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+--- Thread: Minute changes to curing pathogens (/showthread.php?tid=13333)
Minute changes to curing pathogens - LizzyDamska - 11-13-2019
There's been a lot of discussion on the discord regarding pathology and what exactly is wrong with it, and one of the things that always comes up is curing pathogens. At the moment, it's extremely likely that a deadly pathogen results in a shuttle call rather than anyone bothering to actually try curing it. The CDC is slow, costly, and delivers too few cures, and the pathology method of synthesising cures is similar in that it's far too much effort for only one(!!) cure per attempt, as well as frequently having obscure and difficult to obtain suppressants (looking at you, polonium). The biggest issue with the pathology method is the familiarity it requires with pathology - you need to know how to isolate the pathogen, how to analyse it, which antibodies pair with which types of pathogen and how to identify the suppressant. That's a lot of wiki-diving to be able to fix something that's potentially round-ending, and while I do think knowledge of the system should be rewarded, I don't think it should be the only way to go about it. In theory, the CDC is the layman's method of curing, but it's too costly to be practical most of the time, and it feels sort of like a hand-wavey solution.
Flab made two points that I think were really good; first, that the difficulty in curing a pathogen should primarily be in distribution, and I think I mostly agree with this. You're inevitably going to run up against the issue of distribution anyway, and it leads to some fun situations like you can already see in modes like rev, nukie, and blob to an extent, where weapons and loyalty implants have to be distributed among the crew. I still believe that some of the difficulty should be in the process of synthesising itself, but I think there are ways to balance the two that are better than what we have now. The other point I believe to be pretty reasonable is that the expectation to cure pathogens should fall on doctors, not on some external department like QM. This is what I meant when I said the CDC felt "hand-wavey". It takes that role away from the doctors almost entirely. In theory, this should already be the case, as pathology is a sub-department of medical, but it's such an obtuse and hard to learn mechanic that most doctors have no idea how to make a cure.
Now, personally, I think pathology is due a rework, but I understand that's a huge undertaking that nobody is willing to do right now, and that's fine. I believe there are relatively small changes that could be made in a reasonable amount of time to make pathology less frustrating for people that don't know it.
- Make basic anti-agents halt the progress of a pathogen (but not cure it! Existing symptoms should remain) and give them all a recipe. I'm talking about anti-viral agent and spaceacillin and the like here. It might be necessary to remove the beakers you get through the pathogen dispenser if this is done so that pathogens aren't rendered complete jokes, but this would allow doctors with a limited understanding of pathology to be effective in stopping a pathogen while the CDC and more benevolent pathologists work their magic.
- Remove the more obscure chems from the suppressant list. In particular I'm talking about ketamine, polonium, and uranium. These chems are pretty rough to get in your average round, and so it's unlikely that a pathogen with one of these as a suppressant will get cured at all over having the shuttle be called. Really, I think the whole suppressant list could be cut down quite a bit to remove some of the guessing aspect (as in having more than one chem per category), but maybe that's a step too far.
- Make the synth-o-matic dispense more cures by default - maybe depending on the amount of suppressant and anti-agent used? It feels like a kick in the nuts to go the effort of figuring out and synthesising the cure only to get one(!!) vial of cure for a minute+ of work. I'm aware there's modules out there that boost the amount of cure that gets ejected, but realistically, who ever gets them? Nobody ever has an incentive to get them, and it's just busywork.
RE: Minute changes to curing pathogens - Doctor Zaius - 11-13-2019
Pretty much all of this, yeah. The more than one cure at a time thing is particularly vital, as it stands it's more or less impossible to practically cure a plague using pathology itself, which seems nutty. And yeah having something like polonium as the anti-agent basically means that that disease ain't gettin' cured no matter what.
RE: Minute changes to curing pathogens - Ion Mage - 11-13-2019
These are some excellent proposals. I've been RPing a pathology researcher for a while now and while I've gathered some knowledge on pathogens from it, actually using that knowledge takes way to much time. I also have the worst luck and too often the suppressant is one of the ultra-rares. For all the hours I've put into it, I can count the number of times I made a working cure on one hand. In a test environment with monkeys. Even having rehearsed all the steps, there is simply no way I'd be able to cure it on time.
And pathogens act way to fast as well, especially if player-made. Each time I attempted to cure an actual outbreak, 75% of the crew had already been infected. Including me. Even rushing as fast as I could, I died before I could even get halfway there. The idea to make suppresants on there own halt the disease is an excellent idea.
RE: Minute changes to curing pathogens - Caecilius - 11-14-2019
While we're at it, we should also be able to cure all disease types without having to go get the debris field upgrades. Adding another 5-10 minutes minimum to cure time on an already potentially round ending disease is stupid and frustrating, as are the rare suppressants ("Whoops, I hope you have a sleepy pen" is a dumb question to ask non antagonists, especially in a life or death situation).