Removal of cloning

[WingedYordle]

Hello.

Thanks for taking the time to read my suggestion!

As the title states, I would like to remove cloning from medical.

Reason why to removing cloning is because players now are way to dependent on it and ruining the very little roleplay we have by not taking being alive more seriously.

Players (grey tides, security, and civillians) just act without the consequences of their actions, knowing full well that if they die, someone will just drag their corpse to medbay and clone them back to life.

I feel like if we removed cloning, roleplay would increase, medical doctors will have more of a role on this station instead of just fixing broken ribs, chemists would be more depended on instead of making space drugs and meth all of the time.

If not, maybe have it as a research thing, were they need to research whatever category it belongs too and unlock the cloning circuits and have engineering build the cloning room.

 

TLDR: Cloning ruining role-play as players do not care about their life as cloning will bring them back to life instantly.

 

Sorry if this was poorly written. I am here to answer any questions if I left out anything..

[SomeGuy9283]

While the intention is good, SR and defibs would make this a moot ges-

Wait, they would have to work to unlock cloning? Hmm, interesting.

As for bad medbay staff well... wouldn't be SS13 without incompetence, right? Seriously though, if you can propose a more bottom-up solution by targeting that, I'm all ears.

Personally, I think it would be a lot more punishing to the lazy doctors to make cloning have more drawbacks. To remove it will punish those who really need it due to their jobs, rather than recklessness(miners, security), while those who abuse it will simply move on to the other methods available.

[Dinarzad]

55 minutes ago, Trubus said:

Hello.

Thanks for taking the time to read my suggestion!

As the title states, I would like to remove cloning from medical.

Reason why to removing cloning is because players now are way to dependent on it and ruining the very little roleplay we have by not taking being alive more seriously.

Players (grey tides, security, and civillians) just act without the consequences of their actions, knowing full well that if they die, someone will just drag their corpse to medbay and clone them back to life.

I feel like if we removed cloning, roleplay would increase, medical doctors will have more of a role on this station instead of just fixing broken ribs, chemists would be more depended on instead of making space drugs and meth all of the time.

If not, maybe have it as a research thing, were they need to research whatever category it belongs too and unlock the cloning circuits and have engineering build the cloning room.

 

TLDR: Cloning ruining role-play as players do not care about their life as cloning will bring them back to life instantly.

 

Sorry if this was poorly written. I am here to answer any questions if I left out anything..

As a looooong term medical player I can tell you, removing cloning not only won't fix anything, it'll make things worse.
Cloning is not the problem. Cloning is a simple revival method, sure, but it doesn't work on every race, and it is easily sabotaged and destroyed.  Cloning takes a long time, spits out people with brain damage and genetic defects and in the case of Vox/Slimes doesn't even work, and is extremely hard in the case of Plasmamen.

Cloning has been in SS13 a VERY long time, and as someone from former H-RP Servers, it was never a source of problems. The problem we have is player mentality and the sheer NUMBER of revives you have. A Body can't be cloned for reasons? No problem SR/Defib it. Normally that's the sort of thing requiring science to really upgrade the Cloner to perform (Cloning husks for example), but as it is now Medical can do that on their own with very little issue. They Start with Defibs and SR is easy enough for chemists to make on their own.

Again. Cloning itself is NOT the issue, it's oversaturation of revives coupled with a very high Power Game mentality of :"More effective to do X then Y" as opposed to roleplay. Removing cloning will not fix that nor make people roleplay, it'll just encourage them to power game even harder to avoid death.

Until Mentality/Community gets more on the same page about Medium RP needing both RP -and- gamepaly, as opposed to a min-max mentality, this problem isn't gonan be fixed by a silver bullet.

[ZN23X]

I think it's a matter of attitude. I like to try to take death and cloning (sickness) seriously but not everyone does.

I recall at the end of a shift me crying and pounding my fist against the side of the escape pod because our HOS sacrificed themself so we can get away and I was like "Goddamn you Alice! Had to be the hero!" and one of the other people was like "Hey...relax...theyll be back next shift"

RUINER!

Rule when playing games online. Someone is always going to be there to push everything to the max and make the game less enjoyable than it's capable of being, with or without even knowing they are doing it. 

As for wanting more RP on the server. Be the change you want to see.

Edited April 5, 2017 by ZN23X

[WingedYordle]

28 minutes ago, Dinarzad said:

As a looooong term medical player I can tell you, removing cloning not only won't fix anything, it'll make things worse.
Cloning is not the problem. Cloning is a simple revival method, sure, but it doesn't work on every race, and it is easily sabotaged and destroyed.  Cloning takes a long time, spits out people with brain damage and genetic defects and in the case of Vox/Slimes doesn't even work, and is extremely hard in the case of Plasmamen.

Cloning has been in SS13 a VERY long time, and as someone from former H-RP Servers, it was never a source of problems. The problem we have is player mentality and the sheer NUMBER of revives you have. A Body can't be cloned for reasons? No problem SR/Defib it. Normally that's the sort of thing requiring science to really upgrade the Cloner to perform (Cloning husks for example), but as it is now Medical can do that on their own with very little issue. They Start with Defibs and SR is easy enough for chemists to make on their own.

Again. Cloning itself is NOT the issue, it's oversaturation of revives coupled with a very high Power Game mentality of :"More effective to do X then Y" as opposed to roleplay. Removing cloning will not fix that nor make people roleplay, it'll just encourage them to power game even harder to avoid death.

Until Mentality/Community gets more on the same page about Medium RP needing both RP -and- gamepaly, as opposed to a min-max mentality, this problem isn't gonan be fixed by a silver bullet.

I've done my share of medical to feel that cloning is over used and depended on. Cloning doesn't have be completely removed either, as I said, is science research for the cloning circuit boards, engineering could build a cloning. Paradise has a low population of slimes and vox anyway, it is conisisted more on vulps, humans, and tajarans. I feel like removing cloning and adding another operating room would add too the roleplay and allow more medical doctors to learn how to revive and not depend on cloning. Brain transplant, SR the patient after repairing the body. Power game as they will, if it makes it so they avoid dying, then solution is mine as that is what I am trying to get rid of.

[WingedYordle]

1 hour ago, ZN23X said:

I think it's a matter of attitude. I like to try to take death and cloning (sickness) seriously but not everyone does.

I recall at the end of a shift me crying and pounding my fist against the side of the escape pod because our HOS sacrificed themself so we can get away and I was like "Goddamn you Alice! Had to be the hero!" and one of the other people was like "Hey...relax...theyll be back next shift"

RUINER!

Rule when playing games online. Someone is always going to be there to push everything to the max and make the game less enjoyable than it's capable of being, with or without even knowing they are doing it. 

As for wanting more RP on the server. Be the change you want to see.

I play as Wolf, each round is a new round. If Wolf is NT rep, he only knows NT rep. There is no meta knowledge, if there is, bare minimal. As captain, I don't accept medical help from my CE.

[WingedYordle]

2 hours ago, SomeGuy9283 said:

While the intention is good, SR and defibs would make this a moot ges-

Wait, they would have to work to unlock cloning? Hmm, interesting.

As for bad medbay staff well... wouldn't be SS13 without incompetence, right? Seriously though, if you can propose a more bottom-up solution by targeting that, I'm all ears.

Personally, I think it would be a lot more punishing to the lazy doctors to make cloning have more drawbacks. To remove it will punish those who really need it due to their jobs, rather than recklessness(miners, security), while those who abuse it will simply move on to the other methods available.

I didn't mean to say medbay was bad, they truly aren't. I just wanted to give them something to do. All they do is scan, throw in cryo, throw in cloning and throw them out.

[ZN23X]

12 minutes ago, Trubus said:

I play as Wolf, each round is a new round. If Wolf is NT rep, he only knows NT rep. There is no meta knowledge, if there is, bare minimal. As captain, I don't accept medical help from my CE.

I used to do that but I've become friends with too many regulars and IC we are all familiar with each other to some degree. Also hard to treat each round like a new round in sec. Even if you don't want to, you involuntarily carry over stuff you've learned from previous rounds to do your job smarter and better.

[Dinarzad]

26 minutes ago, Trubus said:

I've done my share of medical to feel that cloning is over used and depended on. Cloning doesn't have be completely removed either, as I said, is science research for the cloning circuit boards, engineering could build a cloning. Paradise has a low population of slimes and vox anyway, it is conisisted more on vulps, humans, and tajarans. I feel like removing cloning and adding another operating room would add too the roleplay and allow more medical doctors to learn how to revive and not depend on cloning. Brain transplant, SR the patient after repairing the body. Power game as they will, if it makes it so they avoid dying, then solution is mine as that is what I am trying to get rid of.

The problem is that -is- removing Cloning in practicality.
The state you're talking about is exactly the same state that Telescience exists in, and I can count on one hand the number of times I see that reconstructed in a month.

If you make Cloning require construction it is effectively removed because everyone is going to use SR and Defibs, which are almost universally superior options in every case of revival, save for when someone has broken their entire skeleton. No one is going to be bothered to construct a usually inferior form of revival, and Geneticists will have literally no responsibilities but to fuck off in their lab (They're supposed to create and distribute Clean SR's for cloned dudes, and are SUPPOSED to handle cloning in the first place.)

Cloning is already the WORST option to use in reviving someone in most circumstances, not the least because you can only revive a single body at a time, unless someone makes additional cloning pods and the time it takes to fully clone someone is not a short one (Speed-cloning is on the slate to be nerfed if it hasn't gone through already.)

Consider the amount of corpse back up that medical gets when shit storms happen. Back when Cloning was the only form of revival that was a big deal, you could REALLY get bogged down in revives, especially in Blob or nuke op tier shitstorms.  And there's a few ways of killing someone that leaves them unable to be cloned unless science has upgraded the machine.

Reliance on Cloning isn't a problem with Cloning that's a problem with MENTALITY, that's people being LAZY and min-maxing in the same fashion as a DnD player making a Dwarf Fighter for 2 levels to get special perks before going strait Barb for max damage, strictly for numbers and not for roleplay. That's a PLAYER problem, not a mechanical one.

Edited April 5, 2017 by Dinarzad

[WingedYordle]

3 minutes ago, Dinarzad said:

The problem is that -is- removing Cloning in practicality.
The state you're talking about is exactly the same state that Telescience exists in, and I can count on one hand the number of times I see that reconstructed in a month.

If you make Cloning require construction it is effectively removed because everyone is going to use SR and Defibs, which are almost universally superior options in every case of revival, save for when someone has broken their entire skeleton. No one is going to be bothered to construct a usually inferior form of revival, and Geneticists will have literally no responsibilities but to fuck off in their lab (They're supposed to create and distribute Clean SR's for cloned dudes, and are SUPPOSED to handle cloning in the first place.)

Cloning is already the WORST option to use in reviving someone in most circumstances, not the least because you can only revive a single body at a time, unless someone makes additional cloning pods and the time it takes to fully clone someone is not a short one (Speed-cloning is on the slate to be nerfed if it hasn't gone through already.)

Consider the amount of corpse back up that medical gets when shit storms happen. Back when Cloning was the only form of revival that was a big deal, you could REALLY get bogged down in revives, especially in bloc or nuke op tier shitstorms.  And there's a few ways of killing someone that leaves them unable to be cloned unless science has upgraded the machine.

Reliance on Cloning isn't a problem with Cloning that's a problem with MENTALITY, that's people being LAZY and min-maxing in the same fashion as a DnD player making a Dwarf Fighter for 2 levels to get special perks before going strait Barb for max damage, strictly for numbers and not for roleplay. That's a PLAYER problem, not a mechanical one.

Then maybe we should see what would happen with cloning removed for a week, take a vote.

[Tayswift]

Completely agree with Dinarzad. If you want people to treat death more seriously, there's a lot you can do to question them and encourage people to RP better. For example, people often like to make jokes about dying/finding your corpse when they make suit sensors announcements. It's pretty easy to just go "Wtf? Why are you talking about dying? Stop scaring the crew! It's literally 5 minutes into the shift". It's often pretty easy to expose powergamers if you question them enough. Their actions are irrationally paranoid from an IC point of view.

Also, I think it'd help if we made it canon that there are many, many shifts in between shifts that we play. That way, nobody has an excuse to be paranoid.

Edited April 5, 2017 by Tayswift

[Dinarzad]

It's not that simple. That requires map edits, and loading that map onto the server, or an Admin to go in right as a round starts to remove the cloner.
This is like saying "Sec is way too reliant on executing antagonists, they should have to BUILD their execution chamber to encourage more use of Perma."

[ZN23X]

17 minutes ago, Trubus said:

Then maybe we should see what would happen with cloning removed for a week, take a vote.

Chemists would prioritize SR. Again talking about min/maxing, if the CMO gives the omnizine from their spray gun to chemist, you'll have 90 SR pills within the first 5 minutes.

I play chemist primarily when I play medical and I honestly hate SR because it feels too easy, but if you don't make it you have ravenous doctors going REEEEEE kicking your door down.

If you want to do an experiment about people caring about dying, remove the magic pill

Mind you I don't even think doing that will accomplish what you are hoping it would. I agree with the others that it's just about people needing to be more invested in RP. There's no way to force that. People need to want to do it because they enjoy doing it, and realistically it's not something everyone enjoys.

Edited April 5, 2017 by ZN23X

[WingedYordle]

Maybe removing the SR could be the next step

42 minutes ago, ZN23X said:

Chemists would prioritize SR. Again talking about min/maxing, if the CMO gives the omnizine from their spray gun to chemist, you'll have 90 SR pills within the first 5 minutes.

I play chemist primarily when I play medical and I honestly hate SR because it feels too easy, but if you don't make it you have ravenous doctors going REEEEEE kicking your door down.

If you want to do an experiment about people caring about dying, remove the magic pill

Mind you I don't even think doing that will accomplish what you are hoping it would. I agree with the others that it's just about people needing to be more invested in RP. There's no way to force that. People need to want to do it because they enjoy doing it, and realistically it's not something everyone enjoys.

 

[Shadeykins]

2 hours ago, Tayswift said:

Completely agree with Dinarzad. If you want people to treat death more seriously, there's a lot you can do to question them and encourage people to RP better. For example, people often like to make jokes about dying/finding your corpse when they make suit sensors announcements. It's pretty easy to just go "Wtf? Why are you talking about dying? Stop scaring the crew! It's literally 5 minutes into the shift". It's often pretty easy to expose powergamers if you question them enough. Their actions are irrationally paranoid from an IC point of view.

Also, I think it'd help if we made it canon that there are many, many shifts in between shifts that we play. That way, nobody has an excuse to be paranoid.

Gallows humour is a thing.

There's already a PR up to address "lol cloning" which introduces instability.

I think the issue is the perception of cloning in and of itself - irrespective of how much work it creates I always prefer to defib or use SR because of the massive ethical quandary that cloning presents. IE: You've elected to let your patient die and have a doppleganger take their place.

People generally have no IC appreciation for that, though.

[Tayswift]

1 hour ago, Shadeykins said:

Gallows humour is a thing.

Think about it this way. If you got on a plane for a flight and the captain said, "Welcome aboard! Please fasten your seatbelts so when we crash, you don't go flying out of your seat and break your neck against the ceiling!" Sure, gallows humor, but not an appropriate place when you're in a position of authority with lives entrusted to your care. It doesn't inspire confidence and it's not something that would be said if there wasn't meta knowledge that there are antags out to kill this shift, since extended happens so rarely.

[pinatacolada]

3 hours ago, Tayswift said:

If you got on a plane for a flight and the captain said, "Welcome aboard! Please fasten your seatbelts so when we crash, you don't go flying out of your seat and break your neck against the ceiling!"

You fasten your seatbelts in a plane so that if/when it enters moderate to severe turbulence you don't hit the ceiling and break your neck and die. They won't help you in a crash, unless they're the harness type, and even so...

 

As for cloning, it's a player mentality thing. That allied to the fact that you need to basically die next to someone with a defib for it to be of any use (seriously, the time is too short to be of any use). Over the past months people have been arriving in medbay around 3 to 5 minutes past their time of death. Of course that means the cloner will be used more.

[Tayswift]

1 hour ago, pinatacolada said:

You fasten your seatbelts in a plane so that if/when it enters moderate to severe turbulence you don't hit the ceiling and break your neck and die. They won't help you in a crash, unless they're the harness type, and even so...

I'm aware that in most plane crashes, everyone dies instantly on impact with the ground, but that's beside the point. I'm just giving an example of where morbid "jokes" would be inappropriate. "Max your suit sensors so we can find your mangled corpse in maint!" isn't that much different. In the worst case, a very thorough antag would render suit sensors as useless as seatbelts in a plane crash.

[Happy Tim]

I would say SR is the bigger issue than cloning itself. 

While it's true that cloning can be out of the jail card situation it can go a bit hectic when the population overflows.

And still it takes time to clone somebody. SR on the other hand is insta magical life juice

9 hours ago, Dinarzad said:

Again. Cloning itself is NOT the issue, it's oversaturation of revives coupled with a very high Power Game mentality of :"More effective to do X then Y" as opposed to roleplay. Removing cloning will not fix that nor make people roleplay, it'll just encourage them to power game even harder to avoid death.

Until Mentality/Community gets more on the same page about Medium RP needing both RP -and- gamepaly, as opposed to a min-max mentality, this problem isn't gonan be fixed by a silver bullet.

I really like that quote from Dinarzad, I think it summs up the situation perfectly.

It opens a discussion for more thoughts, like some people treating ss13 like a competitive game and such and trying to "win" over others.

But that are the problems of Medium Role-Play, really when L-RPers and H-RPers clash with each other.

I think that getting people back to life should be a little bit harder, maybe give clones a longer hibernation period that they would need to be fully formed? And give additional cons and disabilities if someone would rush it? I dunno. It's hard to rebalance one revival method without rebalacing the others, really.

If cloning will be nerfed we will be more dependant on defibs and SR (we kinda are right now). Likewise, if we do something with one of the other two the cloning could become the primary way of revival. The problem is to make returning from the dead more... meaningful to a player? Does that make sense?

[Birdtalon]

I think you are attributing the issue that people don't take dying seriously falsely. I would imagine that people not taking it seriously is a result from the fact that this is a video game and not from the fact that you can be cloned. 

I play an unclonable race anyway so this wouldn't impact me, but I don't think removing cloning will be the magic fix you believe it to be.

[Jovaniph]

22 minutes ago, Birdtalon said:

I think you are attributing the issue that people don't take dying seriously falsely. I would imagine that people not taking it seriously is a result from the fact that this is a video game and not from the fact that you can be cloned. 

I play an unclonable race anyway so this wouldn't impact me, but I don't think removing cloning will be the magic fix you believe it to be.

I was waiting for someone to say this.

edit: although now that I think about it. Removing cloning and making it something that requires to be build mid-round doesn't seem like a bad idea. Nothing would really change. It'll just be something medical could benefit from instead of being reliant.

Edited April 5, 2017 by Jovaniph

[ZN23X]

 

31 minutes ago, Birdtalon said:

 I would imagine that people not taking it seriously is a result from the fact that this is a video game and not from the fact that you can be cloned. 

I think that's why many here keep focusing on the RP aspect. When RPing you are trying to imagine how your character feels and how they would react based on the situation they are in as opposed to how you feel and react based on the fact that you are playing a game. But again not everyone enjoys RP...which is fine. The blessing and curse of a MRP server, you get a bit of both LRP and HRP players.   

I imagine as much as HRPers look at the LRPers and think "Ugh...this shit..." the LRPers look at the HRPers and think "Ugh...this shit..."

It's still a more stable environment than a pure LRP server and it's not as slow and cringey as a HRP server.

Edited April 5, 2017 by ZN23X

[Dinarzad]

Cloning, mechanically is not a problem and in the effort to not sound like a broken record I'll skip on to elaborate other points.

The primary issue we have, as I and others have said is really "Mentality. The Min-max mentality that a lot of players have had lately, exists both in departments (Scientists who deride anyone not getting RnD done in sub 5 picoseconds, Doctors who opt to just let people die and clone them cuz they can't be assed to fix their skeleton, etc.) and more in general, such as antags who focus so hard on greentexting and "Winning the game" to the point that they effectively make the game moot to begin with, because nothing happens.  Like a game of DnD where the party min-maxxed and power gamed and killed their Big villain in the first session and now are left with nothing to fucking do.

But the secondary and tertiary issues we have lumped onto that Community Mentality issue is, like Birdtalon said, nobody is going to take dying in a Space Fart simulator that seriously. Odds are you're gonna go "Aw god damn it..." as you death-gasp and start up youtube or salt around in D-chat until you either get revived or round ends. 

The Tertiary problem is simply innate to the fact we're Medium RP, we're middle between very *VERY* Different groups of people. On most RP focused or HRP servers, Death and cloning tends to be pretty strictly enforced. Clone Memory Disorder is administratively enforced, if you pop out of a clone tube going 'BOB MCDOUGLAS KILLED ME!' Odds are you;re gonna get bwoinked an told not to do that.
We do not do that here. Nor do I think we should, but it's also foolish to dismiss it as a problem that brings down RP Standards overall, it's pretty hard to be immersed sometimes when people go do things like "Wow I was a nuke op just an hour ago!"

Higher RP inclined crowds EXPECT that sort of stuff though, because they feel fundamentally basic to keeping a good RP environment, there has to be -some- order in the chaos, in the sameway a DM sometimes has to interject and tell his players "You would have no knowledge of that, sorry." when they start acting out of character and generally fishy.
But Lower RP crowds don't want that that. They're not here to write a fuckin space novella or take part in a space soap opera, they're here to play the fuckin game, and that's just as acceptable a style too.

But right now we're a "Wild West" when it comes to that sort of thing, everyone can do everything and do it all the time and it's turning into a cacophony of just utter *NOISE*, everyone is playing their own instrument to their own beat.  At some point, a standard has to be developed, a point where not just staff but the community as a whole has to do something *REALLY* Hard and find a middle ground, a standard of RP procedure that the LRP crowds can accept and endure to keep from alienating the HRP crowds, and the HRP crowds need to be willing to bend a little here and there for the people are are just here to play a game.
Because at some point you DO have to lay down a gentle "I'm sorry, that makes no sense for you or the theme of things." Otherwise players WILL keep running with that inch you gave them.
TL;DR: There is no TLDR, and I'm sorry I made a wall.

Edited April 5, 2017 by Dinarzad

[ZN23X]

Only thing that sucks for the RP crowd is the non RPers can effectively destroy their environment they've been trying to create unless you completely ignore the LRPer where as people RPing doesn't really hurt people who aren't aside from maybe them being like "OH MY GOD, CAN YOU PLEASE STOP TALKING AND JUST FINISH MY FREAKING SURGERY" or something like that.

I wouldn't mind an exact standard for how we are supposed to view previous shifts. I've found there are broad and varying viewpoints in this regard. Hell now I'm gonna start a new post based on just that cuz I think the results will be interesting. Stay tuned...

[Rurik]

Id be all for the removal of cloning, since I have a unfair bias it trivializes death in my opinion. Why care if someone killed and spaced my IC work buddy, since I will just find his body and bring it back to be cloned? If the antag that kills me doesn't go the 100% to take out my brain and throw it in acid (I think that was how its done, been awhile), I have a decent chance of being found and revived depending on the hiding place of my body. If the antag does go the 100% to make sure your dead for good, then people complain that all they care about is greentexting. Which of course is false, and directed at people who don't like the person they killed coming out of the cloning yelling that said people killed them (Not hinting for CMD). That's not much fun to anyone is it? But anyways I digress. 

Then there is the whole issue of SR, which I don't know much about except for that it can revive people as well. Then there is the whole clash of LRP and HRP as is mentioned above which I don't feel like getting into. Then there is the argument that removing cloning will do nothing since its the "mentality." To which Id argue the mechanics create the mentality, not the other way around. However I agree that removing cloning will do nothing significant since SR still revives people (No I'm not hinting for SR to be removed as well). To top it all off, removing cloning would create many more dead people, which as of the moment we still don't have a reliable way to get back in the round. Its still perfectly possible for RNG to dictate that not a single event will be one that spawns another player during an entire round to my understanding. Which of course leads to a different issue.

TL;DR: This is a multitude of issues that also invited their mother and brother issues to masquerade as a single issue.

Edited April 5, 2017 by Rurik