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Old 11-22-2014, 03:11 PM   #9
vicky_molokh
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Computer Operation/Programming/Hacking

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
What's your case for that being a Computer Use feat rather than a Research feat? Research is certainly the governing skill roll for such searches.
It's kinda like Area Knowledge vs. Hiking:
You need AK to know where to hike, but Hiking to get there in a reasonable timeframe and without complications.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
I would say that you need to be able to use a computer to do TL8 research (Though you can still do TL7 research in many archives). Computer Operation has the usual issue that these days the computer operation side of such tasks is made mindbogglingly trivial by user-friendly design.
I would like to note that (modern) search engines seem provide a specialisation bonus rather than a flat bonus:
They're cool when they're trying to help you find something that matches both your and their expectation. They're ugly and harmful when they think they know better than you, and insist on doing things their way even while you invoke all sorts of forcing or overriding modifiers in your search; this is particularly bad when you're trying to search for snippets of code with very specific orders of symbols, or when you want to search for the whole image as opposed to the one piece of the image that the engine recognised and immediately jumped upon.

IIRC Vehicles or Expansion provided a similar effect for Automatic gearboxes: +1 skill if Driving<10, -1 skill if Driving>10.
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