PDA record scanners hurt internal department cooperation & communication

[Luxizzle]

There are currently 2 PDA programs that allow you to quickly look up records in both security and medical records. Medical records' scanner got added last year around this time and more recently the security records scanner.

These are great, and obviously fulfill their purpose, but maybe they're a bit too good at their job. Especially on the roleplay servers, it's gotten very normal to quickly hit a body with your PDA to see the person's traits to check for puritan. And I'm somewhat fine with this, I enjoyed watching my body get blown to bits when I popped out of the cloner, I must admit. Puritan has almost become an easy +2 points, due to this, though.

But the larger problem I have is that this hurts cooperation and communication in your department, and this shows up more with the security records scanner. It used to be very normal to quickly ask over intercom to the person at the front desk to ask them for anybody's records, and now it's just an easy click away. As an avid security borg (as much as a joke brobocop is, it's fun, you should try it) I am, I'm basically useless now. I enjoyed having to be able to take a cumbersome job over from the AI to look up records or set someone to arrest when nobody else could. Man the front desk or note evidence in records.

But with these scanners, there's no more “Hey, can you look up the records of John Stowaway?” or “Hey, why is Johnny Murdernuts on arrest?”.

These 2 issues combined make me conflicted, on one side they're powerful and obviously a band-aid over the somewhat cumbersomeness of secmate & medtrak, but on the other side they make puritan a free +2 trait and security records are too easy to look up to even bother asking anybody at security.

I have a few solutions in mind for this.

1. Hide traits or some select traits from medical records. Does not fix mentioned communication problem.
   
2. Add a trait that “corrupts” your records, so fields like traits & allergies are unreadable on medical records. Does not fix mentioned communication problem
   
3. Move the security records scanner program somehow to a utility token purchase.
   
4. Remove scanners altogether.
   

I can't really say how much the scanners affect the classic servers and how much these solutions would affect them, so I'd love to hear opinions from both sides.

[Ikea]

Maybe remove security records program and give the functions of that program to the Record trak to make it a more attractive option? Honestly just removing traits being shown in medtrak and have only allergies shown just seems like a good change regardless of communication (this would be 99% for puritan). I am of the take that players should not be able to know that someone is a puritan without meta knowledge, that way when a puritan accidentally gets cloned or whatever the puritan has no excuse to get angry for them getting gibbed, it should help a lot with the toxicity of that trait.

[Mouse]

smh at everyone who doesn't intentionally clone puritans repeatedly until they set dnr

[nefarious6th]

sec records is nice for in-the-field stuff but with the automatic scanner AND records AND recordtrak all for mobile officers, the records PC is almost useless now.

The record scanner and records could be moved onto a new PDA cartridge to buy through the vendor maybe?

I don't care about the med scanners, same deal I guess, but I dont check for puritan as religiously as some people. Honestly, puritan as a trait could get lowered in point value to a 0, even. Or removed. Setting DNR manually every time someone tries to clone is a pain, but if people are getting really toxic about it, then maybe it doesnt need to be in the game.

[Flourish]

[*]Move the security records scanner program somehow to a utility token purchase.

Personally I'd be fine with this! We need more cool utility purchases anyways.

The same goes for the medical records scanner - maybe we could convert it from a PDA program that everyone has to a less common handheld scanner thing?

Though I'm not sure either of these changes would really help with the interdepartmental cooperation / communication side of things.

[Ikea]

Doesnt recordtrak already yknow, track records. Currently I barely use that thing because honestly I dont care that much about setting stowaways off of arrest (and thats only where that thing is used.) Moving the program onto recordtrak seems the most fitting and makes that (in my view) unattractive option more attractive, though if this is done the excess recordtrak from maps should probably be removed.

[Luxizzle]

Obviously my solutions aren't the solutions that have to be chosen, if it was up to me, I'd just completely remove the scanners. If not, I'd prefer having the program moved to utility token and hiding traits and maybe having some more advanced way to check traits in some kind of way. I could see wanting to have a way to detect puritan, but just not as easy as it is right now.

[Kotlol]

In my opinion, anything that requires ADVANCED CHECKING.
Either needs to be a utility that's not on the PDA or You have to walk to the console.

Either you expend an item slot for a device or..
you will be using a console constantly to check things.
It's as simple as that.

[cyberTripping]

The big thing with the med record scanner is that, before it was added, it was just nonviable to ever check records. People seem focused on puritan here, but manually going to check a record before cloning is, while annoying and would never be done, still conceivable. The true effect of record scanners is allergies and, on rp, medical notes: nobody is ever going to torture themselves with medtrak in the middle of treating someone. Before medical scanners existed, there was a functional 0% chance that anyone would even see a character's medical notes, much less act upon them for the purposes of rp.

[Cal]

Give sec fingerprinting kits with dust and have them need to scan that stuff to slow down the process a little bit or something.

Make medical traits need a blood sample put into a vial and then your PDA's pen slot to be analyzed

Makes them a tad clunkier to do in a natural way

[Kotlol]

Give sec fingerprinting kits with dust and have them need to scan that stuff to slow down the process a little bit or something.

Make medical traits need a blood sample put into a vial and then your PDA's pen slot to be analyzed

Makes them a tad clunkier to do in a natural way

Perfection! Now we can have forensics be there again!