Can we hack the CrimeStat for someone else [as a hacker for hire]?

We desperately wanted to do this for 3.8, but then SOCS came along and spoiled a lot of fun. In 3.7, we could have done this, because everyone's on their own server, there are 50 players in it, and we could just say, show all the names of these 50 players, and you get to choose, okay, this guy, and I'm going to get rid of this crime for him. But when we're talking about a meshed server where everyone's together, it gets a lot more complicated. Right now, their CrimeStat and all their infractions are carried on them when they're loaded in, and when they're out, you can't get hold of that very easily. So we'd have to be able to ask the back end...

It's a persistence issue.

Yeah, update his persistence when he's not in the game, which is more difficult. And obviously there's also the UI; you'd have to actually search for people's names because there'd be that many. But yes, we totally want to do this, and you'll find that in the new hacking database all the individual crimes are listed, which is really cool. And you have to hack each one individually. And depending on the reliability of your card, you may get caught halfway through. Basically, you're not supposed to, as someone who works on the criminal database, go through and delete too many things, because then it starts to flag: this is an unusual load of things you're deleting here. So now it's all about, okay, I'll pick the worst, I'll get rid of that murder, and maybe I'll leave these fines, because the fines will be on there as well. So you get to pick and choose. And what's great about that is that you don't just wipe the entire CrimeStat and it's gone. It's, again, an economy. So this card that you've paid 8,000 UEC for is not just a ticket to freedom. It's a ticket to get your crimes down, but you may get caught and shut out of the system and have to use another one.

And for folks who are taking what Luke said and extrapolating from that, SOCS, or Server Object Container Streaming, is being worked on right now. What Luke was saying is not that SOCS is coming with 3.8. He's saying that because we're working on it right now, you don't want to build a system that you know is going to break whenever it does. You want to wait until that comes in and then work within the confines of that new system. SOCS is a wonderful thing that will solve many issues, but it will also create many issues.

It really has as well. We are having to redesign and maybe even say this mission in the state it's in cannot be done now. We have to change it quite considerably. So we are going back to the drawing board sometimes on missions because of the way that SOCS works. These things stream out. Right now, we have a universe that is always streamed in, and that's why we've been unable to add the content we wanted, because it just runs out of memory. But now these things disappear. We can't send you to them because they're gone.