Warborn,
Maybe my understanding of how the game is wrong since I haven't yet played or seen it, but it seems to me that anytime you want to "hack" a base, you would have to send in a team of base infiltrators and not a lone hacker by himself. If this assumption is correct, then the majority of the things you say a hacker will have fun doing is going to be stuff that applies to being a base infiltrator, not specifically a hacker.
It would seem that the hacking cert is going to basically be one that people are going to take just because having one is required. An analogy is to a poorly done RPG where clerics are boring as hell to play, but someone has to bite the bullet and be one if you are going to have a successful party. What some of us are trying to suggest is that hacking become a "class" that people actually enjoy and can become proficient at. Just as Dio said, having a rifle cert doesn't make you good with that rifle, yet having the hacker cert is really all you need to be a good hacker.
I think it's important to remember that we're all fans of Planetside and if we didn't think it would be a good game we wouldn't be here. Hacking as it stands now doesn't change our opinion of the game in general, so there's not really any point in trying to convince us that hackers will still have fun playing PS because we all agree. What we are trying to say is that by making hacking dependent on some kind of player skill, you make the game MORE fun, and the hacking certification becomes more appealing, as opposed to just being something that someone on the team has to have. Just as some commanders are striving to be well respected because of their command abilities, wouldn't it be nice to have hackers well respected because of their hacking abilities?
I wouldn't even make a big deal about this whole thing except that I think the potential addition to gameplay is large and the difficulty in coding is rather small.
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