For those of you who have just joined us here in The Matrix Online community, welcome. In my over three-and-a-half years of involvement with this game, I have been told more than a few times that it can be “very hard to do standard missions on the hard difficulty”. The truth of the matter is, however, it is very easy to do standard missions on the hard difficulty once you master the missioning system. This guide will present a way whereby you can easily complete standard missions on the hard difficulty without even having to kill any enemy NPCs. The key to doing solo missions easily and efficiently is infiltration or retrieval missions.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The techniques discussed in this guide do not apply to critical or archive missions, except for some of the tips and suggestions presented at the end of this guide.


****PRE-MISSIONING SECTION****

Note: Several abilities that are vital to this technique of missioning are discussed in this guide. However, because of the amount of abilities that you absolutely must have (as well as other abilities that you don’t have to equip, but should once you are able to) to be able to complete these missions successfully, you will not be able to equip all of them if you are fairly low in level and do not have sufficient memory capacity available (go to a hardline, right-click it and select the “abilities” tab to check your memory capacity ratio at any time). In this event, you will have to try other methods of leveling, such as gaining assistance from someone who is higher than you in level until you are high enough in level to employ all of the techniques that will be discussed in this guide. Alternatively, until you are able to employ the techniques presented in this guide, you may want to try your missions on the easy or medium difficulty if the hard difficulty is to difficult for you. As a point of reference, you can equip all of the key abilities in the hacker and operative trees (which will all be discussed below), as well as the hyper-sprint, hyper-jump, and evade combat abilities by level 15.

Before you begin working on these missions by yourself, there are several abilities you will need in both the hacker and operative trees. To access your abilities window, go to any hardline, right-click it, and select the abilities tab. After this, you will notice four sections: Awakened at the top, which then branches out into Coder, Hacker, and Operative.

**Required Hacker Abilities**

In the Hacker tree, you need all of the following abilities that are surrounded by a green border:

The names of all of these abilities, from left to right and top to bottom, are as follows: Execute Program, Hacker Style, Repair RSI 1.0, Logic Barrage 1.0, Download Mission Map, and Hacker.

**Required Operative Abilities**

In the operative tree, you need all of the following abilities that are surrounded by a green border:

The names of all of these abilities, from left to right and top to bottom, are as follows: Combat Insight, Hindering Shot, Intensify Damage, and Operative.

The names of all of these abilities, from left to right and top to bottom, are as follows: Sneak, Spy Style, Side Roll Escape, Spinning Backsweep, Disable Evasion, Find Weakness, and Spy.

The names of these last two abilities’, from top to bottom, are as follows: Disguise and Open Locks. You may go further down this tree if you wish, but you only have to go this far to be successful on your Infiltration or Retrieval missions.

**Location of a Hacker Vendor**


If you do not already have these abilities, can’t code them or have someone code them for you, then you can purchase them all at vendors around the Megacity. You can get all of the hacker abilities that you from this vendor (named Pickman), in Mara central:

If you are not sure how to locate Pickman from the Mara Central hardline, you can open your map by pressing the M key on your keyboard. You can zoom in and out with the “+” and “-“ symbols on your map, and you can also increase and decrease the size of your map by moving the map around with your mouse. The “…” button on your map is used to turn coordinates on or off; you should have them on The blue symbols with a capital “V” on your map represent the locations of vendors. As the screenshot below indicates, here is where Pickman is, relative to the Mara Central hardline; the yellow cursor represents my location. As the screenshot also indicates, Pickman is located at the following coordinates in Mara: 166 5 107.

After acquiring all of the necessary hacker abilities from this vendor, return to the hardline, right click it, and select “upload”.

**Location of an Operative Vendor**

You can get all of the operatives abilities you need (up to open locks) from this vendor (named Slosh) at Mara Central:

Here is Slosh’s location relative to the Mara Central hardline. Again, the yellow cursor represents my location, and the coordinates are given in the screenshot:




After acquiring all of the necessary operative abilities from this vendor, return to the hardline to upload these abilities.

**The Importance of Other Abilities**


* ALWAYS have evade combat running when doing these missions. After you pick a lock or hack/search a computer, your disguise will come off; immediately after seeing you, the NPCs may or may not try to interlock you. Therefore, it is important to keep track of your evade combat shield; even if you are able to get out of the mission area before any NPC is able to draw you into interlock, it is still very well possible that they broke your shield, meaning that the next NPC who tries to interlock you will succeed. Whenever your shield is broken, reapply your evade combat ability immediately. If you see the icon circled in red in the screenshot in your display, then your evade combat is running; otherwise it is not, possibly because your shield has been broken. If you do get interlocked, use withdraw to attempt to get out of it This ability may be purchased from Pickman or Slosh, whose locations where given earlier in this guide, or from any other ability vendor.

*If you are below level 25, use the Hyper-Sprint ability. This ability can be purchased from any ability vendor, such as Pickman or Slosh. Because the Hyper-Sprint ability uses a lot of your IS (inner strength) at a fast rate, you should only use it in-between mission phases; once you arrive at the building to complete the objective(s) for each individual phase of the mission, you can manually remove hyper-sprint from your buffer of actively running abilities and upgrades by holding down the shift button and right-clicking the hyper-sprint ability in your buffer; what I am referring to by buffer is outlined in red in the graphic below. This will give you time to replenish at least some of your IS so that you may use Hyper-Sprint once again as you run to the next phase of the mission.

*Once you reach level 25, immediately switch from using Hyper-Sprint to Hyper-Speed, as this ability is far better than Hyper-Sprint. It not only enables you to run faster, but it also does not drain your IS as hyper-sprint does; it only uses a very a small amount of your IS right when you activate it. This ability may not be purchased from any ability vendor; it must be coded.

**Location of an Item Vendor**


Now that you have all of the necessary abilities to succeed in your infiltration missions, it is time acquire the necessary items. There are only two items that you will need on these missions: a disguise and the lockpick item. You can purchase a variety of disguises, as well as the lockpick item, from the item vendor named Alsaud in Mara Central:

Here is Alsaud’s location relative to the Mara Central hardline:

**Equipping Your Abilities**

Now that you have all of the necessary abilities and items, it is time to equip these abilities. At the hardline, right-click and select abilities, and then click the abilities tab (it is on ability tree by default). You will then see a screen that looks something like this:




To equip the abilities that you have just purchased and uploaded, move them from the “Core Abilities” side to the “Equipped Abilities” side. Depending upon your level, as well as your memory capacity (how much memory you have left to load abilities’), you may not be able to load all of the necessary abilities; for instance, you must be at least level 8 to load the Open Locks ability.

**Leveling Up Your Abilities**

In addition, several of your abilities can be leveled up, and some abilities require that you level up other abilities (that are lower in the ability tree) before you can use those abilities. For instance, your disguise ability must be leveled at least to level 8 before you can equip the Open Locks ability. Press L on your keyboard to open up the window where you can level up abilities, find the abilities you need (or want) to level up, level them up and then hit accept. Your window should look something like this:

**Toolbars**

Once you have all of your abilities equipped, it is a good idea to put some of those abilities, as well a disguise, in your toolbar. You have a total of twenty toolbars (all numbered) available, and you have two different toolbars open all of the time; you should devote one of these toolbars to your gear for these missions. To put a disguise in your toolbar, press the I key on your keyboard to open your inventory, and move it up to an empty slot on your toolbar. The item surrounded by a green border in my inventory is the symbol for all disguises:

**Actions Window**

Press the O key on your keyboard to bring up your actions window. Under the abilities tab (which is selected by default), drag the Hyper-sprint (or Hyper-Speed if you are at least level 25 or higher and have this ability), Hyper-Jump, and Evade Combat abilities into your toolbar. You should also put the five combat stances in your toolbar: Power, Speed, Grab, Block, and Withdraw. Your actions window should look something like this:

And your toolbar should look something like this after adding all of the necessary abilities and items to it (you only need to pay attention to the top toolbar):

****MISSIONING SECTION****

After doing everything stated above, you are now ready to begin working on your Infiltration or Retrieval missions. There are three main things people mission for: XP (experience), information (money), and reputation points. Infiltration and Retrieval missions are ideal for acquiring all three of these things.

**The Mission Dossier & Standard Missions**

To start, press the N key on your keyboard to bring up your mission dossier:

Once you have completed the “starter missions” for Tyndall, you should have three contacts: Tyndall, Agent Gray, and Flood. Tyndall is the controller for Zion, Agent Gray is the controller for the Machines, and Flood is the controller for the Merovingian. Note that Cypherite operatives work on assignments for Agent Gray, while E Pluribus Neo operatives work on assignments for Tyndall.

Once you have completed the “starter missions” for Tyndall, as well as the first set of critical missions for whatever organization you work for, you will notice that once you call your controller, you will have several different types of standard missions. These different types of standard missions are as follows: Assassination, Courier, Retrieval, Rescue, Escort, Infiltration, and Recruitment.

**How the XP System Works**

Contrary to a somewhat common misconception, three-part missions are not better than two-part missions, and taking longer on missions is not necessarily better than doing your missions “very quickly”. The fundamental rule about experience is that the amount of experience you receive is directly proportional to how long you take to complete the mission. This rule applies until you surpass the “time limits”, the point where you no longer receive additional experience for taking longer on the mission. These “time limits” represent the time it takes to receive the maximum amount of XP you can possibly receive for any given mission. For two-part missions, this “time limit” is four minutes, and it is six minutes for three-part missions. It is pivotal to not make a habit of excessively exceeding these time limits, for you are not compensated for any additional time that you take.

While these “time limits” are in place, this does not mean that it is “better” to take the maximum amount of time (four minutes for two part missions or six minutes for three part missions) to complete the mission, because in the long run you receive exactly the same amount of experience regardless of if you take four minutes or less for two-part missions, or six minutes or less for three-part missions. For instance, suppose the maximum amount of XP you could ever receive on a three-part mission is 600,000, which means that you must take at least six minutes on the mission to receive this amount of experience. However, because of the time-based XP system this game operates on, if you took one minute on the mission, you would receive 100,000; if you took two minutes, you would receive 200,000; if you took three minutes, you would receive 300,000. If you took four minutes you would receive 400,000, and you would receive 500,000 if you took five minutes. Note that regardless of how long you take, so long as you do not exceed the “time limits”, you receive exactly the same rate of experience. Receiving 200,000 every two minutes, or 400,000 every four minutes, and so on and so forth, is exactly the same as receiving 600,000 every six minutes. In the case of receiving 400,000 every four minutes (which also would be the maximum amount of XP you could ever receive on a two-part mission in this scenario), you are only receiving two-thirds the amount of XP you would receive if you took six minutes and received 600,000, but you are also only taking two-thirds the amount of time to complete each mission; you thus break even with the same amount of experience either way. As this all demonstrates, two-part missions are just as good as three-part missions.


**Missioning for Experience**

If your purpose for missioning is to acquire experience above all else, then select Infiltration or Retrieval from the standard missions list, and select Tiny for time and Hard for difficulty:

**Missioning for Information**

The only difference between missioning for experience and missioning for information is that when you are missioning for information, you want to do your missions on the tiny and easy settings; in contrast to experience, you get more information on easy than you do on hard. The same time-based system, as well at the “time limits”, that where discussed above in regards to experience, also apply when missioning for information.


**Missioning for Reputation Points**

Because time has absolutely no bearing on if you acquire a reputation point or not, when you are missioning for reputation points your goal is to complete the missions as rapidly as possible. When you are doing missions for this purpose, two-part missions are far more ideal than three-part missions. The difficulty of the missions has no bearing on if you acquire a reputation point or not (at a certain point it is normal to stop acquiring one reputation point for your organization after completing every mission), so it does not matter if you do them on easy, medium, or hard.


**Map Symbols**

When you are doing these missions, it is important to utilize your map, and know what all of the symbols on your map mean. Here is a screenshot with all of the different symbols you will see while working on your missions:

The green circular icon indicates the mission objective; if you have to search a computer or mainframe that icon will be where it is located, and if you have to put something or retrieve something from a desk, it will also be depicted by that icon. Sometimes areas will have more than one of these icons in different sections; this is because some are for the mission objective, while some are security devices that are of no relevance to the mission.

The white door-looking icon sometimes symbolizes a locked door, and other times it symbolizes a room that has more enemies within it, which can only be opened after the objective(s) has/have been completed in your current phase of the mission. Other times, the white door will just be a regular door you go through during the mission, with nothing special behind it. The only time the white door is of real significant in these missions is when it is a locked door, since you will not be going through it to fight extra enemies.

The blue and yellow icons symbolize people, which include both enemies in the area, as well as anyone involved in the mission (such as someone you have to give a data disk to, for example).

The green door-looking icons represent the door(s) you go through to enter the mission area for each phase of the mission.

**The Importance of the Mission Map**

As demonstrated above, it is important to understand what all of the map symbols mean. To have these symbols appear on your map in the first place, however, you must succeed at downloading the mission map for each individual mission; when you have the Download Mission Map ability equipped, you will notice that whenever you download a mission, you will get a message in your system box that will either say “successfully downloaded mission map!” or “failed to download mission map!”, as demonstrated by the graphic below. Whenever you fail to download the mission map, abort the mission and redial to get a new one.




**Objectives**

Now that you are ready to start dialing your missions, it is important to note how the type of objectives you receive have an extremely significant impact on your ability to succeed in these missions. The range of objectives you might receive can be categorized as follows: good objectives, unfavorable objectives, and bad objectives.

Good Objectives:

The good objectives where you will never have to kill anyone include:

Search the computer/mainframe

Get the data from the computer/mainframe/desk

Place/insert the data in the computer/mainframe/desk

These are all “safe” objectives because they do not require any interaction, and thus you know you will not have to kill anyone to complete the objective.

Unfavorable Objectives:

The objectives you want watch to out for are the ones which require you to talk to someone, get the data from someone, or give the data to someone. The reason for this is because sometimes you will be able to complete these objectives without killing anyone, but sometimes you will not. There are four possibilities that arise with these types of objectives:

1. The person you must talk to, get the data from, or give the data to is in the locked room (the white door on your map), and thus you simply unlock the door to complete the objective; since he/she is in a locked room, you know you will not have to kill anyone.

2. The person you must talk to, get the data from, or give the data to is the only person in the building of this mission phase, and so you obviously will not have to kill anyone.

Important note: whenever you have a phase of a mission that contains no enemies, you automatically will get significantly less XP on the mission. You receive an even greater reduction in XP if there are multiple phases of the mission that contain no enemies. You will get reduced XP because of this, but you can still complete the mission.

3. The person you must talk to, get the data from, or give the data to is in a room with one or more enemies, and requires you to kill all of the enemies before completing the objective. If this is the case, you must abort the mission immediately.

4. The person you must talk to, get the data from or give the data to is in a room with one or more enemies, but does not require you to kill any the enemies before completing the objective. Therefore, you can complete this phase of the mission.

Bad Objectives:

Bad Objectives are any objectives that require you to kill someone and/or lead someone out of the area to another area. While some leading objectives may be “doable”, they will only slow you down, and they are not worth the amount of time it takes to complete them. Another problem that arises with leading objectives is the possibility that you may get ambushed while leading an NPC from one mission phase to the next; and since the NPC must follow you, you do not have the option of simply hyper jumping away.


**Cycling Through Missions & Dealing with Bad Missions**

While this method of missioning works very well for fast leveling, there is one problem you will encounter at least some of the time: repetitively dialing missions that give you bad objectives that require you to lead someone or kill someone (or more than one person) at some point during the mission. Another problem you may encounter is repetitively dialing missions that result in reduced experience because there are no enemy NPCs in one or more of the phases of the mission.

One technique to get around this problem is to cycle through missions until you get “good” missions. To cycle through missions means to abort the current mission and continuously redial your controller (Tyndall, Agent Gray, or Flood depending upon your organization) until you get a good mission. This works most effectively if you actually close out of the mission dossier and redial your controller first, rather than simply aborting the bad mission, choosing the mission type, and hitting accept again. Note that you may have to cycle through many bad missions before you will get a good one; and after finally getting a good mission, you may once again receive missions with bad objectives (or that result in you getting reduced experience) after completing the good mission.

If cycling through several missions does not help, then you should go to the loading area, and select a neighborhood that is different from the neighbor that you where dialing missions in previously. This will often alleviate the problem of repetitively dialing bad missions.

Additionally, if one type of mission (such as Infiltration) is giving you trouble, then you should also try switching to the other (Retrieval); often when one continuously gives you bad missions, the other will give you good missions.

Finally, if everything above does not seem to help the problem, then your best option may be to log out of the game and then log back in.


** Tips & Suggestions**

In addition to everything stated above in this guide, here are some tips and suggestions:

*In addition to using Evade Combat, you should always use the block stance when running these missions. This in conjunction with Evade Combat helps you to avoid interlock the most, and block also gives you the greatest defense (a 50% upgrade), making it harder for any enemy NPCs to be able to attack you.

*In addition to Hyper-Sprint or Hyper-Speed, you can also run faster by using the technique known as strafe-running. To strafe-run, hold down the right button on your mouse, and use the A or D button on your keyboard in conjunction with W (or the left mouse button).

*Because it does not use a lot of IS, you should use your disguise item both in-between phases and on each phase of the mission. When you arrive at each phase of the mission, put on your disguise before going through the mission door (the door with the green circle on it); this way the enemy NPCs cannot start attacking you until you do something to force the disguise to come off, such as picking a lock or searching/hacking a computer. You should also put the disguise back on before you exit the building, so that enemy NPCs that you may encounter in-between the phases of the mission cannot attack you. Note that doing this will also protect you from gang members. Remember to keep track of how long you have left until your disguise wears off; when you arrive at each building as you go from phase-to-phase on the mission, you should reapply your disguise item, even if it has not completely ran out yet.

*If you have enough memory capacity left after equipping all of the essential abilities to do these missions, equip the ability known as Gaussian Blur; this ability also helps you to avoid being drawn into interlock. This ability is in the hacker tree, and can be purchased from the hacker vendor named Pickman that was mentioned earlier in this guide.

*If you have enough memory capacity after equipping all of the essential abilities to do these missions, always equip both Hyper-Dodge and Hyper-Deflect, and always have one of them running. Hyper-Dodge helps to protect you from ballistic (gun) attacks, while Hyper-Deflect helps to protect you from viral (hacker) attacks. Which one you should have actively running on a particular mission depends upon what type of enemies are attacking you; if you are, for instance, suddenly hit by several hacker attacks, you should apply Hyper-Deflect. You should also equip Hyper-Sense (which helps to protect you from knife-throwing attacks) if you have enough memory capacity, but it is not as important as Hyper-Dodge or Hyper-Deflect. Hyper-block (which helps to protect you from melee, or interlock-based, attacks) should not be necessary, as your goal is to avoid being drawn into interlock at all costs. All of these Hyper abilities can be purchased at any of the ability vendors, such as Pickman or Slosh, whose locations where given earlier in this guide.


*Starting at level 15 and up through level 32, you will not be able to dial missions in this Richland district; if you dial missions in the Richland district, it will force you to go into Westview. This means that you are forced to do your missions in either Westview, International, or Downtown. It is highly recommended that you do your missions in International during this period of time, as this district has the least-threatening gangs out of the three non-Richland districts.

*When doing missions in a non-Richland district, it is important to watch out for level 255 agents that will eventually spawn and come after you if you are in a restricted neighborhood (a neighborhood that you have not yet hacked the access node for). Aside from hacking each neighborhood’s access node to “unlock” that area (so that agent’s will no longer come after you), you can also use a disguise to temporarily keep the agents from attacking you; agents, like enemy NPCs on missions or gang members, cannot “see through” a disguise. Therefore – assuming the agent does not see you attempt to put the disguise on -, you can use the disguise to temporarily avoid the agents; note that once the disguise wears off, an agent will spawn by you once again. To get rid of the agents for a longer period of time, you need to go to a hardline and head to the loading area, and wait there for several seconds before jacking back into the Megacity. You need to do this every time an agent locks onto (which is indicated by a message in your system box that indicates that Agents have locked onto your position). You should also use your “agent meter” to see how much “heat” is on you; this meter is circled in red in the graphic:

Ohh, Nice Guide.

The thread title seems to be inaccurate. 

HutchieJNR wrote:

Ohh, Nice Guide.

    My thanks.

Cadsuane wrote:

The thread title seems to be inaccurate.

How so? This guide presents a way whereby anyone in this game can easily complete their standard missions on the "hard" difficulty without surpassing the "time limits" (as discussed in the guide), allowing them to maximize their gains in experience, information, and reputation points whilst being able to avoid situations such as having to deal with several enemy NPCs all at once, which happens all too common when killing objectives are required, such as on Assassination missions. This can be hard for some (especially newcomers to the game) depending upon their experience with the combat system, the number of enemy NPCs that they may have to deal with at once, the quality of the buffs (or lack thereof) they receive from their clothing, how far they have leveled up their abilities and how many abilities they have, how often they may have to leave the mission area and sit down to heal after a “close call”, and so on and so forth. This method of missioning can also most certainly be applied to a group of people missioning together, but its application to solo missioning is specifically emphasized because a group working together may encounter no problems when dealing with the several NPCs on the various phases of the mission (depending upon the number of group members, how each individual group member’s level compares to the level of the NPCs, as well as all of the other factors that I mentioned above), and may very well be capable of killing all of the NPCs on each phase of the mission (and thus earning the additional experience that comes with doing so) while staying within the “time limits” with relative ease. What may very well be easy and efficient for the group, however, may not be so for the individual. In any case, if you where trying to suggest that you prefer to do your missions differently while soloing (such as killing all of the NPCs) by your comment, it is certainly fine for you to do your missions following the criteria that you are comfortable with, but you should also keep in mind that what works for you does not necessarily work for everyone else. This is why the intention of this guide is not to suggest that those who are already comfortable with their style of missioning and can easily complete missions on the “hard” difficulty in a timely manner while soloing should necessarily replace their way of missioning with this method, but rather it is to present a way to anyone who is interested, particularly those who have been having difficulty completing their missions on the “hard” difficulty without significantly surpassing the “time limits” (or difficulty with completing them at all), to complete their standard missions on the “hard” difficulty with relative ease and in a timely manner. This is why the title of this guide is completely accurate.

LordVortex wrote:

HutchieJNR wrote:

Ohh, Nice Guide.

    My thanks.

Cadsuane wrote:

The thread title seems to be inaccurate.

 

How so? This guide presents a way whereby anyone in this game can easily complete their standard missions on the "hard" difficulty without surpassing the "time limits" (as discussed in the guide), allowing them to maximize their gains in experience, information, and reputation points whilst being able to avoid situations such as having to deal with several enemy NPCs all at once, which happens all too common when killing objectives are required, such as on Assassination missions. This can be hard for some (especially newcomers to the game) depending upon their experience with the combat system, the number of enemy NPCs that they may have to deal with at once, the quality of the buffs (or lack thereof) they receive from their clothing, how far they have leveled up their abilities and how many abilities they have, how often they may have to leave the mission area and sit down to heal after a “close call”, and so on and so forth. This method of missioning can also most certainly be applied to a group of people missioning together, but its application to solo missioning is specifically emphasized because a group working together may encounter no problems when dealing with the several NPCs on the various phases of the mission (depending upon the number of group members, how each individual group member’s level compares to the level of the NPCs, as well as all of the other factors that I mentioned above), and may very well be capable of killing all of the NPCs on each phase of the mission (and thus earning the additional experience that comes with doing so) while staying within the “time limits” with relative ease. What may very well be easy and efficient for the group, however, may not be so for the individual. In any case, if you where trying to suggest that you prefer to do your missions differently while soloing (such as killing all of the NPCs) by your comment, it is certainly fine for you to do your missions following the criteria that you are comfortable with, but you should also keep in mind that what works for you does not necessarily work for everyone else. This is why the intention of this guide is not to suggest that those who are already comfortable with their style of missioning and can easily complete missions on the “hard” difficulty in a timely manner while soloing should necessarily replace their way of missioning with this method, but rather it is to present a way to anyone who is interested, particularly those who have been having difficulty completing their missions on the “hard” difficulty without significantly surpassing the “time limits” (or difficulty with completing them at all), to complete their standard missions on the “hard” difficulty with relative ease and in a timely manner. This is why the title of this guide is completely accurate.

*giant wall of text crits you for over 9000*

LordVortex wrote:

This is why the title of this guide is completely accurate.

I disagree. 

Further, I decline to discuss it here as such discussion is likely to lead to argument and argument is likely to lead to moderator action.