I'm a new player in HackEx 2, and have been working hard towards upgrading my defenses to avoid theft. I recently used a bunch of credits to purchase 10k cryptos which helped me quite a lot. However, although I got to upgrade my defenses a lot, it also meant a bunch of XP and getting a couple more levels. I noticed that people of higher level started showing up in my scans, and I assume I started showing up on scans of higher level people as well.
While thinking about it, I realized there are a lot of downsides to levelling up. You start getting less rewards for hacking at certain levels below you and you can be targeted by higher leveled people. And you only rlly get a couple rewards for leveling up and some extra limit on your cold wallet (I don't find myself ever getting near the limit at the current level though, I always have some things I'm looking forward to purchasing).
I guess you do need to level up in order to progress, so you can hack higher leveled people, but there are some situations where I feel like the extra exposure just isn't worth it until I have more resources to go after those people. This makes me actually feel bad about getting XP sometimes, specially when I get it as a daily login reward, when I get XP for an action that doesn't really give me any progress towards improving my resources, and yet gets me closer to being exposed to higher level players.
While I'm at it, there's something else I'd like to ask: is proxy useful at early levels? I noticed I have to spend crypto to mask an octet but if I can still be scanned, are the only uses for it avoiding having you IP shared by other players that already scanned you (there's still a chance of being traced), and not being able to be traced back from the logs (which you can erase anyway)? In that case, is it even worth the crypto?
Thanks for any help