Device Destroy
The real achievement...

First, my idea is to lower the skill requirements for most existing programming commands, allowing newer deckers to get into the skill set earlier.

Second, make the most powerful possible command allow a decker to destroy a Term.

I love that. Maybe a trigger of like, when a specific Device ID accesses a specific node, trigger.

Or maybe instead of a command that is run, it's a cybernetic that does that.

I'm not likely to implement destroying a deck entirely. This has been discussed elsewhere, but like, any time we implement something that destroys a high value item it leads to major complaints and people not using the system.

Take drug rigs that can blow up. We had to dramatically scale this back over the years because people just didn't want to risk a lot of money.

Decks are expensive, and a lot of time goes into them. Do you really want to log into the game and find out that someone blew your deck and months or work up while you were offline, for the lulz?

It's not a good gameplay loop. I'm all for consequences, but the approach I've taken with the grid is that deckers can have real, but mostly temporary impact.

It's the same reason you can't delete someone's node backups. That just creates more actual work for the player behind the screen who put a ton of effort into creating a node only to have some decker come along and delete it all for funsies.

Think about it in terms of temporary but real impact, and not about punishing people forever with limited constraints.

Another example is stealing cars. Before we had expensive kits to allow you to steal a car, someone stole almost every car in the game overnight.

Was it fun for them? Probably. Was it allowed in the rules and code? Yes. Was it fun for everyone else? No.

(Edited by Slither at 8:33 am on 8/11/2026)

I would be very against lowering skill thresholds for commands. The work available to deckers is already scant due, I think, to issues with player culture and the way people view deckers and the grid. If it was much easier to access higher level programs I feel the situation would be worse as more people would just chip it rather than engage in RP with deckers. You see this already happening with other similar skills (electro, secure, etc.).

Maybe instead of destroying it you could temporarily fry/disable it? Perhaps needing it to get repaired?

New characters are just as able to utilize skillsofts as older ones. If you can't afford one, you can get a loan and engage in further RP. And there are other ways to engage in a character concept without being a master at the relevant skills.

(Edited by zxq at 12:27 pm on 8/11/2026)

While I like this idea in theory, at the moment there's only really one group getting device references for other gridterms (due to the, frankly, silly level of a skill you need for daemon backtraces) and this would 100% just result in said group going "lol eat shit kid" the second you trigger a certain rather low threshold

(Edited by Baguette at 4:54 pm on 8/11/2026)