The Know Evil playthrough at RPPR found the easiest way around it was to keep traveling from place to place, so they'd get handed off to another Proxy who was in charge of the assets there. Alternatively, i-Rep could be (instead of a favor/economic system like some of the other reps) purely a 'this is how well known you are to the big wheels' system. The guys who blew up a hab to prevent an x-threat will get much more attention from on high than the guys who pirated a potential x-threat cargo off a ship.

jasonbrisbane wrote:

With i-Rep you only have one single contact - your Proxy. Otherwise its not a secret society, is it?

Not quite, your proxy is essentially your commanding officer. You're supposed to pass your intel/problems/requests/etc up the Firewall chain through your proxy, and receive orders/intel/etc from your proxy. The firewall chain of command is really short though, basically a web of chains above the sentinels with the (routing) proxies hanging down as links. That doesn't mean you won't know other members, or even wouldn't get asked to do something by another proxy. Firewall is pretty ad-hoc and has a fair amount of internal politicking so stuff like that might be pretty common.

jasonbrisbane wrote:

Or is there a forum (equivalent) that everyone is listed as "anonymous" and the system keeps track of who posted what? Seems VERY far fetched and very likely to be hacked by ozma... And BAM their world ends!

There is, its called Eyechat, and uses anonymous pseudonyms, its also the source of the commentary in the MRG. It works because Firewall has divine infosec backing which can't really be compromised by anyone else. OZMA has broken is a little bit, but has never unraveled the network or gotten anything super important.

jasonbrisbane wrote:

Is it just me or is it silly (ridiculous) to have an iRep at all? Should all Queries simply be made by the Team as a whole to the Proxy, who then gives them a "team Rep" score? Or could someone explain this to me.....

Irep is a useful thing to track individually imo, because of personal connections with other sentinels through Eyechat, or a proxy who rotated servers during a sentinels time, or any number of other things. I think a group Irep might make sense as well, but it shouldn't replace personal Irep. Perhaps adding it and giving Irep a penalty on tests to reflect the secret nature of firewall might be a good in-between?

I imagine that if your proxy hits your rep harder than you deserve, you can appeal that to the proxy's server. If they uphold the decision, you either can choose to live with that and modify your behavior or continue seeing your I-rep tank, or ask to be transferred to another server.

You can view iRep and the Eye as sort of like a bulletin board system. As a simple example ORCACommander has reputation here. It is based on the various things he has posted. If he were to ask for help with a project people could look through his previous posts and see what other projects he's asked for help with in the past, if they got completed or were abandoned half-way through, if people seemed to enjoy working with him, and if he's helped out on other projects. I've got zero idea who ORCACommander is in real life, but he still has reputation. Now in our case this isn't a system designed for anonymity and for facilitating this kind of interaction but that core functionality remains. The FBI could seize the server and check the IP address that ORCACommander logs in from. They could monitor the traffic going to the server without the admin even knowing that they were looking for ORCACommander. Also, ORCACommander's anonymity here might be more a matter of convention than a conscious decision on his part. The Eye, on the other hand, was built from the ground up for being an anonymous network. It's almost certainly decentralized so there is no particular server to seize. Matrix IDs are probably anonymized through something like our present day TOR network and traffic is encrypted. It isn't a completely open system, however, as Proxies are able to restrict information. People who post sensitive information before it has been cleared probably find it redacted very quickly along with the equivalent of a sysadmin post stating that they were being naughty (which isn't good for the iRep). I would speculate that if someone calls on their iRep and asks for help that any help from other sentinels probably gets routed through the proxies. This means that if ORCACommander asks if anyone has a spare Neo-Orca morph and I want to send it to him I can even though I don't know who he really is. I can even do something like helping him move a body or patch up an injury. I'll end up meeting him but unless he tells me his name I still won't know who he is. Because of morphs he could even be famous and I wouldn't necessarily know who he is. He might not use his primary morph. Even if he does I won't know if its really him. Maybe it is someone else using a morph that's been customized to look like his.

Actually that's not a bad idea, it also makes more sense logically. The eye could be a combination of forums, message boards, chats, etc... which are frequented by Firewall members. To identify each other, they might use an encrypted digital "handshake" a-la secret masonic salute. The Eyechat could require a similar key to log-in. This way if anything is compromised is info used by a subset of agents, not the whole organization. It also avoids the problem of a single double agent being able to access all open info from Firewall in one shot.

No, but your reputation precedes you. :)