I propose an etiquette for players that follow the Hacker path and for people that want to go after the people that stole their RP. My proposal follows a pattern that I already see from my experiences and by using common sense with a pinch of altruism.

Hackers build their ships around cloak and scan and target higher level players. This naturally puts them in a tough spot to defend themselves from being disabled in retaliation. Its expensive to constantly switch between hacking and defense and even if they have kept up with researching defense (which they probably have not by putting it in cloak and scan) the higher level players can easily overcome them. Most hackers realize its an uphill battle to keep their reputation above Balanced or they just become apathetic towards that stat. In essence, they are almost always an easy kill.

On the flip side of player paths, most tend to follow attack or a defense/energy path and thus are vulnerable to being hacked. I am nearing 300 hacks and I am pretty sure I have only failed half a dozen times.

So the Quid Pro Quo should be obvious to even the most casual observer. I get your Research Points with a hack stat and you get a player kill and a better Rep for low amounts of energy and cost.

So this is my proposal: ONE HACK, ONE KILL.

Someone that I hack usually stays on my battle tab for a while with chances of hacking him over and over. But I follow the code and spread my hacking love to all ten players in the tabs (by the time I get around the sixth player there is always a fresh player anyway). Most of the time I do not get retaliated against either from inactivity or they don't care because, come on, its only a hundred to two hundred RP and it was only one hack. Even if I get a REALLY juicy score I only hit him once. Usually if someone I recognize from a past hack shows up on my tabs again, I pass over him... usually. Plus its a challenge to hack as many different people as I can. I know I can Hack you so why do it again?

As I am leveling up I am running into more and more active players and retaliations. 9/10 times I am disabled ONCE and that is the end of story. By now I had believed the Code of One Hack, One Kill was already an unsaid honor system. However I am also running into players that will attack me several times. Either they are greedy for an easy kill or are delusional and think that if they disable me several times I will say ten Hail Mary's and give up my sinful lifestyle. I NEVER alert my legion to a hack retaliation because ..well they would probably get sick of it and a dedicated Hacker knows what he is getting himself into. So if you have been hacked only once, don't upset the balance. Do you want to scare more people away from being Hackers and the easy kills? Is 150 RP not worth a relatively easy kill?


For Hackers that are going for max amount of research per hack and suck on one player all day, feel free to mess them up over and over. Don't feel too bad for them, they know its coming.


Hopefully this changes some perceptions that Hackers are bloodsucking lowlifes that need to be sent back to Mexico. So ya, follow the code you overzealous Cretan. The only better alternative I can think of is to let the Hackers do they're thing and not attack them.

Smeriously.





Also, if you want to know more what it means to be a hacker, SilentKnight wrote an amazing post called The Art of the Hacker: How to be a successful Hacker in GL here in the forums.

Yeah, that sounds good. I'm always calling for not alerting and mass-attacking people for just one thing; I think some people just let things get out of hand making a big deal over nothing. I usually go with your way; just one disable, though probably on raid with it, but then just leave it alone.

First, thank you for an excellent post. I like respectful bloggers and you are helping people with matters of etiquette. However, I find myself in disagreement. I am not sure how much you hack or what other hackers you talk to for verification, but one of your assumptions is way off the mark.

For example, you state, "Most hackers realize its an uphill battle to keep their reputation above Balanced or they just become apathetic towards that stat. In essence, they are almost always an easy kill." This has never been my experience. My battle reputation is Insane and folks who have fought me will tell you I am very hard to kill.
Battles 4017 (Champion)
Player Kills 413
Deaths from Players 7 (one was pre-rank 10, another was from my attack and hitting an Omine!)

I suppose it depends on what you invest those stolen points into. I immediately developed my hulls and shields. I fully expected the return fire, so I built a ship to take the hits. I do like what you said about not alerting people you hack. I started it, so I can finish it. I also agree with you about hacking the whole battle tab. I tend to cycle through about 2 times before mine actually refreshes; course then again, I am using time manipulators!
Currently the leaderboard is simply a reflection of the number of hacks. It would be neat to see who has hacked the most raw research. It mostlikely is Iron, but it could be players with fewer attempts but larger targets. Just wondering, what legion flag do you fly?

In summary, I think your one hack, one hit proposal is sound. However, don't sell hackers short. We know how to fight too. You might get more than you bargin for when you follow that link back looking for an easy score. (Hum, that might have been Nietszche's trap all along! LOL)

Your correct Jugger on what you say, but being able to be a "tough" hacker actually takes time. I touched on this in my guide. In the lower levels you are correct, you're going to be weak because you just can't fit it all onto your ship. Build your ship up as fast as you can. Put everything into decks. I would suggest going with an artifact heavy build. Your hacking will help supplement your research income and you can get by with very few mining planets for a long long time, as long as the few you pick are good. Once you build your ship up, you want to put as much hull and defense defense defense as you can get on it. Hull mods will be easy, they don't take up much room, although they cost a lot to research. Defense mods however are some of the biggest mods you can put on your ship, just as big as cloak and scanners are, and your already stacking plenty of those. They are, however, the most important. The idea is to make it cost as much energy as you can to take you out. Defense is key to this. People get rather discoraged when they have 2k attack and only hit you for 50 points of damage. (might i suggest Aerlene) This forces them to spend quite a bit on energy to take you out. Forget shields for a long while, they also take up a lot of room and don't give nearly as many hitpoints as hull does, just research a higher teir of hull. This is why decks become so important. If they don't run out of energy or just give up from the energy cost, they won't be able to take you down as often because each dissable will be costing them a bucket load of energy. Eventually, like you said, they'll realize it's just not worth it and move on to squishier targets.

I fully agree the 1 hack 1 kill rule, and I have practiced it myself. However, from my higher cloaking on my ship I could say the best rebuttal to a hack is to hack a higher amount of research back!

I agree with 1 kill or 1 hack in retaliation for getting hacked. But when the hacker keeps coming back over and over, then the gloves come off and they get punished a bit more harshly.

The only time I can remember going crazy performing hacks on somebody was a few weeks ago. He apparently scanned one of my better planets, invaded it while I was offline and threw an Aegis on it. Now taking back the planet was no problem after the Aegis wore off (at least he didn't flux it) but he was on my news feed for 2 days so he lived at zeros for that long. No Aegis, I would have just disabled him once and reconquered the planet, but I felt I should get some compensation for the 5 days of lost production.

Well the intense counterattack was for the stealing of a planet, which I would say everyone would agree with you on that.

SK, you wrote the guide that got me started, so I have tons of respect for your thoughts. However, when you say, "takes time to be a tough hacker," could you please explain more? If you mean time as in, months of game play, I am not so sure that is correct. If you mean time, as in hours of sitting in front of the computer or coming back every 15 minutes like clock work to hack someone, then I agree. Again, I immediately dumped all research into hulls. Even at low ranks, my targets had to make the energy cost/ choice you mentioned. One final thought, for you would be hackers out there, I have hacked more planets than I have scanned! But, I have invaded only one of them so far. There are several juicy ones for me yet to conqure. In that, I have taken my time and planned my attacks... and yes, I flux as soon as I capture.

I mean time as in size of ship. This does not always equate into rank. Granted a large portion of your decks will come from rank points, and depending on how you have your resourses budgeted, mabye almost all, but as it stands currently, I'm only getting half my decks from rank points. The other half are comming from artifacts. This average has increased over time naturally, and eventually i'll be getting all my decks from artifacts, although I'm probably at least a good 100 ranks away from that happening. Currently I'm rank 144 at goliath with 1167 decks. Now assuming you follow the 5 decks per rank rule I should be at 720 decks. So 447 decks, or an overall average of 38% of my decks have come from artifacts. (Actually it's a bit more since I spent the first 10 levels into crew, and did 4 decks 1 cargo till my mid 40s) Naturally this hasnt been a steady throughout my ranking, but it increases as I rank up and colonize more and more artifact production planets. Currently i'm getting about 10.5 decks per rank. I hit Titan at 102, goliath at 133. That's 350 decks in 31 ranks, or 11.2 decks per rank. So as you can see, I'm getting more decks from artifacts now than I was when I was in my 70's.

When I say having a "tough" ship, I'm refering to how much hull shield and defense your ship has. Don't bother with shields till everything else is stacked on your boat. This leaves hull and defense. The reason I suggest building decks is because as a hacker your already having to focus on 2 of the 3 largets mods in the game you can stick on your boat, scanners and cloakers. If you want to be a tough hacker, your now adding in the 3rd largest mod, defense mods. Maxing out hull is great, but hull (and evenutally shields) alone, does not make you tough. I smile every time I start hitting someone and i'm smacking them for 350-400 damage a hit. I know it's gonna be an easy and cheap kill. Everyone pretty much has the same amount of hull. Almost everyone quickly maxes out alll 5 hulls and the only difference ranking up is which tech level of hull they have equiped, at end game, everyone has the same end teir hull, so you don't gain anything here. Where you can excell is in the amount of your defense. THis is what makes your ship tough. By making them do less damage, your forcing them to spend more energy. Make them spend enough, and they'll stop coming after you pretty quick, either because they don't want to spend it, or they ran out of it. Forgo weapons. Only buid weapons when you want to farm mobs. Besides attack does nothing to deter an attacker, even if they do take more damage than you, all they do is repair and come back to finish you off.

I am definitely in the painful growing stages of a hacker where my three scanners are taking over half my deck space. I had put most of my planets towards research and had not thought about an artifact build to speed up my deck space. I might switch to it but i have a few research goals that i want to reach first.

After reading your guys' post, I think I have made a mistake that a few beginning hackers might make that puts them in the position I am in of being an easy kill. I put ALOT of research towards cloak and scan WAY past where i needed it to be for my level. No one around my level (level 75, Legion Delta V2) can defend against 700 cloak/scan let alone my 1.9k cloak/scan when i am fully modded. So I went overboard on it when i should have been balancing it out with defense.

I am glad to see alot of higher level players that have continued to be hackers because well... I dont see ANY around my level. In my legion the most hacks ive seen is 50 and that was just to unlock missions. Even players that are thirty levels higher than me that are hacker professions have around a quarter of my total hacks. Kinda sad ... but kinda cool at the same time. I enjoy the fact that I have picked a more challenging way to play this game.

Actually I converted from hacking to full on combat somewhere in my 40s, although there are some very dedicated high ranking hackers in my legion. Hacking is kind of a tough proffession to accomplish. In the lower levels it leaves you weak, but you can switch from hacking to combat fairly easily. In the mid to high ranks this is much less effective, selling and buying 8 guns/hacking/scan mods will run you 100's of millions, and eventually, billions of creds. So it kinda forces you to pick your disease and stick with it. At end game hacking rather becomes a lame duck. Final tier scanners already gave more scan than final teir cloakers did, and now there's an extra teir of scan. You can equip 5 of your best scanners on you boat, where as you can only equip 4 cloaking mods, 2 of which can only be from a lower tech teir. There's more mods that give scan than there are those that give cloak, and some of the dropped scanning mods give way more scan than any dropped cloaks do. So eventually what happens is end game ships are running around with a lot more scan then you can get cloak. Meaning the only way you can hack them is with a positron clouder.

Hacking module research order: Hulls, Cloak, Hulls, Scan, Hulls, Defense, Hulls... I threw in some weapons but only because I wanted to represent the battle rank. I wanted to hack and I didn't want to appear weak. Most regular research goes into Energy of course and some Construction.

Yeah I didn't research energy as aggressively back when I was hacking because it didn't require it. It only costs 5 energy to hack, but back then the timer was 25 minutes instead of the 15 we have today, so energy regening faster than the 10/hr you could spend it was never a problem. Missions were the way to go for exp since your energy and gun research was probably not quite up to par. Thankfully now days the quantum traps are only 2 hours instead of the 8 they used to be.

wow, so i guess some people really disagree with the one hack, one kill thing. I hacked a guy from Battlestar Galactica and he posted me. After getting disabled by 4 of their players i started telling them that their legion was looking dumb for being so dam petty. That just made it worse, lol. I think people getting posted for small crap really messes up pVp. Every time you get into it you always have to worry about it turning it into a big legion conflict. dumb.

well I was once a hacking addict ,and I say forget this code
I would work the battle tab hit each person I could once if i couldn't hack them I took it as a personal challenge to up my cloak and scan at the top of the hour I would go back thru battle tab and hack them all again ,
why the top of the hr well because right after I get my rp so have they and it makes for a potentially juicier target .
the people you hack nine times out of ten are either not going to retaliate or they will excesively anyways so you might as well get them for all there worth .

If you hack me I'll slam ya a few times, just to make sure you get the idea. God help you if you attack back or alert me, it's on then.

SilentKnight, have you missed the whole point of my post?

There is NO POINT to be made for attacking over and over again. The only thing I "get" when someone comes after over and over again is that the person is immature. Its like Kim Jong-il being crazy and stupid so people are wary of him, and then he thinks HE's a Badass because everyone is "scared" when in reality he is just stupid and crazy. Unless its a full on pvp fight going after someone over and over again is dumb. What is a hack to people? Nothing. Its dumbs and a waste of everyones time to retaliate more than you have to.

The worst part is I can tell when its someone that thinks they need to prove a point by comeing after me over and over again. Grow up people. its a numbers game, thats all it is. Nothing personal. No "lessons" are being taught here. See: My Cloak > Your scan; You get hacked. Your Level and guns > My level and guns; I get disabled. Math. Logic. What do you prove by doing anything else?

My annoyance is not with having to spend money on repairing, my annoyance is with stupid people that are reactionary.

Yes I understood your post just fine. What part of "your not allowed to steal my research" don't you get? You #$&*@ about getting dissabled, raided and counterhacked because you hack someone one time is like the thug clocking some store attendent over the head and running out with the money in the register and then #$&*@ at the cops because 6 of them showed up with a dog and helicopter and saying it was only 50 bucks. If you don't like the payback, then don't do it.

I say the best strategy to being a good hacker is to find the right targets. the only ones I ever hack are legion alerts, those without a legion, or those in a legion who has no members who can beat through 20 of my traps.

Not really; this is a game, and one hack makes no difference.