Okay this is a new page after roughly a year away, time to see if I can explain some things. As usual this is my opinion and thus not meant to challenge anything, use it or don't, your choice. Really all I wanna do is make you think. Some of this will rehash things, and some of it will be original, since I've not really thought about this for a year I can't really say how much will be of each type. But mainly this is a response to more and more articles in the Chrome books and from online sources.
July 1st, 1999
This is one of those areas where in real world terms the Cyberpunk 2020 rules fall flat. The best we are given is a geographical based reference system based on each local node. This would work fine assuming the net is virtually devoid of human activity, and that patently is absurd. Realistically Corporations should spend millions if not billions on their Datafortress networks to allow virtually unlimited and unceasing contact between branches. The Net serves to link each aspect of a company as one whole organism rather than several separate entities. This alone would see an abundance of user traffic. (Of course if all we ever care about is the few Corporate Datafortresses and some public sites sure the old system works...but that's dull)
And lets look at today's Internet for a second. The highest trading stocks in North America on the day this was written are all Net based companies, millions upon millions of users are going online to order everything from books to stocks. The Net is growing at an exponential rate, doubling each year adding hundreds of thousands of sites a day. This is not too likely to change in the next 20 years. The Net will be teaming with life. The addition of proven virtual reality technology in a cheap affordable format will make online life even more common. Entire new Net based industries will develop just to deal with the needs of a virtual public. Look at some of the ideas in the Virtuality Source book "Virtual Front" for Cybergeneration. Its riddled with the same errors of function that Cyberpunk 2020 is, but it has some very interesting concepts.
So why does a geographical based reference system not work? The problem is sheer number of users. You could use that system to reflect only the corporate user datafortresses in a given city, but Cyberpunk 2020 never even mentions the casual users who fill virtual space. In today's net we use a binary code system to numbers to keep track of the meriad sites, and even that's not enough, soon its thought we'll move to a hexidecimal based code system to allow for a virtually unlimited number of site addresses. And while this may be a dig at a fellow Netwriter, addresses in Cyberpunk 2020 are not LDL's, LDL's are something else entirely.
But what can we do? Well here's where I admit I'm stumped. I can see the problem, but I can't really provide a detailed answer. I can provide one that most Net user's will be familiar with, and its a nifty GM answer to boot.
So what does this mean to players, well they have to use their library skills to find pages, making skill checks to narrow the fields. Not all searches are gonna result in a hit. The Net is so crowded that they can't just float about finding the needed locations. Though the floating about could be useful for finding unexpected things.
Unfortunately this is one of the areas where Cyberpunk messes up the Net idea the most. Okay we'll just drill this into your head one more time.
I don't know where this idea came from, I know its been embraced by a wide range of Netwriters who think its original and effective. But please people, its stupid. Why should we have to cut the realism to allow a simple idea when we can make the realism far more exciting without a great deal of effort. Its a case of shoddy writing, its too hard to find the realism so skip it.
Hold on and soon enough I'll begin explaining what I mean by realism playing its part in making the game that much better. But for now its another article.
Okay this is another area where things have gone over board, especially from online writers. The first batch of official anti-personel ICE worked on tricking the target's heart into failing. I think I explained this concept fairly well in an earlier article. But since then a wide range of programs have been designed that do hit point damage to the netrunner hit by them, and most don't even bother trying to explain how they work. Or at best we get a very short comment about high voltage electricity through the Net. But everyone overlooks things and forgets the Net runs mainly on fiber optics which do not, and cannot carry electrical charges. Worse the majority of Netrunners use portable cybermodems which can't carry enough power to cause the damage the program is designed to.
Okay LDL's will always annoy me. They can't be done the way Cyberpunk 2020 tries to explain them, the cost would be far to expensive, and they never really explain why the public can use them to...weird.
Over time I'll return to this page and add more things that have frustrated the hell out of me over the past weeks of thinking about the subject. And of course I'm working on more functional articles to explain it all.