Hack Hacks Hacking

Revision as of 07:18, 13 June 2017

A Combat Action against another player.

• Cost: 5 energy
• Cool Down on Success: 15 minutes
• Cool Down on Failure (or Success while they have no research points to steal): 5 minutes
• Not available against NPCs
• Ability to hack is based on Cloak
• Success is based on Cloak and Scan
• Defense is based on Cloak and Scan
• Does not require enemy ship to be disabled
• Allows the theft of research and on rare occasions planet locations

The following potential outcomes are confirmed by the game developer:

Critical Success: You will steal the location of a planet in the enemy ship's database
Success: You will steal some research points from the enemy ship
Unsuccessful: No research points awarded
Failure: Enemy ship will counter-hack and steal research from your ship
Critical Failure: Enemy ship will counter-hack and steal the location of one of your planets

It should be noted that Critical Successes and Failures are both rare events.

There is also a "zero success": when you succeed in hacking a player who has no research points to steal, you receive a blue badge, but the cool-down timer is set to just 5 minutes and your "Successful Hacks" stat is not incremented.

Later in that Hacking topic, Spyder outlined his theory:

There are 2 "rolls" for hacking - success and effect.

The success roll is Your Cloak VS their Scan. This determines who "wins" the hack.

The effect roll is Your scan VS their cloak (IE them hiding their data). A higher scan:cloak ratio will yield more RP, and will increase the crit % by a certain amount, up to X% (I'd guess somewhere between 1 and 5 %)

However, if you "lose" the success roll, they auto hack you back. This is now their cloak VS your scan to see if they succeed, and if they do, their scan VS your cloak for the effect roll.

but this is countered by an earlier post by the dev:

Success and Failure rolls are indeed "re-rolled" for critical chance.

See Also: Raiding