I assume that the rant DDMW copied was silva attempting to ape the house style here. Whatever.
Anyway, the parts of the Matrix in SR5 that don't work from a RAW or RAI standpoint are "all the parts." We just focus on Infinity Mirror because it is the
first part. You disguise your icon as a NERPS ad, and then no one can interact with you until they "take the time" to identify all the icons. And "the time" is measured in hours of
game time and literally tens of thousands of die rolls. That's what the rules actually are, and that's how they are "intended" to work, and it's completely fucked. Disguising yourself as an unimportant icon is simply the "I Win" button of the matrix. You will never beat that and no one will even begin to try.
But every other part is also similarly fucked. The game hits a stop codon on the pre-battle perception tests. But even if you handwaved that, the
next part
is also a stop codon. To hack something, you need to put marks on it. But the defender already has marks on their own stuff, and are entitled to know how many total marks there are. So to do
any hacking at all you need to put marks on a target and the opposition then knows you are acting against them because the marks incremented for no reason. Hacking secretly is simply not even possible. There is, by design, no way to secretly mark things and no way to accomplish anything without marks.
Once you get access to something, you can "do stuff." What that stuff
is or how that "stuff" might be accomplished is anyone's fucking guess. There's some sort of RAI argument you could make there, where you insist that whatever ideas you pulled out of your asshole are what the authors "intended" to be the procedure here despite that what was actually written is incomplete and contradictory. Because you're a fucking telepath or whatever.
But that procedure doesn't even matter, because actually anyone can be kicked out of anything by just rebooting, which sets all hostile hack marks to zero. So all your hack actions for however many turns can't do anything more than create a couple of seconds of downtime for individual devices. We know
that's RAI because that's in the god damn full page hacking example.
All hack targets are Wobbuffet.
And then afterward, there's incredibly complicated and stupid GOD accounting. It's based on what things you do while in a particular wireless plan while not in a particular node. But your actions aren't clearly defined as being in or not in nodes you're interacting with, so that's all so much gibberish. None of the examples anyone has ever put together have actually even
attempted to do GOD accounting correctly, so I'm pretty sure the RAI is to simply handwave it and periodically stomp on your players for no damn reason just to remind them that you're the GM and can do what you want. But since getting blown up basically just makes you reboot, and that scarcely matters, that still doesn't matter much.
So no one can find you and you can't find important macguffins. Also you can't secretly hack into anything because the act of getting access automagically tips your hand that you're doing it. Also, hackers can't really do anything except force people to reboot their connections, meaning that no hacker attack of any power or skill ever amounts to much more than a slightly annoying DOS attack.
And... that's hacking. It doesn't work. It doesn't work at any level. There is no amount of zooming in or out that can make it work. It's not bad numbers plugged into a good concept or good numbers plugged into a bad concept. The numbers and the concept are both bad to the point of unsalvageability. Every
step of the hacking process is unworkable, both in the sense of taking too long to resolve and in the sense of giving outputs that are bullshit even on their own terms.
There is not one paragraph in that entire bloated piece of shit chapter you would want to keep when you inevitably had to rewrite it from scratch. There is no concept introduced in this edition that is good or usable.
-Username17
