Hacking Stations

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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just had a thought, an expansion of hacking has been asked for, for quite a while now actually.

maybe we can start with something small, such as “hacking stations”

a station which doesn’t allow you docking access, you can “hack the station” and gain docking access.

this would be like ESS hacking in a way, the idea is that the longer you hack, the better it works out.
rewards are in tiers

  • station access
  • repair service access
  • market access
  • industry access
  • clone bay access.

probably a better way to balance or scale that, but i think it would be cool.
is possible disallow for POS’s but allow for allowed for upwell structures.

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For station access, it should be a bit more involved than just a single hack and you’re in. Perhaps you have to hack multiple objects, and on a failed attempt you turn suspect and the station guns start shooting you.

CCP could also create a new hacking minigame interface for the different hackable objects.

However, I also believe pois should be introduced around the outside of stations to liven the area up a bit. Some of those pois could be hacked (a failed hack will once again give the player a suspect flag) or attacked (also suspect.)

These pois could also be tied into the mission system, giving players a new environment to do pve in, one where other players might be on location.

All in all, making the overall environment more interactable with more life in it would only be an improvement.

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@Drogon_Mace @Rail_J_kar

Actually sounds pretty good… and it shouldn’t be too hard for CCP to implement…

@CCP_Zelus or any other Dev browsing these forums…

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well I thought it would be cool to only get 24 hour station access, maybe you can hack for longer access or something.

its nothing massive, but when warclones show up, explo pilots also have more purpose for hacking too.

(edit) maybe you can hack for different service modules and such.

theoretically if they do stations they could do stargates too or at least player owned ones.

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imo, a hack should only allow 1 time access. If you want in again, you should need to hack it again.

Unless, maybe there’s a station security module that will offline station access roles if a successful hack is made. So everyone can gain access, but there will be consequences. Maybe the station gets locked down and npcs related to the faction will show up to the station once a certain period has gone by, say… 5-15 minutes. That could give give the players a bit of a bank heist mission impossible vibe to it… especially if the player gets a clock that counts down.

I also like the idea that while hacking… if you click the wrong thing, other effects start happening… like you get warp scrambled or webbed. :smiley:

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this was much more along the lines of what i was thinking.

I had a thought for an automated defence utilising one of my previous ideas, the ability to breed computer viruses which effect capsuleers and their ships.

you hack a station for access for example and if you mess up it triggers the stations virus upload response, which then uses one of the games exisiting effects, maybe thats simply a bit much right now.

but for now, being able to hack to access structures / use service modules would be cool enough, theres plenty of chance to expand later, but it does open up some interesting possibilities.

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So all I need to invalidate your ACLs is a blackglass implant and a covops?

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Balance would dictate, the greater the result the more difficult to achieve it would be. At the high end of this type of game play, it could be made so multiple simultaneous hacks would be required to achieve the objective.

Collideable structures could be fashioned to act as gates into maze complexes that require multiple people to complete at the same time. If any of the people doing the hacks fail, everyone dies and the system gets locked down for a period of time.

And if the players in question only have 1-5 minutes to navigate the maze and complete the hack, the difficulty increases exponentially.

Just because something can achieve a great effect, doesn’t automatically make it bad.

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Any PvE, once solved and optimized by the players, becomes trivial.

Bypassing ACLs should not be trivial.

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That’s just because those pve systems are bad. They’re static, and thus can be solved.

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Abyss is pretty much solved too. Go roll up a spy alt like everyone else and stop asking CCP to let you into their stations.

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great idea, we can create this whole process as part of an insanely expensive implant the players can have.

covops implant
station hacker 9001
costs 2-20 Billion, slap on a cool down feature like you cannot target anything for 5-10 minutes to prevent excessive spamming or usage

meaning people who will access your station will have to sink a heavy financial cost into it.

once installed in a clone, disallow installation in other clones, this way you can own multiple but only use one at a time.

any permissions granted via hacking will be temporary.

linking the new mechanics to a specific item is a tried and true method of game development, so its an expansion of the existing skill via a unique implant, like how you can’t just hack a can, you need a hacking module,

so skill + module + implant = hacking for station access.

could develop a whole implant set where it allows you to hack specifically for station services this would help curve it and slap on a financial level to it, so if you’re WH diving and find a structure, in theory you could hack it and dock up and go to sleep.

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Balancing by cost is stupid, and making it an implant makes it effectively free to use in lowsec. If you want in so bad, use that 2-20bil and bribe the owners or something.

Also, how does this work in highsec? Do you get a suspect flag when hacking stations? Criminal flag? Or are highsec stations just FFA now?

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what are your thoughts on the subject?

15

I’m assuming you’re AFK but I am genuinely curious about hearing your thoughts on the matter.

you mention about bribing the owners however its likely people will just ignore you.

before continuing + would like to say for clarification for people reading that i have been and am using the term station to also include structures.

but circling to balance.
you’d naturally want to prevent excessive spamming of hacking stations but have it as a fun thing to do, hacking an entire stations.

the current pitch is to make a series of implants which effect different aspects of the station, different service modules and such.

such a specialised series of implants will have to be faction level
each implant will also have to be quite expensive
each implant will require the skill cybernetics to be at level 5 (meaning this is omega only at this point)
you can then link each implant to a different level of hacking skill probably 3, 4 & 5 each level will then have different abilities (this can be further expanded on) and ultimately would have to be done this way.

so much like how a ships might require multiple skills at certain levels, it would work the same in this case for these implants

alternatively due to the high nature and complexity of hacking a station, you could possibly have an advanced hacking skill which would be used to hack stations, stargates and all the other fun things which people would like to see and link the skills required to that skill but you’re basically doing the same thing

(considering skills allow you to improve statistical chances, improved virus ratings, improved rates of fire or DPS, mining yields as well as unlocking new items to use, which expands your abilities in game)

hacking a station would then be a criminal act in high sec, working along the lines of can flipping mechanics, you want to give people responding the chance to come and fight you.

a failed hack would cause feed back into your ship, dealing damage to your ship. which becomes incrementally larger making the more you hack and fail, the higher your chance of being blown up by the structure’s feed back

I could see fighters from structures being launched automatically after a failed hack, however not every station has that, so you’d need to change the lore so that upwell has changed their structures and given every upwell structure an “anti capsuleer countermeasure system” (ACCS)

similar to how ship changes come in suddenly you need a massive level more of materials like with recent capital ship changes, but perhaps that’s too far, less is more.

16

So is it giving a criminal timer or a suspect one?

This is relatively toothless if it doesn’t pod you, since the expensive bit is the implant. As I stated before, it’s really hard to get podded in security >=0.1.

There are good reasons for me to not want you in my station messing around. If I build supers, I’m going to want to tightly control the industry index, and letting any tom dick and harry into my station to build 10000 shuttles is going to ■■■■ me over big time. We have ACLs for a reason. You shouldn’t just be able to waltz in whenever you please.

17

following from what I said it would be a suspect timer, however a criminal timer is also applicable tbf regardless of timer people can freely engage you in highsec without concord interference.

whatever your argument for wanting to keep people out of your structure is only a valid reason for people to want to break in as it will create content for them, just because someone breaks in might not give them total structure access, which is why you scale it and connect it to items. if you had a series of implants which all used the same slot, you’d then be restricted to one per clone to minimise impact.

an automated defence shouldn’t have to pod you, if you want to pod someone, hunt them down and do it yourself, but a defence system which damages you for failure seems like a valid consequence.
unless you prefer to follow the standard exploration mindset of it despawns your structure for a failed hack?

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If you give me all your stuff that will create content for me, yes? So why haven’t you? There are already loads of ways to create content at the expense of others, we don’t need something as obnoxious as this.

If it doesn’t 1-shot a covops then it may as well not exist. Also covops are like 25 mil a pop, so if it doesn’t pod you it’s cheap to fail, especially in systems where bubbles don’t work.

Basically you seem to think that someone operating an upwell structure should have to be defending it 24/7 to chase hackers off their lawn. That’s ridiculous. Like the whole point of stuff with reinforce timers is so you don’t have to do that sort of thing.

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actually no i don’t this is why i proposed an automated attack which increased in damage incrementally with an additional cool down factor, its like being tapped on the nose and being told no and each time progressively harder till you decide you don’t want anymore. beside on this forum when it came to AFK cloaky camping the main counter argument was to have an active fleet to defend sov space.

so why not one more?

fantastic chain of thought, clearly you intend to gift people your items instead of creating engaging content for them.

I look forward to receiving all your assets as a gift in game via contract.

20

That was a bad argument and even CCP knew that, which is why they added Mobile Observatories.

Groups cannot expected to be online 24/7 in larger numbers than the groups around them.

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