Just now I got a result from a routine suggesting that I am getting better at philosophy. Maybe this is just some feedback from the game telling me than an otherwise-invisible counter has inched up a notch. Or maybe it's telling me that I'm on the way to a new skill. In any case, I was excited and did a furious bout of hacking to see if I could find some more philosophy sites. This, in turn, reminded me of something I have remarked on frequently as I've been playing around with Novos and have seen other people mention in chat as well: how difficult it is to find a specific result in Novos. (Cyberbowl promo code unlock, I'm looking at you.)
The sheer amount of new content that came with the latest phase of the Novos rollout is really impressive, and there is a ton of neat stuff in there. But this scope and variety is a double-edged sword if you are looking for something specific. Right now we mostly have Blog-type sites available, which were pretty varied in Oldos too. Their names didn't generally allow you to distinguish between a poetry blog, a science blog, or a survivalist blog without going in and looking at what was on there, which was true then and is true now. But there are some features of Novos that I think are worth mentioning:
- Unlike Oldos, you can't find out what kind of site you're dealing with and then change your equipment or program loadout and come back.
- Unless the mechanism has changed, this makes jotting notes on your satirical poetry a lot harder, or at least a lot more of a sacrifice, than it used to be. Before you could see as site was a poetry site, log out, equip your satirical poetry, and log back in. Now you'd have to do a bunch of hacking with the poetry equipped, losing out on the Memory from an expanded handheld in hopes that you will stumble across a poetry site. (I would, humbly, like to suggest that if particular bits of equipment interact with a particular Novos result, that you give serious consideration to letting it work "passively" from your inventory, even if you don't have it equipped. This is the way formatted memory cores (admittedly, these are not equipment) do now on sites that can give you neural recordings.)
- If you want to do something specific in a given site if you find it, it's harder to tailor your program loadout to that action, since you have a lot less control over what kind of site you'll find when.
- You can only read a given site's Posting Archive once a day. So if you read the Posting Archive to ascertain what kind of site you have, then even if you find the site again that day you can't go back and read more.
- Finding a site of the kind you want, then getting a link to it again and leaving it there so you can come back to it the next day is risky, because the site is quite likely to get deleted in the meantime.
If there are skills for, say, reading a whole lot of philosophy, or reading a critique on a music theory blog while listening to each of X different kinds of music, it seems right now like it will take either incredible luck or many days (weeks?) of dedicated hacking to get them. I want to make it clear that I'm not saying all of this to whine. Some things are hard to get by design. Also, we don't have all the design yet! I just want to point out what things look like from (one section of) the trenches. Here are some things I think it's worth bearing in mind to keep feedback constructive:
- We don't have all the pieces of the Novos puzzle yet.
- The wider Net is still all-Oldos, and at least in Oldos, Net sites generally had more descriptive names and fewer sub-types, making it easier to seek out particular types of content.
- There may well be programs, search tools, website types (link aggregators?) etc. in the pipeline that will make searching for a particular kind of site easier.
- The hacking resources we have right now are relatively primitive. We haven't gotten our hands on the Novos equivalent of the advanced interpreter or Efficient Hacking yet. We're still playing around with the low-tier stuff.
- Restrictions about only being able to read a site once/day, etc. were put there with the express intention of making it harder for us to make the game unfun for ourselves.
- If you are really serious about looking for something, you can keep records. I hope this content isn't designed with the expectation that you'd keep detailed out-of-game records about the content of every individual site, but, well, this is a wiki, and it's something that we could make an effort to track once we get a bit clearer about what the different categories of sites are.