People realy hate hackers. Then again people realy hate anyone that does anything to them offensively...but hackers reserver a special place of hatred in peoples hearts just under planet invaders. Truth be told, it's not a huge loss. Yeah it slows your research advancement down a little and yeah it can suck logging in after being gone for 10 hours only to find you've got half the research you would normally have had, but other than that it's not going to kill you. It certianly can't be as bad as logging in and finding that someone disabled you and raided your planet fluxing artifact. But either way just do to the nature of hacking, expect to be retaliated against on a regular basis. The main goal of a hacker is to quickly advance down the research tree far beyond what normal production would allow for someone of a comperable level. Here's a guide on overcome a few of the bumps and pitfalls that you can expect along the way and become a players worst nightmare.

BENEFITS OF BEING A HACKER
Why choose a hacker? I tend to think of the hacking and raiding proffesions as bonuses to your resources much like the miner and excavator proffesions are. Don't think of them as replacements for colonizing planets, but think of them as an adjunct to your resource production. The difference is they're a bit more tricky than the last 2 because people tend to retaliate against players that practice these methods, but the reward is they're infinately more fun. You get the gleeful pleasure of possibly stealing someone's resources once every 25 minutes verses sitting there for 10 hours waiting for a mineral or artifact bar to fill up for a new shipment. If nothing else it gives you something to do once every 25 minutes and a reason to come back to the game more often.
The one big advantage of hacking over raiding is that it's very energy unintensive. To raid someone you have to hammer down their ship before spending the energy to raid it...and quite possibly fail. Hacking on the other hand doesn't require this, only that your scanners be strong enough to pick up the ship and your cloaking to be powerful enough to hack them. Not only this, even at the worst energy regen rate, you'll still produce more than the 5 energy required every 25 minutes to hack, enabling you to still complete a mission here and there, therefore it's much much more efficient energy wise to see gains through hackking than raiding.
The biggest upside to being a hacker is you will be very powerful as a player in terms of the moduals you'll be equipping on your ship. For instance, 8 heavy mass drivers give an attack bonus of 7 while taking up 7 decks each for a grand total of 56 attack at the cost of 56 decks. Meanwhile 4 light ion cannons give an attack bonus of 25 each while only taking up 13 deck spaces each, for a total of 100 attack power for only 52 deck spaces. Thats almost double the attack for roughly the same amount of deck space. As a hacker you'll be fitting much more efficient moduals on your decks at a lower level than most.
The downside of hacking is it looses it's luster in the later stages of the game. Once you've reached high enough levels and researched down the far ends of the research tree, the research resource obviously eventually becomes extinct since there is nothing else to research. The only value hacking may have then is the ability to hack another players planet locations, which is a long shot and not neccessarily productive, since the chance to hack a planet location is rare to begin with, then since most players have mostly crappy planets in their data bases, the odds of you finding the few good ones they have are even rarer. But then at that level scanning for planets is pretty hard too, so at least it's one more way of accumulating planets, but for this you don't realy need to be a true hacker for.

SUCCEEDING AS A HACKER
The main stats your going to look for as a hacker are cloaking and scanning. The amount hacked from a player is dependant on their level to yours. The higher level they are to you the higher amount overall you'll receive. The lower the level the less you'll get. This means in an ironic twist to the norm, you'll be actively seeking higher level players to piss off. To do this you have to do 2 things., a) be able to actually see the enemy ship on your battle chart and b) be able to hack the higher level players you see there. If all of your deck space is devoted to scanners and jammers then you won't have a hard time hacking higher level players. As a hacker you have one major advantage in this. Most players move through the game by fighting, wether it be npc's or player versus player. Therefore most of their research and deckspace is researved for fighting stats, weapons, hulls, sheilds and defense, especially weapons since the more you can hit a target for, the more energy efficient it is to level this way. Coupled with the fact that people are paranoid about being dissabled and raided, especially when logged out, it's quite the norm to find ships running around looking like a porcupine with high level guns poking out of every crevice in their hulls. Needless to say, scanning devices are an after thought, so you shouldn't have much of a problem overcoming another players scanning abilities.
Scanning is what allows you to see these players. To see an enemy player you have to have a scanning high enough to overcome their cloaking ability. The lower they're cloaking vs your scanning, the better chance you'll have of seeing them on your combat screen. Whether or not your successful at hacking them is the inverse of the above. Scanning defends against hacking, so the higher your cloaking is over their scanning, the better you'r odds of hacking them are. Also cloaking is what determines a critical hack. The higher their cloak value the higher the odds are they will score a cirtical failiure and counter hack you. The object is to try and strike a balance between the 2. First and formost you want to spend a great deal of research into your scanning and cloaking research trees early and often to increase you'r scanning and cloaking abilities. Second you want to be spending the vast majority of your rank points on decks and holds, 4 decks to 1 cargo holds is the typical formula, adjust as needed. I suggest the first tree to research is scanning, since this not only still benefits your hacking but is highly needed to increase your ability to locate planets for colonizing. Then start moving down the cloaking tree. I find cramming my best jammers and cloakers on then filling the remainer up with scanners seems to work quite well. This means i'm pretty much able to hack just about any one that comes on my battle screen. As of right now at level 27, I have 2 Mark III Sensor Jammers, 2 Mark III EM absorbent panels 1 Mark III Wideband scanner and 1 Mark II EM scanner loaded onto all 110 of my decks and i'm hacking players in their mid 70s and I'm getting between 35-130 research per hack, typically in the 70-100 range, although I'm not exactly seeing them on my battlescreen. I'll explain later on how to target these realy high levels.
When it comes to choosing targets, the choice is pretty straight foward. Pick the highest target or targets on your battle screen you can hack. Since you'll be going down the scanning tree first you may not be able to hack all of them right away depending on what they have equipped. Thats ok, just pick the best one start leeching. As you level your cloaking abiliy you'll have this problem much less. Check and see what the ships have equipped for cloaking and scanning. You might not be able to see what each has equipped but that's ok, it just gives you an idea. Hack several of the highest targets a couple times and see which offers the most. According to the game developers, level determines how much you get from hacking. The higher the level the target, the better. Also as you're hacking some higher level targets may start appearing, this will especially happen if you level. Give them a whirl too, but the first rule of thumb is the highest is the mostest.

Here's a tip, have your legion members send you alerts for high level players that you normally can't pick up on your battle chart, perferably the ones with the fewest scanning modules. Odds are your still going to be able to hack them, at least for a little while, and you'll get much more reaserch out of them than the little chums floating around on your battle screen.

THE VICIOUS CIRCLE: RESEARCH-FUNDING-DECK SPACE.
As you level up your research tree your going to notice some significan't patterns. First and formost, the higher you go the exponentially more expensive it becomes to build higher end moduals, and not just in credits either. Second, the higher level the modual, the more deckspace it takes up. Case in point, a Mark III sensor jammer takes up 16 deck spaces and gives 31 to cloak, where as a quantum jammer takes up 30 deckspace and gives 136 to cloak. So for the amount of decks used for the two lower end ones, you can get more than double the effect for the same deck space with the quantum jammer. The difference is the sensor jammer costs 11,400 creds and 228 dynite to build where as the quantum jammer takes 3.3 MILLION creds and 13 pawlacite. Eventually this will become the crux of your problem, as you level up your research tree you will become less and less able to afford the cost of you'r upgrades without colonizing planets that comes with leveling. So even though with roughly 100 or so decks while in you'r mid 20s, the quantum jammer might still be a better investment giving more than double the jamming power over the 2 lower level jammers for the same deck space, it's extremely unlikely you'll ever be able to afford that device at this level unless you were lucky enough to unearth a few Dysan planets in your scans or you have a higher level willing to fund you.
So the moral of the example is two fold, don't slouch on your mineral production planets and don't shoot your research too far out of your reach. Mid level game I would shoot for roughly 40% each of research and mineral production with 20% artifact production. The biggest thing, however, is to make certian to research the tech table in the game wikki before going on to research a particular modual. Set a goal for researching a certian level module that is within your means of researching, building and equipping, then pick something else to research. It cost 75,000 research to get from the third rank of wideband jamming to the first level of quantum jamming. It's a huge waste of time and energy to invest into this research only to find out you can't fund the item once you've unlocked the research tree to get it.
The delema with deck space is another by product of advanced research. Odds are, as the game is designed, it's not likely your going to terribly out research your deck space. As you move down the research tree, the modules you will be able to equip will be stronger but taking up more deck space. The trade off is that they're more powerful in terms of benefit per deck space used. Typically this translates into you will be equipping fewer modules on your ship but getting much more out of them overall than what several lower level moduals would have granted. For instance you can have up to 2 jammers and 2 cloaks to increase your cloaking ability. Higher level research means you might only have the ability to do 2 or 3 out of the 4 total, but they will give better returns than what multiples of the lower tier moduals would have given. How fast you level versus how fast you level your research tree is adjustable by you according to how you play. I suppose it is possible to sit back and never do quests and never attack anything and thereby never gain levels and eventually out research what you ship can handle, although this is highly unlikely. Do to the exponential increase in research costs as you advance in tiers, your decks size will eventually start catching up to your modual sizes. Space, however, is always going to be an issue.

HOW TO DEAL WITH PAYBACKS.
Mark my words, it's going to happen, especially in the lower levels. In return for all the research that others have so gleefully contributed to your advancement, expect them to demand payment. There's two ways they can do this. First they can disable and raid you, which will be the usuall method, especially considering that the people your picking on will be much higher levels than you, or they can counter hack you. Here lies the crux of your dellemma, you can't counter both, especially in the lower levels, so here's some advice on what to do.
As stated before, you will probably have better moduals to equip on your ship than most people the same level as you. However, for those of us that have school/jobs and have normal sleeping patterns, that wee little tugboat your floating around the universe on just ain't big enough to stack on the max compliment of jammers, cloakers, scanners, state of the art plasma weaponry, armor plating, defenses and sheilds that would make the Death Star green with envy. However, to defend against both forms of retaliation, dissabling and hacking, you need it all. My suggestion, defend against counter hacking, and let them mercilessly pound your little tonka toy to pixie dust. Here's why...
The reason is simple, if you spend 6 hours hacking away at a nice juicy target siphoning research off him, only for you to log out for bed only to wake up the next day to find out he hacked it all back, your not realy gaining much, and loosing a lot of energy in the process. By defending against hacking, your inadvertantly maximizing your profitability in research tech. There's two ways to go about doing this though, do you stack as much cloaking, or as much scanning as possible. Which one you use is dependent on your situation. Typcially I do cloaking and here's why.
Scanning is what you need to defend against a hack. The higher your scanning is vs your opponents cloaking, the less likely he is able to hack you. However, the results of a hack are dependant on your cloaking. The higher the level cloaking you have the better the odds are that he'll get a critical failure and you'll counter hack him, But also you need to defend against other roving baddies in the universe, including other hackers, and those Konqul bastards that like to raid other players and incorporate their wealth, and the best way to do this is to avoid being detected by them and this is best accomplished by cloaking your ship. They can't target you if you don't show up on their battle screens. The idea isn't to make your ship invisible to everyone as this is impossible. The idea is to make your ship only vissable to players high enough level above you that they could care less about wasting the energy to mess with you for such little returns.
The other situation is if someone is retaliating against you by counter hacking. In this case I advise boosting your scanning ability as this makes it harder for him to hack you. Retaliation from a previous target for hacking by counter hacking is extremely ineficient for him. First off, if your doing it right, your hacking players much higher levels than you, since the amount hacked is dictated by your targets level. If he's attempting payback by counter hacking, he's obviously going to receive less research overall than you did because your a lower level then him. If you happen to have the hacker proffesion and he doesn't, this just compounds his dellemma. So to sum it up, stack as much cloak as possible and fill the rest up with scanning to stay off potential sharks scanners and to counter any counter hacks by your previous target(s), and switch to boosting your scanning if a former target wants to play the counter hacking game.
The next form of payback, and the most common, is disabling, sometimes followed by being raided. If you go with my above advice, then you wont have the deckspace to be able to instal the components to fight off would be disableers. Yet there are other ways to counter their effects. First off disabling you isn't a big deal. So it cost you a few creds to repair your ship, oh dear. Think of it as paying for the research you managed to siphon off your target. 1000 credits for 500-800 research the night before is a fine trade off in my standard. If your logged off for the night or because your at work, they'll disable you once and you'll remain that way till you log back in to repair your ship. By then i'm sure they'll have gotten bored and found better ways to spend their energy. IF your in the process of playing, however, it can be a bit more complicated. You can't hack if your disabled so the key is to not repair your ship till just before your ready to hack, perform the hack, then if you get dissabled again, leave it that way till your timer is up. Or likewise, you can re-equip your ship out with those nice fat ion cannons you spent so much time researching along with hulls and defenses and go tit for tat. Odds are though you'll be outgunned by a lot, so I wouldn't bother, unless you know you can beat him and don't mind wasting the energy to do so.
Now this only leaves us with being raided, and there's several ways around this too. First, don't carry a damn thing of value on your ship. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Either use artifacts immediately or scrap them. When it comes to ore, sell or use it immediately. If your planning a major rebuild on your planet's infrastructure then wait till your ready to build before recieving your ore shipment so you can use the ore you need for the modules then sell the rest. One trick, especially if you found a nice juicy target you liked to leech off of, is to leave a small amount of dynite in your hold. This way if he raids you and loots it, it keeps him on your news page so you can retarget him the next day. Traps applied to your ship are great for this as well.
Most artifacts of real value you'll get in the lower levels that are worth the most are able to be used immediately, such as artifacts that increase crew/cargo/deck space, traps, etc. Traps for your ship and planets can and should be used right away, and also make great deterences against being disabled. Especially are the pacifier artifacts the make you immune to being attacked for long periods of time. Just think of artifact production as another form of income for a while. PvP style artifacts (artifacts that put an effect on another players ship or planet) can either get scrapped or send them to another player in your legion. They'll be happy to have it and they're more likely to come rescue your butt when you stir up a major hornets nest. Eventually though your going to want to start keeping some of the more valuable artifacts but thats fine too. Remember it takes a critical success to raid an artifact, and if you keep some junk one's in the pile, there's less of a chance he'll get the one you want to keep. Or, if you have a trustworthy leagion memeber, you can give it to them to hold on to for you. The ones that are worth the most, however, usually arn't tradeable.
In the long run, this is just the price you pay for advancing up the tech tree at a blitzkreige rate. If you don't like it, go be a miner. As you level this becomes somewhat less of a problem and you'll be able to keep more modules on your ship than just the standard compliment of jammers and cloaks. The first reaction of most would probably be to slap on heavy cannon, but I would highly advise against this. Any ship that's been dedicated to the art of woopass could care less about your cannons and will easily be able to absorb the damage and disable since your still not going to be able to get enough hulls sheilds, defense and heavy cannon on your ship along with cloaking and scanning. BUT, what you can do is make it more energy costly to take you down. by stacking a crap ton of defense, some sheilds and hulls, you'll make it cost a lot more energy to disable you which can be a major deterent in itself. Anyone that still is determined to take you out will probably still do it, but they won't be doing it for nearly as long, and blowing a lot of energy in the process. Of the three, I'd max out defense as much as possible since it reduces the amount of damage you take per hit. The merits of the other 2 have been debated in other posts and I'll let you take your pick.

HOW TO COUNTER A HACKER
This one is for all the non hackers out there that have found themselves in a hackers sites. First off, as a hacker, my target priority is going to be the highest level players I can target, whether they be on my battle screen, or from my news board. Congrats, you were one of them. Unless it's in retaliatoin for a slight against a legion member, I'm not picking on you specifically, your just a target of opportunity. There's a few ways you can get out of his sites, but which one you use depends on what kind of player is after you. The VERY first thing you need to do is to spend your research points. If he's not getting anything out of it then he will move on to another target. The next thing to do is you should try taking yourself off his radar by increasing your cloaking ability. If that doesn't work try increasing your scanning ability. The higher your scanning is the less likely he is able to hack you.
Whether or not this may work will depend on a few things. Look at his proffesion and rank and see what they are. Odds are if it says they're a hacker or spy, and they're level is much lower than yours this means they're a dedicated hacker and not just some schmo out for a few extra research points. If they're a dedicated hacker this may not work since most the bulk of their research tends to be into these two types of modules, and you can be guaranteed almost every deck they have on board is filled with one of these modules. The only advantage you have is that being a higher level than him, you probably have more deck space for more moduals. The only other thing you can do for the immediate recourse is using artifacts to trap or adjust his or your stats. Firewall traps that reduce cloaking are a hackers worst nightmare. Use an artifact that either lowers his cloaking or scanning or increases yours. If you don't have any see if you have some legion members that might be able to give you some. This is the best possible outcome for the immediate deterence. If they're a non- dedicated hacker, someone close or higher level than you, odds are they're just looking to gain a few extra research points and this will probably do the trick.
As a last ditch effort you can try turning around and try blasting their ship to smitherines and raid them. If your lucky you'll get a nice artifact or some ore to exchange for the research you unwittingly donated and he might very well get detered. However, if it's a dedicated hacker, this is the absolute WORSE thing you can do. Odds are, he's used to this and doesn't have anything on hand worth raiding, and ship repairs are laughable when your not stacking any hulls. Odds are he'll probably laugh at you, and you'll probably not get much of anything except a depleted energy bar, but the worse part, by disabling, raiding or hacking him, you just put yourself on his news board, meaning he can target you from there for the next 2 days. The more you do this, the longer he can target you. I had some level 72 twit dissable and hack me out of the blue 3 days ago. He's been paying for it ever since, as I just target him from my news board, and he perpetually disables me, putting him back on my news board.
If this fails go to plan B) which is prepare for the long haul.The normal advice for someone getting farmed is to level up some. However, in the case of being hacked, this is terrible advice, unless your absolutely certian the extra deck spaces will allow you to be able to equip enough modules to escape his radar, I HIGHLY advise against this. I'm allready looking for the highest target to hack and if this tactic fails, you just made yourself an even better target. Spend research quickly and often, he can't take it if you ain't got it. Otherwise there's not much you can do. Just wait it out for a couple days without hacking, or raiding him, and chances are pretty good he'll move on to another target. Either one will wanderaccrossed his screen or he'll level up himself and find better targets that way, wich is the best thing that can happen for you, or you'll drop off his news board if that's how he managed to target you. Trying to retaliate against a hacker is like trying to punch water, it doesn't realy do anything to the water and just gets you wet. And the next time you spend research points, consider putting some into your scanning tree.

Nicely thought out hacking FAQ. I commend you for putting in that much time and energy in typing that rather long post (by forum standards) and exposing the tricks of the hacking trade that you yourself do. Kudos.

I always thought it was a great way to bank research before level 20, when you lose planet protection. You lose the ability to use that energy to level and get more research planets though. It seems more justified when you re-invest the RP into energy research but it still might be less efficient in the long run. If you want to be strong for your level it would be a great idea. It's also great for antagonizing someone. If notifications become level-based, I can see hacking becoming much more popular.

I kind of want to start hacking again because I feel research-starved with the pacifist/resource strategy that I took up. I can't research planetary structures fast enough to get rid of my credits. The time it would take me to get the next tier would be more than enough time to have the credits to build them in almost every instance I can think of where I skip one or more tiers... probably because I'm not researching anything with ridiculous upkeep... except energy of course, which essentially pays for itself IMO. The extra levelling from not hacking only gets me more credits, which is something I don't want at the moment. Hacking might solve both of my 'problems'.

TY



I think it largely depends on your goals in the game to how valuable it will be.

If your goal is to level quickly then hacking isn't the way, as hacking someone doesn't offer exp and it takes longer for your energy to regen. Since hacking is largely energy unintensive, I find myself not envesting in energy as much as say an npc farming build or energy/quest build. However just by spending extra energy as I get it in between hacks I still find myself leveling along just fine, albeit at probably a slower rate. If your goal is to climb the research tree quickly then I think hacking is a good way to accomplish this. But if your goal is to level quickly then the standard energy build is better.

The built in balance between the two is by climbing the tech tree faster, I have access to better modules in more trees because I gain the research faster. The balance is since i'm not leveling as fast I don't have the deck space to equip as many modules. On the flip side, a fast leveling build will level quickly, allowing for a lot more decks, but it's research ability will have a harder time keeping up. So it might not have as good a modules to equip, but it will have more deck space to equip more of them. Which ever way you go though, in the end the extreme amount of research cost near the end of the tree will balance it out since it will take so long, even as a hacker, to get to the next teir of research it will allow your level to catch up. Whether hacking will trump gathering at the end is something i'll have to see when I get there.

As far as hacking vs your "pacifistic" research gathering, I think they both will remain about the same. I only gain the benefits from hacking as long as I'm logged on, but at least it gives me something to do when I'm logged on for more than 10 minutes to blow through an energy bar. On the flip side your resource gathering build still works even when your logged out, but like I said it's boring waiting for a recource bar to fill up every 5-8 hours. I think possibly though in the end the research build might trump hacking depending on how much the higher levels give when hacked, and the fact of the possibility of not being able to find higher level targets since they target pool has thinned out. Personally I think your at the point where they're fairly equal and you should probably be more concerned about playing what you enjoy vs which is gonna give you the mad rush to the end....just remember, once you've researched all the trees, all those research planets you have are gonna become dead weight.

really, nobody can expect to be the level leader without spending big bucks, but lets just say there are some individuals that I intend to catch up with (or at least be more competitive against) and I don't intend to be a pacifist forever. Somehow hacking is finding itself into my my plan because I don't really intend to research planetary structures for the rest of my life.

I sort of started doing a 4 tier energy research push that took 2 weeks and then realized I'm going to have to research planetary structures for a VERY long time if I want to get rid of my credits and not rebuild every single tier. The extra RP production in the end should make catching up on module research a breeze compared to where I would have been. You're right though, what I'm trying to do is quite boring. IMO I'm not actually valuing the "fun" factor of the game nearly enough. I have patience and a vendetta though and I'm hoping it will be more fun in the end when I am more competitive.

You say: "The main goal of a hacker is to quickly advance down the research tree far beyond what normal production would allow for someone of a comperable level".

That's probably true for low levels, but dude it's been a long time that research points stolen from hack are dusts in desert' sands for me. Stolen RP from hack over an hour barely represent 3% of my hourly RP production. That's not what I call "quickly advancing down the research tree".

The main goal for a hacker is to steal a planet location from a player. That's why a good hacker is first a good forum reader and write down the names of the fools who bragged about having a nice Exotic or Dyson planet.

You could hack PSIcore for up to 830 RP a pop... if it were possible. He's a nice guy and everything, but I'm guessing the CCers have some nice planets aside from a dyson or 2. I've seen 4-5 people on here say they had dysons, before project collosus was introduced, that are probably pretty hackable.

cough*coth*cough... wait that sounded like normal coughing.

All the big boys have hack trap on them. Since I complained already alot about the absolutely pointless 8H penalty that kills all hacking at high lvl and nothing was changed ... I don't see why I would go hack them.


I hacked PSI Core a while ago, got 8H penalty and numerous attacks + artifacts sent on my face.

Question: Is it really worth it to hack a big boy every 8H and suffer 0 cloak penalty when 1/4 of your ship is equipped with cloak modules + suffer the massive retaliation ? I doubt it is.

Especially that after having done 600 succesful hack, the critical rate I found was at around 2.5% ... So I need to hack 40 times to get that critical that will probably end up in a crap planet.

40 x 8H = 320H = 13.3 days ... Useless.

Everyone has hack traps and they are really annoying. I think Dan has been tinkering with the odds of getting certain artifacts though. I think the real question might be "How many hack traps can the 'big boys' really produce in 13.3 days?" 40? Well probably. Obviously the retaliation would outweigh the benefits unless you latched on to the same person for months, even then their planets probably aren't better enough to justify the trouble... Thats actually sad.

I think everyone wants hacking to have some kind of buff. With how annoying people think it is to get hacked, it could probably give a small amount of XP to be slightly more viable at any level without penalizing the victim any further. Like 2-7 xp or something.

I thought it might be a good idea for the hack timer to be for defense as opposed to offense. You could hack all you want but not be hacked more than once every 25 minutes. I'm 90% sure that would eliminate all the possible targets though. It would definitely sweep the game of those ridiculous traps though.

If it could be worse for the defender there are a LOT of ways it could be buffed.

I personally think that, after attempting a hack, what the hacked learns about the hacker should be based on their scan vs. your cloak, plus a random element (die roll). For example, if their scan in fairly low, and your cloak is fairly high, they might only get a message that says "Someone hacked 67 research from your database." If their scan was pretty high, and your cloak was low, THEN they'd get the message "tk3 has hacked 113 research points from you." Essentially, it would be a second hack roll, with the result determining what they learn about the hacker.

Critical Fail - They learn your name, and you can't hack again for 2 hours (instead of the usual 25 minutes)
Fail - They learn your name
Success - They only discover that they're missing research/data
Critical Success - They only discover that they're missing research/data, and your hack timer is set to 5 minutes

@ Zhorgul

I agree with you and pretty much expected this. As it stands now, by hacking people in their mid 70s I can get up to 130 research per hack, and you figure I average getting 100. Thats an extra 200 per hour. That's still doubling my research per hour. Even if I went with beinga a vygoid i'd only be pulling in an extra 24 research per hour versus a possible 260+ with hacking (but thats the extreme end). Of course that extra 24 per hour is always being accumulated even when I'm logged off which helps make up for the fact that hacking only works when your logged on. But as you level I pretty much expected the production of planets to more than overcome what you can pull in with hacking. As for hacking for planets though, you don't realy need to be a hacker (i.e. have hacking proffesion) to do this as I don't beleieve the bonus applys to getting critical hacks. Eventually it comes to the point I think it would be more productive to change your class and proffession to something else. Personally I think they just need to reduce the time of those firewall traps. No trap reduces your attack/pacifies you for that long, but as a hacker getting nocked out for 8 hours effectively puts you out of commission for an entire day. If traps are as common as you say it is then hacking at the end game pretty much becomes a dead proff.

Edit: I guess the point I'm trying to make is, if your looking to be a productive hacker, it realy only pays off if it's something you plan on doing on a very consistent basis, literally every 25 minutes your logged on. This of course means devoting the vast majority of your deck space to cloakers and scanners, not alllowing you to do much else other than quests. Once that becomes inefficient, then hacking becomes much more worthless and it's time to change your proffesion

you forget also the fact that the hack trap penalty makes you a good target for hacking since at 0 cloaking your counter hack ability is at minimum ...

Nope I didn't forget it, in fact I used that tactic on a guy the other night. As for making you a target for hacking, not realy. His ability to hack me is based on my scan vs. his cloak. All you have to do is swap out your cloaking moduals for scanning moduals and this will boost your ability to counter his attempts to hack you. What it does do is shuts your ability to hack down for 8 hours. Basically it means you unequip those cloakers instal your energy moduals and go do missions for the night .

It's 2 hours now.. It's nothing now..

No thats still something, its just not nearly as bad.

It's usually enough time for me to put another Quantum Firewall up since I check it periodically at work, usually they assume if you don't retaliate you're offline and they want to get some RP out of you for the trouble of the first Quantum Firewall
Of course, I do the same for raiders as well, trap 'em into figuring it's not worth the trouble.

If hacking gave experience, I'd be all over it tho.

Actuarially it can go i there way for a hack and counter hack, Example from when i was rank 27: my scanning ability is only at 6 compared to my cloak which was 104, and when some person tried to hack me i got a counter hack for 44. After reading The Art of the Hacker: How to be a successful hacker in GL, I now target higher rank people then me do to the higher payout, thanks to silentknight. When it comes to picking a profession, pick the one that best fits you, for me its a Spy, cuz for a successful Hack you need better cloaking and scanning.

Why didn't you pick "hacker" as your profession?

30% extra hacking (available for Aerlen, Human, and Vygoid)


Its only use when doing the hacking.. .spy give you bonus to the stat... Helps you when your not hacking...

cuz i said pick the profession that bests fits you, or a profession that you might like, i picked spy because i like the whole stealth striking thing, 1 of four things you need to get a successful hack is cloak.