New Disease system is making the game worse.

[MSpaintEnjoyer]

Introduction:

Hello, i am maliciousmoxy i usually play rose white this is my first post here i hope its suitable.

 i want to bring to attention the reception of the new disease system and its balancing as well as its problems from a gameplay perspective and why i and many other players believe its making the game less fun. 

 

Gameplay problems with the disease system: 

The problem with disease in this game is that wile its much like  other station catastrophic events like blob or spiders it fails to entertain players  like they do.

Blob and spiders let you control or spectate the catastrophe after you die playing as one of them giving you a new objective, as well as they give plenty of fun opportunities for the players to fight it  escape it or be the one that survives after shit hits the fan.  That increases gameplay value and frankly those are station catastrophes both i and other players seem to want more of.

The other problem with the new diseases is that they disproportionately kill antagonists with out replacing them with something else that creates fun chaos, antagonists can't as easily go to the public medbay the most crowded part of the ship to get the cure if they can't make it in the short timespan it can give them debilitating effects ruining their game and the game of the people around them by making it more milk toast with out adversity,

As a example i was playing as vampire named rose white, with an other vampire we had taken out the entire security department and were on my way to become ultimate vampires.  Until we caught the disease security had, it killed me in a short matter of time  as much as i was using the 250 vampire self rejuvenation ability it wouldn't stop hurting me continuously,  until i died. 

round after that was boring with ERT there but no adversity to deal with.

Wile the idea of space disease passing through the crew and dropping them dead is great in realism and sounds interesting it really doesn't give any fun gameplay potential for anyone but the virologist.

 

 

Prospective solutions/fixes  :

1. Simplest and most balanced option is returning to the old disease system. I haven't heard anyone praising the new disease system. 

2. Importing game modes from other stations such as sentient disease or a form of zombie outbrake which would work much like blob  giving people symptoms as a disease overmind  trying to keep enough people sick and if we go with the zombies idea being able to turn the dead into different types of zombies and organize them  [ This solution would take WAAAY longer to implement and balance but if it interests you feel free to make the pr for it] 

4. Make the disease system more interesting   like after a point of infected  central command automatically messaging the ai  quarantine areas or send people in hazmat suits disinfectant tanks and flamethrowers  to cremate people with the disease and purge it, that could be fun.   Changes in procedures making it required for people to take a disease waaayy more seriously etc. 

3.  This is mostly mending the problem a little bit,  but either make antags invincible to the disease or give them an easy out like a 1 tc all disease curer or vampire healing removes diseases or the wizards are magically immune etc 

 

[Frank]

I have been playing medical ever since I started here. I don't love having a new annoying virus every 15 minutes, but I did notice something. This whole system made having a virologist who knows what he's doing just as important as having good chemists every shift. In my opinion this is a good thing because with the new system, virology is more interesting to play. However, it could be a lot better. 

Now let's say you're CMO and you don't have a good virologist. This is a problem that can be dealt with quite easily. Either hire a viro from inside or outside of your department or do this:

1. Enter viro. 

2. Make a virus using the flu virus bottle and unstable mutagen. 

3. Repeat until you have anti-bodies metabolism.

4. Remove the other symptoms with diphenhydramine. 

5. Release and distribute. 

6. ???? 

7. Immunity. 

If you as a CMO does not know virology, you are screwed. You should always learn the entire department before thinking about leading it anyway. If you don't have a good chemist, CMO has to make chems. If you don't have a good doctor, you gotta fix people. It's the same thing with research directors and roboticists, head of security and warden (which is a hella lot more annoying imo). 

[uc_guy]

Hi! I'm the one who wrote the event rework, so I'd like to clarify some intentions I had in mind for it:

1. Fix the buggy disease generation that produced nonviable diseases that could only spread by blood and displayed incorrect cures when analyzed.

This was achieved by reworking the disease generation to always produce a disease that at least spreads by contact.

2. Provide plausible deniability for antag virologists.

This was done by removing the type 7 biohazard announcement

3. Reduce the impact of RNG towards antags.

This was done by changing the infection method from "random crew on the station" to "new arrivals as carriers"

4. Make the virologist role more useful than making the same 6 symptom healing virus every shift and going SSD afterwards.

Not sure if this one has been achieved considering how little time it takes to detect and to cure diseases.

 

I understand that it is harder for antags to get medical help, but it is the case for all kinds of medical problems (fractures, IB, organ damage) not just for diseases. Dealing with it is part of antag gameplay.

Medbay will often announce the cure for the virus and it is often something trivial like salt or orange juice, which should be easily procurable.

Biosuits, gas masks and internals also reduce transmission risk.

 

As for this:

Quote

1. Simplest and most balanced option is returning to the old disease system. I haven't heard anyone praising the new disease system. 

What we had before, wasn't really a "system". It was a bug. Instead of the disease outbreak it produced basically a non-event 75% of the time. A useless disease that couldn't spread and was showing up incorrectly in the disease analyzer as well.

Going to old "system" basically amounts to the removal of randomly generated viruses altogether. Which once again calls the complete job of the virologist in question.

 

I'd say the disease system and the virologist job is in a dire need of a rework because as of now it is barely a job at all. I have a few ideas in mind, but nothing that can be implemented quickly.

However I'll submit something to combine the major and moderate diseases events into one, which would reduce the total amount of diseases introduced to the station.

[Contra]

I still think it needs to be toned down from 3-4 viruses a shift to something lower, wandering off the shuttle and immediately getting fucked by some random virus because it decided "lol im gonna advance through several stages in a short period of time" isn't fun. I get that its making the experience better as a virologist but feels like you WILL catch a deadly virus every single fucking shift, and its getting annoying. These viruses effect the entirety of the crew, not just medbay and antags. Fixing the bug of viruses not working is great, but it feels really overdone to have so many viruses in a single shift. 

My proposed solution is to either make it infect random crew again, because no one likes getting arrival spawned camped by a fuckin virus. And/or to tone down the commonality of the event, because getting every possible severity virus in a round isnt too far fetched. As for the virologist, perhaps we could implement a sentient virus antag or even better just port fish doctor.

[uc_guy]

To clarify: The virus does not infect the arriving person. They become the carrier of the virus, able to spread it but immune to the virus themselves.

The commonality will also be reduced to at most 2 a shift.

Edited September 3, 2022 by uc_guy