to a lot of abuse. if you don't like the risk of force 1 (though dispelling attempts shouldn't be all that common, and there are ways to get a spell through a ward), try casting a spell until you get 10 hits on a slightly higher force spell, and then quicken.

Quickening is prone to a LOT of potential abuse, yes... But Having seen high leve/prolific Quickening going on in our campaign, it also has plenty of drawbacks...

I am aware of that and this is not the issue I have... there are "sacrifices" to realism that have to be made for play ability and that is ok. But throwing logic and realism out of the window and drowning it afterwards is my issue and I think that is what the 5e Matrix is.

There is in my opinion no problem with abstract representations of hacking and computers.

The Matrix in Neuromancer is still based on technological constructs and had in the confines of his fictional universe an inherent logic.
The Matrix in Shadowun 5e is a construct based on unicorn farts, fairy dust and the dreams and wishes of little children as far as we know and it sprang up basically over night with not one person understand why and how and everyone went "*shrug*That will work!"



I have to disagree on your statement that people don't need to understand how the underlying systems work. Like I mentioned a few times before... most people don't need to know how that stuff works yes... that is even true today.
But the Matrix was build by human hands, engineers and scientists created it... and yes even these people don't need to know every detail individually. BUT! Their combined knowledge amounts to knowing to the smallest detail on how the matrix works... at least it should... because this is how technology works.

Now in a true post Singularity world technology would not be build by humans and things are different and you could argue that Deus was the Singularity moment. But then my other argument from above comes into play... why would the corporations so easily put the fate of the world into the hands of super intelligence after the experiences with Deus, two devastating crashes and at the same time another technology doing the body snatcher thing?

Corporate greed and stupidity have their limits when it comes to maintaining their wealth and power... and the matrix is the key to this and even to a point human existence itself with everything from food production, power, transportation, financial system, military weapons and almost everything else depending on it.

If we accept that the 5e Matrix is the direct product of the technological singularity than it is potentially the biggest thread to human existence that ever existed.

Edit:

I want to add something about abstraction and computers...

Even today in our world we work with huge level of abstraction when it comes to computers. Any code programmers write is a simplified representation of how the processor works. Even the processor is an abstraction because it is (oversimplified) just a collection of logic gates.
The graphical interface we use is another level of abstraction.

The more complex computer systems will get the more we will need to reinvent the way to use them. In this regard Gipson's Matrix makes sense.

Edit 2:

We like to think we made such great strides in computer technology in the last 60-70 years... but if you really look at it the big stride was miniaturization, allowing us to pack more logic gates, more memory into smaller spaces.
Since the invention of the first integrated circuit in 1958 that is all we basically did. The technology did not change, it just got smaller.

And here I lost my train of thought... pls forgive me as I am on some pretty heavy pain meds right now... or simplified... I am high as a kite! I was planning on making a point with these two edits I swear!

Literally, the Crash of 2029 is the Singularity moment. And you know what the corps did? They modeled Black IC after it. A virus so powerful it broke the entire Internet, and they then start using it to secure their black sites.

Corporations have insane levels of hubris. It's a tried and true cliché in the cyberpunk setting. An example in other media, in the Alien franchise, Weyland-Yutani Corporation constantly thinks they can control the Xenomorphs. It always turns out bad. Why would they invest untold amounts of wealth and constantly sacrifice colony after colony on trying to control Aliens? It's the same reason Ares plays with bugs. It's the same reason MCT plays with Dissonance TMs. Everyone thinks they're different and thinks they'll do it better and have all the problems figured out and it always bites them in the ass because when mega corp play with fire, it means it'll make a damn interesting run.

With Weyland-Yutani, I chalk a lot of that up to bad writing, and writers who have a Let's Stick It to The Man! ™ agenda.

After all, why send a dedicated team of xenologists to pick up your fancy new alien specimen when you can co-opt a small ship of space truckers, who have absolutely no experience or training with what you want them to do (and no xenobiology specimen facilities), and trick them into doing it instead? It has a way smaller chance of success, but hey, it's way more evil, so let's do that! Damn the cost, I say! And who cares if the whole affair is a colossal failure?

And who cares if you lose an entire colony of your personnel, and a highly-expensive atmosphere processor, and an entire squad of Marines (which absolutely will trigger an official military inquiry into the situation), when you can once again send in completely unqualified people to clumsily attempt to grab the same alien specimen you tried to obtain before (that hasn't gone anywhere but that you've conveniently forgotten about for last 50 years)? Again, way more evil, and no opportunity to engage in evil, no matter how much it costs the corporation, must ever be passed up.

Weyland-Yutani's behavior can only be adequately explained if every single person in the corporation with decision-making authority is continually smoking huge amounts of crack and cares absolutely nothing about making a profit or avoiding costly losses of money, facilities, equipment, and personnel. I've worked with far too many people in the corporate sector who have a balance sheet in place of a soul, and none of them behave like that. Ever.

And some Shadowrun corporations aren't far behind that, in the hands of some writers.

Part of that is needed to give the characters a reason to go shoot of the other company's people in the face.

With that said, companies are almost ALWAYS portrayed negatively in Hollyweird. If they're mentioned they're always the bad guy, and their only reason for existing is to show that Capitalism is bad, horrible, and icky. Besides, it's SOOOOO much easier to make the company the bad guy because they have all the money and jealously is easy to invoke.

I wouldn't consider the 2029 crash a singularity, not even an aborted one. I don't think there is any actual claim that the crash entity was a superintelligence experiencing exponential growth of its faculties. It was mainly good at destroying things. And while I feel there is a rumour that the entity could be lurking out there in the matrix, a connection to, for example, the Deep Resonance was never made. So maybe the virus was a form of early artificial intelligence, but as the emergence of AI in the early 2050s shows even that doesn't trigger a direct pathway to a singularity moment: Morgan was fooling around with Dodger rather than reaching to unknown horizons. And metahumanity was always chasing AI rather than productively using it to trigger rapid technological development (there is kinda the exception of nanotechnology, though that proved to be another research field rather than a stepping stone to greater things). The crash of 2064 was an aborted singularity moment. But after the singularity didn't happen, history repeats itself: A few years later the matrix is swarming with AIs (digital intelligence) and there is still no indication for a true acceleration of technological growth, instead nanotechnology now had to even be abandoned because of a type of intelligent agent.

To the Black ICE comparison: I think there is a big difference between reusing a mechanism like lethal neural feedback induction learned from an emergent intelligence and using an emergent intelligence as a black box to run your whole network.

Did you forget about Psychotrope? Mirage is an AI. Mirage can rewire metahumans to become Otaku. Mirage was active in 2029.

I didn't forget. The writers, on the other hand...

Whew! For a second there, I thought I had.

Mirage was "born" at the end of the Fuchi Civil War, so the late 2050s. The dissolution of Fuchi triggered the events described in the novel Psychotrope or rather the retconned version of these events. This process created Mirage. Its core software, a highly sophisticated anti-virus program used against the crash entity, was indeed active since the first crash, but all these years the x-factor was missing.

The distinction of being the first AI goes to either Morgan or the Deep Resonance, if it is one. Un-retconned Psychotrope actually explained the Deep Resonance, but if I'm not mistaken it didn't achieve awareness in 2029 but later. I would have to read up on it. Anyway as I said that whole portion of the novel was retconned.


Update: Had a look into the book. Psychotrope p. 186:
So even without the retcon version the first crash shouldn't be considered a point of singularity at least not because AI first emerged there. Though if you ask me evidently, since after 2029 for years "nothing" happened. A technological singularity means that you don't have to go further in time to go up on the scale of technological development. "Everything" happens at this point.


By the way to add to the overall discussion, on the same page is this:

The role of carbon in steel was only discovered by Reaumur in the 18th century, and a detailed analysis of the various phase states and their transitions came even later. But the fact that blades can be hardened and by heating and quenching was already discovered in the iron age, or course burdened with various anecdotal and mythical procedures. Firearms were developed and improved for centuries by people who explained oxidation by some combination of the four elements or phlogiston. And wireless communications were in use when the idea of luminous aether was still given serious consideration.

While Mirage didn't achieve self-awareness until...later. I'd say code that can self-regulate and self-code itself is what I'm talking about. Anyway, the point is that code has been writing itself and rewriting itself since 2029 at the least, if not earlier. So the modern Matrix being so complex that no one understands how it works is extremely probable. Is the Crash of 2029 THE Singularity moment...I'd argue yes, but even if it's not; code complexity is exponential once code is self-optimizing.

In the retconned version Mirage was more of a proto-SK. Less emphasis on the self-coding, so they downgraded that too.

Just to note, we're not argueing over a solid theory of technological development. But if anything the singularity is a point in time when the curve charting this development approaches infinity. Self-modifying code (which exists) is not enough, self-modifying intelligence is posited as the key innovation.

But a lot of hidden things happened in the Shadowrun matrix, so I go with another counter argument: From the perspective of metahumanity 2029 marks a loss of knowledge rather than a rapid increase. I think you have to at least feel the singularity for it to actually be one. A superintelligence dominating the matrix in secret without really doing anything with it, is fine I guess. It's one of the options to explain the Deep Resonance, but I would argue that's just not a singularity.

The problem is we are not talking about a fifty year development. The revelation not even GOD knows how the new matrix works, implies that while the matrix was of course complex as a system the underlying technological basis and the implementation was well-understood. I certainly never got the impression that wasn't the case. Metahumanity is flying blind for four years now, not fifty.


Also a description of "pocket universes" from Virtual Realities 2.0 p. 141:
Sounds like the Foundation actually.

The greatest problem of the new matrix concept is that it relies basically on faster than light information propagation. There is no other explanation why you can talk in real time, without delay to someone you are sharing a host with even if he is inside Zurich Orbital at the other side of the world. Not to mention the fact that you are in essence routing all this across millions of devices.

You basically need something either a magic component to break the laws of physics or there are some new as of yet unexplored physics at work.

Taking the matrix away from physical servers was imho the greatest mistake in all this.

You could have stopped at 'Devices do not require being in mutual signal range of a Host'.

That's another thing I miss from SR 4. Each Commlink had a signal range. Now if you're somewhere like the Australian Outback, you still have a connection to the Matrix. Massive stupidity.

Hmm, very interesting find

@Jack: You could always rig a drone from the other side of the world without problems. And IMHO that's better than rules for latency, keeping track of storage and bandwidth was bad enough