Leaderboard

There is a server called CEV Eris that, summed up, has a religion and only the members of that religion can be cloned. If you are not a member of that religion (which usually most of the station isnt), defibbing is the only way to go and it has worked fine so far. Mind you, this is a MRP ship where everyone knows all the antags, can buy guns with nonlethal (and i believe if you prowl maint, lethal ammunition), nazi roaches in maint at roundstart and a dictatorship-esque captainship. Granted it's population is waaaaay less than paradise so things are generally less hectic, but it's still SS13 so it is chaos half the time. (I would like to point out there is a 30min timer to respawn, and it can be shortened to 8 minutes if you are put in a morgue tray, however unless the round is tranquil this will not happen, and very few players wait for the 30min timer, as the round would be near end/ending unless they've died near roundstart.)

NECROMANCER IRL

Exactly this, the lack of downsides on death, makes the struggle to keep someone alive on the new system a questionable use of time.

Pretty sure the only flogging that should occur on station is the Captain 'disciplining' the HoP with the Chain of Command for opening multiple high priority clown slots. 1 Honk = 1 Lash

I'd like to add on to your beginning point regarding interesting mechanics and boring mechanics, that for the dead or injured person, it doesn't matter whether the mechanic is good or bad, it's still boring, so doing things that increase the time it take to heal a patient, negatively impacts the people actually getting healed in med bay by making it take longer before they can get back to actually playing the game. So generally any change that increases the amount of time anyone person spends in the med bay is going to be perceived negative by most of the community. This is why increasing cloning time is bad. Doctor doesn't give a shit, doesnt affect them. The person who's dead now has to wait longer to get back in the game though. It intended to make doctors use more fun mechanics but the doctor is not at all pushed to do anything but clone, they just fuck off and do something else while they wait on the cloner as they have always done. If anything, it pushes doctors to just build more cloners to increase their efficiency. For the same reason, cryo nerfs are also bad. For the most part, cryo only healed external damage, and didn't really do anything to organs unless you included mito in the mix, but if the chemist has mito in the mix they probably have it in the fridge too, so that doesn't really matter. By making this worse, everyone who goes into medbay just to get external damage treated now goes from being able to just fix themself in the cryo really quickly, to now occupying doctors time and making medbay an inefficient mess because there's 6 people waiting for their 20 burn damage from hacking a door healed but still the same amount of critical patients who need immediate medical attention or else they're doing to die.

New crit is terrible and unfun for literally everyone involved. I can't forsee myself playing the server much in the future if it were to stay.

I'd usually make a PR with my changes but with the flood of revivability PRs, the maints decided not to accept any further PRs about the topic, so instead I'll just write down my thoughts. I decided to make this its own thread instead of putting it in the crit discussion since it extends beyond the changes of the crit rework and touches on other things as well. Let me first define what I consider interesting and boring gameplay in medbay. The Issues First, interesting gameplay is when a doctor manually fixes a patient, using their knowledge of the game mechanics, chems, the patient's medical state and so on. What counts here is that he is making decisions and is actively engaged. The prime example of this is surgery, as the probably most involved medical procedure. But also things like brain and other organ transplants, etc. Secondly, boring gameplay is when a doctor puts a patient in a machine, turns it on and then walks away, or otherwise takes a single action and then leaves, especially if there is no or very little decision making involved in this. For example, deciding which chems to give someone in a sleeper is still somewhat more involved than pushing them in the cloner. The cloner is the single most boring and uninteractive machine in medbay. It fixes a patient regardless of their body's state and proceeds totally automatically. Most often the poor clonee even has to go poke a doctor for a mannitol pill for his brain damage. You can grab a greytider with no medical knowledge whatsoever, give him a one minute crash course and he can clone. Once cloners are upgraded, even that part is moot. The current main issue of medbay is that cloning is easier than fixing people in other ways. We've seen a PR that reduced defib time from 5 to 2 minutes, an attempt to increase cloning time and an attempt to make SR not work on non-clonable races. And now, the big crit rework will completely remove the revive function of defibs. Raising defib times was an attempt to, in the words of the author: "Push[ing] more individuals to use cloning". The now closed 'Revivability Update' attempted to double clone times as if it fixes anything besides doubling the time you can fuck off before checking on the cloner before putting the next body in it. The crit rework being test-merged has the same issues. By removing defibs as a revival method, you incentivise cloner use, pushing people into the least interesting 'mechanic' of medbay. Now, in the crit rework's credit it also attempts to make you survive longer in crit and give medbay lots of chances to stabilize and pull you out of crit, which is definitely interesting gameplay, but the issue persists that players can avoid that (and often do) simply by letting the patient die and putting them in the cloner. So, to summarize the current issues: 1. Involved, many-step processes that benefit from player knowledge and experience are interesting. IE surgery. 2. One-click solutions that fix all issues with a patient are boring. IE Cloning, Cryotubes to a lesser extent. Solutions Now, how do we fix this issue? Clearly, we should push people towards 1 and not 2. I've thought about a number of approaches: Make cloning take longer. This is a solution that's already been attempted, unsuccessfully. Faced with waiting 4 minutes for a patient to clone instead of 2 doesn't actually make doctors chose the more involved procedure, since they aren't the ones waiting as a ghost to rejoin the round. You could raise the time to ridiculous levels before this actually starts having an effect. This solution is clearly unworkable. Rejected. Make cloning consume meaningful resources. Biomass is easy to make in raw amounts, and besides that all a cloner needs is some power. You could make it necessary for cloners to be fed with some hard to get or valuable ingredient to work, but it would be hard to think of something lorewise fitting, imo (maybe something cargo has to order in an expensive crate?). At least, of something that doesn't just tax the chemist even more. Other servers have cloning cost money I think, but money has no meaning in our economy. Rather bad, imo. Make cloning come with not easily removed downsides. Having cloning cause some permanent downside or disability that isn't instantly removed by a pill of mannitol or clean SE could potentially work. For example, you could give cloned people a chance of getting a 'cloning trauma', which gives them a mental issue that they then have to play out (maybe even give them a little 'objective' like abductor victims get?). (Bonus: Give the psych something to do). Potentially interesting idea. Less RP-intense alternatives might just be stuff like unremovable disabilities, but I can already see players REEing about that. Workable, maybe? Make cloning no longer the default/lowest tier revival method. The most 'radical' method. Cloning is used because it is easy and available from roundstart. We could simply...change that. Remove the roundstart cloning setup and lock cloning behind decent research levels. You'd have to undo the nerfs to alternative revival methods while doing that (IE give the CMO omnizine in his hypospray again, raise defib timer, make defibs not insta-kill slimes again because brain damage multiplier lol). This would mean medbay has to carefully preserve their SR pills, patch people up, rush in with their defibs to save on SR, perform surgery to fix internal bleeding, broken bones, etc each time someone dies. Radical, but IMO the best idea so far. Something that can go hand in hand with 4., make more people reach medbay alive. The crit rework, as far as I can tell, somewhat intends this already. Have the paramedic bring in less dead people and more crit people, so medbay can patch them up, work under time pressure to stabilize, etc. To do so, we could introduce some more tools to stabilize patients, like stasis bags, or simple tweak the crit numbers to make dying slower. Nice but not enough on its own, imo. So, what do you all think? Do you agree or disagree with my analysis of medbay's issues and what makes good gameplay? And what do you think of the possible solutions I talk about?

-1

This is another excellent point. Speaking from experience you have to factor in your players. Just because something works when you the developer dose it or in tests, does not mean it will work well when deployed to the player base. You have to ballance what you want with how your players use what you provide.

It's like fake thermostats in offices or Russian democracy. It's an illusion to make us think the staff care about the player base when they don't.

I mean sure, as far as non-medical players are concerned, the ideal medical system would be an instant-cloner that revives you the moment you die no matter what, but there's good reasons we don't do that. There's a reason we don't let people instantly revive when they die. Though maybe option 3 would work for people very concerned with how long they are dead? Getting to come back but with some kind of condition to play out should be interesting, right?

I am mixed about the new system - and here is why. I like the idea of reworking crit, of making it more deadly and more serious, but it comes with a huge nerf to medical systems and makes the decision often just a two way street. Can I fix him fast? - Fix him fast Anything more complicated? - Into cloning they go. This two-way approach to medical is partially due to players being lazy, and partially due to them just not knowing better, the chemist being trash or other unforeseen consequences. I had a few rounds where Fox was my Doctor, and I have seen in person that, if you know what you are doing, you can fix people without stuffing them into cloning. In addition, several times he fixed me up from things that I thought were a guaranteed death. Nevertheless, unfortunately not every player is like this. Personally, I would ask for more depth in the medical system. I have just taken a short look at TG station, and frankly, I know nothing about how their medical system works. However, the idea alone of brain damage that add random effects sounds far more advanced than what we have right now. I agree, medical should become more interesting, but personally, I would add more systems into the diagram of procedures. Example: Allow them to clone people, but - it might result in brain damage - and woops, person has now "Monophobia - The patient will become increasingly stressed when not in company of others, triggering panic reactions ranging from sickness to heart attacks." which needs to be treated as well. In addition: No system should be reliant on one factor. Currently, I feel like the chemist is too important. Destroy the cloner, kill the chemist (or chemist area) – Medbay is done. Back then they still had the defib as a last resort, but this path is now closed. Overall - the game is Semi Realistic - allowing us to bend the rules, reality, and time just enough. Because if Survival Games taught me anything: Realism is not always fun.

While reactions to something new are likely going to end up being negative just by human tendencies... I feel like this new crit system has more than just that pulling it down. The system adds nothing fun, and doesn't really add more variety and options. My most interesting medical experience while the test was on involved a maddeningly long decline through which I was unable to speak, offer advice, make signs, nothing. I just sat there gasping as life slowly ebbed away, which was terrible, but that wasn't too bad because it was dramatic and created an interesting story. The part that made me upset was after this long struggle, they popped me into a cloner and "ding" I was back in better shape than I was before. I don't know if this is what you were going for, it seems like it takes a lot away from the fun of the game to create a little extra RP that was sorta there already. The "depth" of the system is bottlenecked by cloning and SR already. Gameplay-wise, and even RP-wise, it would have been more merciful for the Paramedic to put me out of my misery and just focus on cloning me since the cloning tanks were free.

I don't much see the point of discussing these merges if the maintainers/administrators won't take it into consideration to begin with.

The defib reviving is not realistic yes, but not being able to restart a heart is incredibly unrealistic. As I've said multiple times, if real doctors in real ERs are working on a critical patient and their heart stops, they can and frequently do revive them. A shot of epinephrine and chest compressions can restart a heart. So I agree changing the defibrillator was a good idea as a one click revive like that is dumb, but there are times when trying to stabilize someone where restarting their heart is apart of the process. Needing to clone everyone who's heart stops or use a really hard to make chemical to do so is unrealistic and not fun. Not to mention heart transplants, head and brain situations. You need to remember, just because the system works when Admins test it, that does not mean players will be efficient smart or play properly. Have you actually played ss13 before? They don't call it malpractice bay for nothing. You need to build it for the community not yourself. You need to think about how it will be played not how it should be played. The new crit system has lots of positives but it has massive problems that I guarantee won't be adressed because let's be real, this thread is less a feedback discussion thread and more a "suggestion box" sign over a paper shredder.

As a test, I used an admin spawned human and used admin tools to deal 200 burn damage, then timed how long it took for them to die. These times aren't precise as I don't have a stopwatch and had to alt tab back and forth, but are generally accurate within 1-2s. Test 1: 2:28. Subject started taking brain damage after 1:47. Died with 664 respiration damage and 75 brain damage Test 2: 0:56. Subject started taking brain damage after 0:35. Died with 297 respsiration damage and 36 brain damage. Test 3 0:18. Subject started taking brain damage after 0:08. Died with 139 respiration damage and 18 brain damage. Test 4: 1:33. Byond bugged and didn't update the scanner so I don't know when brain damage started. Died with 818 respiration damage and 102 brain damage. Test 5: 1:43. Subject started taking brain damage after 1:05. Died with 530 respiration damage and 60 brain damage. I'd hazard a guess that in a real scenario the odds any of those test dummies could have been saved by medical, even if it was staffed by the best medical players in existence is practically zero, simply because none of them would likely have made it to medical before dying. Keep in mind, these numbers are withn me using admin tools to deal 200 burn damage. In a realistic scenario where someone is taking brute by an antag or atmos death blender, it's probably going to be a lot worse. There definitely needs to be some adjustments made on the time til death, and there certainly needs to be a floor so patients can't just randomly die in 20 seconds. Edit: For some practical advice to anyone playing medical. At round start acquire a bucket. Go to the mendvend. Vend a bottle of Epi, Sal-Glu, Atropine, and Salylic Acid. Then vend 1 pill of Mannitol and 1 pill of Salbumtol. Add 20 of each bottle to the bucket, then disolve both pills in it. Grab a syringe and fill it. Inject literally everyone who comes into medical in crit with that. If you're the CMO, use your hypo instead of a syringe, it's faster. Normal hypos won't take atropine sadly, and if you have to give it separately it kind of defeats the point of the hypo being faster. Edit 2: Actually, forget all that. Just carry Atropine, it's all you need. They can't die unless they suffer cardiac arrest, and they can't suffer cardiac arrest if they have Atropine in them. Defib if their heart is already stopped. Once atropine is in them, treat as normal to get them out of critical. In fact, it should generally be safe to just inject 15u of atropine from a syringe and then dump them into cryo as long as their heart isn't already stopped. Edit 3: Theoretically, you should be able to just add atropine to the cryomix and just cryo everyone. Will require testing. Once that's done, your biggest issue will be your fellow doctors trying to drag your patients away and throw them into cryo. I would recommend murdering them with a hatchet.

Yeah no, even a passive reading of space law and Security SOP and you get the gist that Security is to use physical violence only as a last resort and even executing a criminal who has committed multiple murders or devastated the station with sabotage still requires security to go through the proper channels to get approval, premature executions can result in demotions or incarceration even if they would have been justified had security just waited for the verdict. Adding flogging or any other form of beatings and corporal punishment sends a signal in the opposite direction that security can and should act like brutes who legal threaten beatings and carry them out with no repercussions. If we are going to allow that we might as well remove security as a whole, make the armory and brig cells command access and allow lynching when ever greytide desires. Cause that's the exact direction you'll be taking the community if you go through with this.

It'd kinda half of a joke really. Like, I would like to see some variety in punishments, if possible. It just feels so dull at times, especially for MINOR crimes. The minor 5-minute crimes are more hassle than it's worth, when it comes to processing, bringging, etc.