Pathology Feedback

[Telareti]

AFTER 1 week of playing pathology i can say i really enjoyed it, i never got to play it before when it was out, but playing this beta has been very fun, in ss13 i am not very nerdy in much like the thing i may know the must about that can be considered nerdy is tele sci, however with this pathology i have became a nerd in it and i enjoyed it so much i spent so many shifts with it and have positives and negatives about it, so at the start when it came out there was problem with outbreaks spreading really fast and no one knew what to do and most of the time the outbreak was started because someone would make a mistake, however with the nurfs and the people like me and stars and other friends becoming nerds in it, it has been very fun, i have noticed when someone who is expericed in it now almost no outbreaks happen and even if a natual one happens or one gets out some how, making a cure is very easy, recently for the pass 4 days i have been joining as a staffie and going to hop to be a plague doctor and as that i would watch over anyone who was inexpericed to make sure a outbreak happening was very low, however if no one was doing it and i was free to i would start finding good symtoms like brute healing and burn and in the best case the T5 that can revive dead people and after i would make sure the parasite had 0 spread and with only good symptoms and go round asking people who wants a good parasite and lots of people would say yes even some people who dont know me wanted it, so in the case where some people say there nothing good about it, i would disagree and i would say it can be really good even fun with the fun symtoms like the one that give people shades. other than making cute parasites i would make lots of cures for people who were big stinky and did not shower and it would take me around 30 sec to 1 min to get sample from blood 2 min to grow it then 1 min 30 seconds to make it into a cure, this was the same with natural or lab pathogens, when i got antag one time i decided to be a plague docter again but make parasite with bad symtoms however i would make sure spread was 0 and i would only give this to people i considered being rotten to others that shift for instance i think someone was being mean to a gene friend because he was being slow, so i injected the rotten person with the parasite it had 3 t5 bad in it but even then they mange to get the CDC before he died so i would say once people know to use the CDC curing should be easy even if you dont do pathology

OVERALL

positives i would say pathology is fun and can be used for good and even when something bad breaks out that being a natural or lab pathogen it is pretty easy to cure even with no pathology experience because of the CDC, the new changes to do with how you can see pathogens and how they have a lower chance to infect people i see as amazing changes, it got reduced to a 5% to 10% chance to still infect people this is not to low becuase some people will still catch it but not to high that it will cause everyone to get infected so i feel its good, in the days after that change i would see around 3 people who would catch it before it was cured, i would even be able to cure it before 2 people catch it if people come to med or med find out it exists and i feel that even with low spread, pathology is still fully functional since you can still inject people if they allow you so i feel this change just stops a lot of cases where a antag or self antag or even a mistake caused a large amount of people to get infected. since someone cant just make a T5 bad infection and spread it to everyone so it means its more to do with injecting people and asking.

second positives this one is more of my opinion but the way making large pathogens and splicing and doing the testing is great, when i do the testing part to find T5 its fun becuase its like a puzzle and you dont have to spend to long doing the splicing bit because once you have a big pathogen you will have a lot of numbers to test with so you can spend a lots of time doing that fun bit

the first negative i would say is one i noticed for maps where pathology is a med job or sci job is that the jobs would always be taken and this was mainly bad for med because the job got taken by people who had no care for healing or helping other than making a good parasite and the people who did wanna help people could not play med, thats why when i wanted to do pathology i would always start of as a staffie and become a plague doctor, so maybe adding it as a job like gene or somthing would be good.

second negative was how people being self antags or antags would make a TERRIBLE PATHOGIN and just make it max spread and infect everyone i feel like pathoolgy should not be played like that on rp at least, since it is not fun for anyone, however the nerf to do with spreading fixed some problems with this and so i dont think this is as bad as a problem as it was however if it still somehow happens when pathology is added back i feel theres many different ways to deal with it. the first way is simply what has already been done and reduce spread to low numbers for all pathogen ways of transmission other than injecting people that way people can still inject good parasites for people who want it and for the antags they can still infect people but its harder to infect a entire station. now if that does not work the harder thing that can be done is make it so pathogens cant spread and can only be given by injections this is a harsher way to do it but it could be done because it would mean all the good elements of pathology are still there but the antags spreading T5 is gone. this way pathology can still be on in RP and not have the antags or self antags making it terrible

[TheMaskedMan2]

I like Pathology. I want it to come back. I'm not going to claim it's perfect at all but I really don't think it is in a "Broken" state at all in it's current state and can easily be added to the current rounds and worked on over-time like most other features. Nothing really exploded - outside of the first few rounds where obviously everyone is messing around with it, but as the week went on I barely saw any disease outbreaks, and even then it was usually relatively mundane like bee-sneezing and just kinda fun. People complaining about it just aren't used to fighting diseases and knowing how to cure them, and trust me curing them is easy as can be.

For improvements - the interface is still kind of a mess. I talked in discord about this so I am sure you already know, but the "known samples" area could really be streamlined if it's supposed to be your little catalogue of symptoms and things. At the very least have it mention if it's good/bad. It'd also be nice to be able to keep track of what symptom each sample causes. I still think the chart itself is a bit of a pain to navigate and a whole interface change of maybe a flow chart or something else would be more appealing to look at - but that's asking for a lot.

The disease gas/sweat looks so much nicer now that it isn't slippy liquid and is more like blood splatters and spore gas. I still think the individual sprites for those could be spruced up a bit but still, looks much better than it did before.

As for people saying it doesn't interact much, I'll say it isn't any more anti-social than genetics. Perhaps a way to speed up your research from volunteers or ordering things from cargo to get better samples. I don't think it should "rely" on any outside department in its current state. Even in an ideal situation of you locking yourself into your room it can take forever to get an interesting disease and having to rely on John QM to constantly sample back crates or whatever would be a pain in the ass.

Also I gotta mention traitor stuff to make it more convenient. So maybe a few tiny ideas.
1. Traitor Disease Codex - (Big list of almost all the symptoms so you can make a custom disease without spending an hour searching, probably big cost.)
2. Disease Box - (Like random poison bottles, but instead it's diseases that are exclusively bad symptoms and go up to T4?)
3. Assassination Pathogen - (A very very deadly T5 Pathogen that can't be manipulated or spliced at all, it has zero spread so mostly used to give an unwitting person a bad disease.)

tl;dr - Make pathology regular again. It isn't broken at all and I enjoyed it, plus more feedback and changes get made when its tested by randoms more.

[Icraft343]

I think people on Goon1 would love making chaos with this, but I'm not the one to judge because I have like 5 rounds of experience in that server.

As for on GoonRP, it hasn't proven to be a big problem, at least near mid to late-test. In addition, there's also people that just wants to make wholesome and beneficial pathogens. Personal experience, curing pathogens is apparently not that hard either.

I think pathogens should be added again, it's a pretty nice game mechanic to re-add or add into the game.

[Oremir]

Played a bit of Patho on GoonRP and i have no experience with the old Patho system, so i doubt i'l have too much to add.

For me it was fun.
Much like it mentioned in this thread it did suffer from people playing Patho to be locked away in their own chambers for most of the round but i suppose that's what it is.
I suppose one thing i'd like is to see is, like someone mentioned earlier, maybe a visual indicator for "good" pathos or perhaps a way to name known Pathogens using either the Pathogen Console or perhaps to make an entry into Medtrack? It already has a database for known Viruses like Beserker etc. Maybe scanned pathos are added to a custom database where you can name them and add notes that are visible if people scan themselves? Just throwing mud at the wall here.