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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?

This is... fairly strange, but I've been here for almost five years. I've unlocked all the karma purchases, and quite honestly I'd prefer if people gave karma to players that need it more. Don't get me wrong; I appreciate that I make people happy while I play, but I... really don't need it now. I'm sure I'm not alone, either.

Not to get off topic or beat a dead horse, but on the topic of reviving methods and what is broken and what is not, it never ceases to amaze me how people claim IPCs not reliant on the cloner is too strong of perk and they need to be nerfed farther, then you turn around and people say the cloner is too powerful and needs to removed out right because it's too good and requires no work to run it. So which is it? Because it can't be both.

one. one survived. be careful when walking the streets, spark

So I took some doctor, chemist and CMO shifts during the test merge, my impressions to go: Medbay side - If an injured hit the medbay before falling death, the treatment is easy. A quick triage - is the heart ok and running, what kind of damage there are, what should I do first on - then chems, patches or defib first depending of the need. Concerning the mechanics from the medbay side, death seem to happen - as also provided in Evadable's previous tests - by the random chance, which becomes more probable the greater the total damage is. Respiration damage accumulates at tremendous rate if the cardiac arrest kicks in, but defibbing and giving epi+atropine also tremendously heals it. Brain damage should, according to the newcrit guide, count more into the possibility of dying. I had the impression that brain damage usually won't get high enough to be the main cause for the death. The time window of living after critically injured, that is some 1:30...2 minutes now, might be too short for it to actually happen. From the medbay side, the system works and is quite fun to play - if they arrive there living. As said, this is too short when the only option to cope with the dead are cloning and SR'ing. Antag side Since I very rarely roll antag and didn't do that during the merge, I've got nothing to say here on my own - but what was observed and mentioned above, the test merge broke up antag side things. The crit mechanism, due taking care of needs the specific chems or even a defib, it makes things very hard for cult, changelings, vamps, wizards and nukeops, if they are in the receiving end. Also their violent actions get complicated, since the time window of living after being hit hard is the rough minute and half. Specially terrors have a need to instakill their downed victims, as mentioned. These problems seem unintended. Alternatives With the tested revision, the antag side problems are more or less breaking their game. Concerning the medbay, newcrit is more or less fine IF they arrive alive, but the possibility for that actually happening is too short now. The newcrit stuff is aiming to make more immersion into getting hurt really bad, that way endorsing more RP, right? The current system isn't that realistic or complicated, true that. But the ingame realism is indeed a certain dilemma. Realism has to be traded for gameplay. At the cloning and reliability thread there was a neat discussion concerning that topic. SS13 is a kind of scifi fantasy world that mimics the reality (whatever it is) and known scifi and fantasy phenomenae. Well this we all do know, but considering the oldcrit it should be remembered, too, as well as considering the alternatives for changing it. So I'd say there are three ways to continue on; either staying with the old system, either having a compromise with the old and the new system, with the already-existing tricks from the both systems either overhaul the newcrit even more. If the intent is to implent the newcrit without compromises, I'm afraid that quite a lot of work is needed to deal with the observed issues. The timespan of crit should be extended from it was during the test, for the sake of medbay being able to cope with the critically injured patients. But in the meanwhile, antags definitely need the possibility to kill someone instantly. The way I'd see this to be coped, if no compromises are the way to go, is not only about further altering the crit and dying mechanisms, but altering the very mechanisms of damage aswell. So I would call it an overhaul. For I don't speak BYOND, I've got no idea of what would it take, it seems like a huge work anyway. Since I felt the urge to nerd (pro writing some school stuff...), I'll have here an idea of overhauling, some irl background for it, followed by an obviously more reasonable suggestion of an in-between solution (which is not my own, but from Norwest’s long post, from the other thread). Consider what said on realism with this input - not going to say these things should be implemented, or even are in the range of sane or possible for that at all. I'm writing them for the cause of providing some irl data and so possible ideas of mimicing that in spess. Overhauling newcrit: some nerdy irl backround on the results of violence The hazards of the spessmen could be somewhat-relevantly reflected to actual hazards of a battlefield. Rough cases at cyberiad are more often than not caused by excess violence, namely projectiles, sharp melee, fires, explosives and the beloved fastmos blunt; that is the common ground there. Talking about battlefield casualties, they are divided to few categories: instantly fatal, acute, urgent, priority and routine patients. Out of these categories, acute and urgent cases form the medevac category A, while priority and routine patients are B and C respectively. A-class patients are to be in a hospital (which is, battalion- or 2nd level in the field) within 2 hours; B and C cases in 4 and 24 hours. The times are irrelevant considering the game stuff, but you'll get a picture of which kind of injuries those might be from the evac time required. Now, in a rough example, casualties in a present-day battlefield. The following figures are most probably from IDF, EF and ISAF experiences. Just to note, the irl medical side isn't my actual military profession at all, but they've been hammering the basics of that in my head long enough. So, some 5-8 per cent of the casualties are instantly fatal or acutely will become fatal; meaning that even if they could be evacuated succesfully as A-class patients, they will die almost certainly. Culprits to these are catasthrophic or traumatic brain and heart injuries (ie. a shrapnel or a bullet in the brain or the heart), dismemberment (which we know as gibbing, caused by more or less direct HE hits), neck hits (shrapnels or roadside accidents) and, in a minority, catasthropic stomach or chest hits (that is, really violent projectile hits). These all mean that the victim had really bad luck, if they were not a victim to violence dedicated specially to them, ie. if they weren't a subject to a murder. The rest 90 percent of casualties would survive, or are survivable. Lately it has also been so, that survivable patients do survive. Reason is obviously the fact that the present western combat experience is from various low intensity guerilla conflicts, where evacuating and first aid could be done more or less freely. The ranges of engaging being anything over 150m - for what I've read, they are usually much beyond that - there is a relative safety to perform a field or "first first-aid" and then move to the actual safety, again more or less uninterrupted. Intense combat would dramatically lower the amount of survivors of initially survivable injuries, since either the field first-aid or the evacuation procedure is certainly interrupted. Anyway, a wide range of injuries, both in type and seriousness, form the group of casualties that survive. In conjunction with the evac A-B-C system, we use the so called cABC to determine the type and seriousness of the injuries. It is dubbed for critical hemorrhage, Airways, Breathing, Circulation. The cABC thing is done to anyone who gets hurt, scratch the obvious instant fatalites. In practice, it is just a rinse-repeat mechanical trick of checking certain things out of a wounded person. Moreover - again scratching the instant or acute cases - all of the injuries who fall in the categories of cABC can be first-aided effectively. I'll explain these briefly. Critical bloodloss happens with most projectile and-or shrapnel hits. These are the most frequent wounds in a battlefield. The c-wounds are mostly situated to arms or legs. Critical hemorrhage can kill in a timespan of some 20 seconds to couple of minutes, depending on which vein where is hit. Thankfully the c-wounds are also the most easy and quick ones to first-aid. Leg or arm case, apply tourniquet, else, apply pressure (emergency) bandage and-or hemostat bandage. That's it if the wound isn't a grossly huge one in chest or groin. Then it would be called a "catastrophic stomach/chest" hit and is an acute case. "Acute case" - notice the logic! Acute case actually means a case that we are unable to effectively first-aid, and those are in all circumstancies a small minority. Airways are the case if a minor internal bleeding from a projectile trauma happen to block your breathing, and are first-aided by setting the person lying on the ground in a certain posture. Breathing and Circulation are the problem if there is a gone-in in the chest or a general shock happening. First-aid to these are, in the case of a shock, CPR, securing the body temperature and possibly using stimulants (though my training doesn't cover the lattest). Shock in the context of violent injuries is, by the way, a symptom of suffered hemorrhage, most often. The second possible reason for that is a gone-in (not gone-through) in the chest, which creates a pressure of air and blood that can't escape to the lungs. It is first aided by chest punctuation, a violent act of making there a space for air to get off the lungs. Third one is a sub-conscious phenomenon, which happens if it happens due the entirety of symptoms. Sidenote to newcrit cardiac failures, no violent damage directly result to any cardiac failures (scratch the obvious direct hit to heart, though). Shock, failure and arrest are all outcomes of the actual cause of death. That is, in the context of violent injuries, most likely hemorrhage, specially if it was not first-aided in time. I don't know how actual burn or brute, in the meaning of blunt damage, leads to death.I guess burns lead to septicism in the long run, and in case of violent burns, to death of heart tissue by temperature, if not preceded by inhalation of toxic smoke gases. For pure blunt I guess massive internal hemorrhage. Speaking of "first-aid" in common, the first aid I mean hereby is something that any soldier with a basic rinse-repeat mechanical training can do. The only thing that matter there is speed. Moreover, atleast in my experience every deployed soldier has all the tools to do the tricks. For the obvious reasons, the kits are issued so that you carry the one for yourself, for if you had it the helper will use your kit on you. However everyone should be able to do the most things. Advanced care is done by more-or-less professionals, and getting there usually needs fair amount of evacuation. Reflecting this to spess, Cyberiad is no military station. The IC spessmen of course expect their shifts to be peaceful and productive in first hand, but they have some IC anticipation of possible hostiles too, enough for it to feel reasonable that crew is issued a basic first aid kit. TL;DR, first aid is the king in the vast majority of cases, if you apply it quickly enough. - - Overhauling, an idea Considering the previous, we of course are not into turning ss13 into a military medical trauma simulator. So we want to mimic reality for the sake of immersion, RP and gameplay. My quick throw into that direction would be that, in short a) make the type of violence matter more b) as a counter, make first aid great again Now the main newcrit reason of dying is the shock. It causes cardiac failures, which in turn generate respiration damage making the random chance of death big enough with accumulating total damage. This is indeed more complex than oldcrit threshold of death, no matter what type of damage it was. Still the damage type doesn't matter much. If I cure the underlying condition, which now is solely the shock, and then cure the damagepoints, the patient will be fine in no time. a) Make the type of violence matter more? Mimicing the irl things would be the thing here. Namely, make there a few ways to instantly kill a person. I don't know how to code-engineer these, though, but I have two ideas. 1. Threshold of damage in certain (short) amount of time. I'd imagine that it could be possible to create a threshold of damage in certain short period of time that results into instant death. Damagepoints refer to the severity, right? Mimicing irl, giving someone really grue violence would lead to their instadeath, and the threshold in a period of ticks is the actual meter of the violence. So if I fire like three shots of .357 to a chest in a row, it would be enough to drop the poor victim dead instantly. That would mimic "catashtropic chest/groin." This threshold would make it possible for antags to rapidly kill their victims when they have the possibility to concentrate on their victim. Talk about spiders or the classic maint murder. 2. Hemorrhage. Otherwise, hemorrhage would be the main reason for death, as it certainly is the reason for deaths caused by violence, in nearly all forms. To achieve that in-game, the threshold of dying by bloodloss should be higher in general. Currently, going under 20 percent of blood will instantly kill you - which practically happens only with rampant vampires. If I remember right, the fatal bloodloss would be losing 40% of it in rapid. So ingame goung below some 50-60% would instantly kill you. The shock with the cardiac failures, as present, would stay as a symtom of hemorrhage AND suffered but first-aided hemorrhage. but the lethality of shock should be greatly nerfed. Make it a thing that will kill you if left unattended for a time. Or - even more realism! - remove the threshold of dying due the blood level, and fix the RNG of entering shock to the amount of blood, instead of amount of damage points.Or - even more mimicing realism! - first, dramatically increase the respiration damage that bloodloss causes. Second, make the chance to acquire shock mainly dependant to the respiration damage. So if that will not be first-aided, losing of some 40-50% blood, which would happen really quick, would lead to a 100% chance of acquiring instant cardiac arrest and due that, death. As stated next toxin and burn points should perceive the link to shock, but their significance in acquiring should be nerfed. Actually, either of these might be my best idea hereby, but I can't decide which is the better one. Honk. Maybe the latter. Going through some damage types next. Excess blunt, namely, really excess blunt, like it is received from a bunch of angry aliens or your local blood-red sithlord, would lead to massive internal bleeding. Make it separate to the regular internal bleeding. Also there would be the treshold in a time. If the nukie is out of killing just you, he would accomplish it by quickly accumulating your damagepoints with a number of hits. If he only was to say mere regards from the syndicate, with say, two-three blows, you'd have "only" the internal bleeding. So there could be levels in the severity of internal bleeding, depending on the threshold-in-time or the amount of damage received in one hit, as it is presently. Also, blunt would cause the "regular" mild bleeding, but not the hemorrhage. Projectile or sharp hit severe enough (threshold in points) will result in both damagepoints and, with a big randomchance, to external bloodshed, aka critical hemorrhage. Arms and legs would be more suspectible for hemorrhage. Projectile and sharp hits cause death by either hemorrhage or the threshold in a time; threshold should be rather big. For balance reasons I'd think that fastmos damage would count in as sharp (ie, things hitting you causes bleeding and if hit hard enough, hemorrhage), not blunt, for the sake of first aid ideas down below. Burn damage happens now because of fires, electric shocks, space or lasers. Hereby the threshold in a time might not work that smoothly. I'm bit uncertain what there could be. For the sake of simplicity (code-wise I guess) the symptoms and fatality would need to be the same for all stuff that cause burns. Maybe give the one who receives excess burn damage (fixed threshold? in-time threshold?) a good chance of going into the shock, as of irl heavy electric shock would bear that hazard? I have a guess that cardiac failures are a thing with severe tissue burn damage in overall. Respiration damage could bear the chance of falling to the shock. The very nature of respiration damage depends, in this idea, how much would hemorrhage affect it, as addressed above. Toxins could do the same as they did the test merge (rising the possibility to shock, with the side symptoms which were present at old system, too). Damagepoints in general would give impress of the deadliness of weapon just as it was previous. What matters now more though is some kind of DPS, at least when it comes to weapons that deal brute damage. The total amount of brute points, in other hand, would just impress the severity of the damage, the grander the grand total is the more it takes to be cured. Toxin and respiration damage would count in to the probability of shock, possibly that would be the case with burns too. In balance, toxin and burn damage should be more difficult to acquire, or their weigh on acquiring shock nerfed. Well, lasers are underpowered to ballistics even now, and getting toxicated is rather seldomly happening (if you don't count in ghostsalt). TL;DR, if somebody gets hurt, they die either by the threshold-in-a-time - resembling excessive and dedicated violence and allowing antags to perform instakills when they can and have the need to - either by a shock caused by burns or hemorrhage, and these could be efficiently prevented or stabilized, as I propose as next, namely, b) MFAGA! Make first aid great again! The aforementioned might look like just a bunch of even more quick ways to get your spaceman killed. However, to counter the number and aggressiveness of the lethal hazards, first-aid would be buffed. As first-aid is a thing irl - it can be miraculously efficient if applied in time. Critical hemorrhage is countered with an emergency bandage. Irl we have two tools, tourniquet and this, but for the sake of simplicity we could do with only one (emergency bandage could actually be used as tourniquet as well, but that requires some tricks). Emergency bandage would be the new epipen, carried by all crewmembers. It would work as rolls of gauze works now (they should be then nerfed or turned into these), given that in intents, you aim the bleeding spot. It would also take a brief time, just like using traumakit to self does now. Using the bandage would lead to reduction of speed, and if it is applied to arm, similar effect than having bone broken there. That would mimic the tourniquet patients being irl litter, if it's leg, possibly walking but yet unable to use the hand if it's the arm. Balance-wise, applying an effective way to prevent a certain death to every crewmember would have this as its downside; the patients won't be back in fight just the same they were few seconds ago. Somebody has his tourniquet but is his respiratory damage have made him fall to shock? CPR should really deal with shock, scratch the cardiac arrest. Make it not very time-consuming action and make it cure some of the respiration damage, below some fixed point (as of epinephrine does take care of oxyloss below... whatever it was), so the victim still needs medical attention but is likely to be stable for sometime. Medical staff would have more powerful tools to deal with the shock, that is the chems, like it was in the test merge. Massive internal bleeding? The result of blunt damage would, mimicing the issues with that irl, be a bit harder to firstaid. For (fastmos) balance reasons, the high-tech chems could combat the respiratory damage of it. Paramedic's job. After the initial first-aid, which would prevent dying if applied, the injured will need medical attention more or less fast. I think that would answer to the call of endorse more RP. People aren't afraid of getting killed ingame, they are afraid of being out of the game or severely hindered in it. Making first aid great again, with downsides that more or less makes them unable to go back to combat (or tiding), would be a engaging way to do it. Also, if no co-operation is present, they will die nevertheless, and co-operation is the thing that makes RP to happen, isn't it? Last but not least, what about antags? They could use the same tools as crew, but obviously they need to have buffs in their special ways of medication. That is especially so for vampires, wizards and nukeops. High-tech syndicate concentrated blood pills for the ops? Rejuvenate+ deals with bleeding and shocks for vampires. Some nifty spell or item for the mage. - - - Sigh, did I write all that? Oh yeah, well it was entertaining to think around. Whether any of this is usable is an open question, for I personally don't speak BYOND to try anything on my own. But the compromise suggestion I'd think of is much more simple and so reasonable than that wall of text. I'll just cite @Norwest from the medbay poll thread. (quote) So the newcrit stuff would be as-is, maybe even made bit more quick to cause death, but defibs would revive again in the timespan of five minutes, with a cost. This makes it possible to have such a small timewindow of surviving alive after being critically injured, so not screwing the antags. Though, obviously antags need specific ways to deal with the shock. Also I find what Norwest wrote on persisting symptoms most interesting, something that might have the desired impact and for sure a more entertaining one to go.

Once upon a time... A long time ago... In a discord channel far far away.... There was a conversation about a strange individual roaming station.. he wears all green, a wrestling mask and is known by the name of El Luchador. Some said he could kill a slaughter demon with his bare Hands... A true hero. Well, there he is

The consturcts that people become when they click gods as a ghost or get to close to the gods as a living. They have access to paralysing smoke and can smash walls but beyond that they're pitiful. The round is over give them some actual murder power. On TG the constructs that happen post god summon have extremely high decap and stun chances and murder you in just a few hits. Additionally they are able to track the nearest non culted person and then after finding them can switch their tracker to point them to the god so they know where to take the corpse. In addition to that they can literally just move through cult walls. At the very least give the constructs some actually damage so they can kill things, make them feel actually powerful.