NEWS PATCH: Darknet Operations Burst Pricing

PATCH: DARKNET OPERATIONS BURST PRICING

Running operations back to back now costs more each time. Your first three every hour are unchanged, and the price falls back on its own. This is aimed at one specific thing: somebody sitting on a single target and firing until something lands.

WHAT WAS WRONG

• The cooldown bypass had no limit. Once you were on cooldown you could pay the fee and attack again immediately, as many times as you liked. The fee never went up and the cooldown never moved.
• That made success rates meaningless. A 10% chance stops being a defence when the attacker can take forty swings in an evening. Maxing out your DDOS mitigation and Firewall bought you nothing against somebody who simply kept paying.
• It was not a bug being abused. Nobody broke anything. The rules just allowed it, so this is a balance change rather than a ban.

HOW BURST PRICING WORKS

• Your first 3 operations each hour cost the base fee. Hacks and DDoS count together.
• After that the bypass fee climbs by half the base fee per operation:
  • 4th operation · 1.5x · 0.75 NVC
  • 5th operation · 2x · 1.00 NVC
  • 7th operation · 3x · 1.50 NVC
  • 9th and beyond · 4x · 2.00 NVC
• It is capped at 4x. The point is to slow a spree down, not to price you out of the game entirely.
• It is a rolling hour. Nothing resets at a fixed time. As your older operations pass the one hour mark the fee drops back on its own.
• Your free attack is still free and the Phantom Bypass skill still discounts the base fee before the multiplier is applied.

WHAT YOU WILL SEE

• The Operations terminal tells you where you stand, either at the base rate or at your current multiplier with the number of operations behind it.
• The HACK and DDoS buttons show the real price before you click anything.
• The confirmation screen shows it again along with a short explanation of why it is higher.

IF YOU ARE ON THE RECEIVING END

• A successful DDoS still shields you for 3 hours, plus an hour for every level of the Guardian Fortify skill. That part has not changed.
• Antivirus and the Guardian tree matter more now. Every level cuts the attacker's chance by 5%, and with fewer affordable swings per hour that reduction actually holds.

ALSO IN THIS PATCH

• Friend requests now show on the Vault Chat launcher. A pending request used to be visible only after opening the dock and looking at the Requests tab.
• The Add friend button no longer locks up. After sending a request it stayed unclickable until you reloaded the page, so you could not cancel it.

 

[WzerW]

Not sure how I feel about this change. I am one of the higher-ranking miners and hackers and never, not even once have I bypassed the cooldown. Why? .5 NVC was and is too rich for me. Even with it down with skills to .35 NVC is STILL too much for such an operation where you might have 10% chance to get back almost nothing in almost all cases.

I don't know who the high roller was who was spending large amounts of NVC just to troll other miners, but that's a new level of stupid IMO.

 

[WzerW]

Additionally, this still does not solve the problem with ddos attacks on players with multiple levels or redundancy. In fact, you just made it even more impossible.

 

[t0r]

Additionally, this still does not solve the problem with ddos attacks on players with multiple levels or redundancy. In fact, you just made it even more impossible.

And what is the problem?

 

[WzerW]

And what is the problem?

I have explained it a few times.

If you have even redundancy at 1 and someone hits you, you have 1 rig going and you are protected for 3 hours from any more attacks. The chance of you getting hit again after 3 hours and you not turning on more rigs if fairly low. If you have 10 rigs and redundancy at 3, the chances are near impossible to get you 100% offline. Before long the top 10 online times will be all people with redundancy 1-3 until the website shits the bed again, that seems to reset it everytime.