[CLOSED PR] Allow cloning rotten people, add additional cloner defects depending o...

[Cherman0]

Roboticists are not pointless just because you don't like being borged.

Agreed. People only suicide upon borging because getting cloned if far too conveneient and these people developed a spoiled attitude because of this.

I really dont like dismissing the huge majority of people who think getting borged sucks as "spoiled". Strictly speaking, they're correct. It does suck. The game gives you an option to play as a human or as a cyborg at roundstart, meaning that getting revived as something you didnt pick necessarily means that youve been forced into an option that you specifically refused.

Like, imagine if people took to monkey-cloning dead cyborgs as humans instead of rebuilding them as cyborgs. The flood of complaints would be biblical in scale. But people dont do that out of a general understanding that cyborg players picked cyborg because they wanted to play it. The notion that people who play humans and want the same consideration are "spoiled" is frankly just offensive.

[Lord_earthfire]

I really dont like dismissing the huge majority of people who think getting borged sucks as "spoiled". Strictly speaking, they're correct. It does suck. The game gives you an option to play as a human or as a cyborg at roundstart, meaning that getting revived as something you didnt pick necessarily means that youve been forced into an option that you specifically refused.

You got this the other way around:

borg is not an alternative to be a human: It is an explicit downgrade to less capability in exchange for being able to further participate in the game.

People dying in this game and being only partially or downgraded replaced is core part of the game of a station that falls into utter disarray, with the shuttle call being the cumulation of all this. And you can directly measure on how well that replacement works on how late the shuttle gets called.

Of course some people choose to start as the lesser variant of a crewmember from game-start. But don't make the mistake people to choose less capable or challenging roles/mutantraces with these being considered equal gameplay-wise. Borgs having no hands and relying on human interaction is there for a reason.

[Cherman0]

borg is not an alternative to be a human

It is though. Your two options are to be a human or a cyborg. Functionally, neither is strictly better. Cyborgs are immune to a huge amount of damage sources and have a lot of extremely powerful tools at their limitless disposal. In exchange, they have to follow a stricter ruleset and they cant interact with a lot of things in the same ways that humans can.

For people who agree to those restrictions from the get-go, cyborg is not "lesser". Its just how the game works. But for people who get revived into it, theyve been stripped of most of their ability to play the game how they wanted to and have an additional ruleset to abide by to boot. And that sucks, and their only recourse is to just die. The fact that cyborg is selectable roundstart sort of necessarily means that all the people who didnt pick it dont want it, at least not more than they want what they did pick.

Fundamentally what I disagree with the most is that roboticist is (or should be) the "reviver" job. Once upon a time, the cloner was the domain of genetics and medical doctors didnt even have access to it. The trouble with that was (aside from the terminal tunnel vision of the average geneticist) that there isnt much room for making an interesting amount of job content in reviving people. You can add minigames and bells and whistles and whatever, but fundamentally someone else has to wait on all that and so any "engagement" you add to the player performing the revival is subtracted from the person actually getting revived.

This issue really stems into roboticist's role in general beyond reviving, as any amount of cyborg-related tedium that gets added in order to justify robotics existing adds an equal amount of just afking as a cyborg while the roboticist ticks of their checklist.

[Flourish]

I agree with other commenters on how this PR seems like it'd make death even less meaningful in how it further reduces the friction / work necessary to re-alive someone again. I also agree that I would be fine with this if it were paired with the removal of pre-scans.

[Kotlol]

I agree with other commenters on how this PR seems like it'd make death even less meaningful in how it further reduces the friction / work necessary to re-alive someone again. I also agree that I would be fine with this if it were paired with the removal of pre-scans.

I just thought of something...

If we add this...and remove pre-scans. We need to keep the "dead patient" in the scanner at ALL TIMES during the cloning process.
This means the dead body cannot be used as bio-mass for the new body wich is a nerf.
It also means if the body gets removed or swapped during the cloning it causes problems. (Means antags do not need to blow up cloning if they can just abort the cloning by removing the body)

It also removes necroscans and such.

Also this is a nerf then to security who get their data disk used once.

The more I thought about this the more I see the domino's fall.... but still ... how would it work on a changeling victim?  In my opinion.. "instant skeletonisation" then.
Not only is now the victim unknown... but the killed victim has NO WAY of coming back.

[KikiMofo]

borg is not an alternative to be a human

It is though. Your two options are to be a human or a cyborg.

Wrong. Think of borgs as a, "You died but here lets be nice enough to bring you back into the round. You can't do all the same stuff but at least you get to play some more"
Just because you can pick borg at round start doesn't mean it's an alternative to being in the round.
Years ago round start borgs wasn't even a thing.
Cloning is also just a +1 life if someone feels nice enough to bring you back.
I believe firmly that even being ALLOWED to come back into the round is a boon and should be happy with what you get, either cloned or borged or if someones got SR.
Once you die, that's it, your round was over and you don't get a choice in the matter so you should be happy to even be able to play more that round.

[Zamujasa]

Yeah realizing this also means that cloning linged people is right out because they're husked.

I posted this in the other thread but I've had enough time to let my thoughts around these PRs bake and I'd rather have cloning as it is without these PRs. Too many changes that affect things in a negative way.

[Ikea]

Honestly Im fine with this pr as is, I like how it gives a more practical way to find corpses that have been shoved in a locker because now they emit miasma before theyre unclonable

[ZeWaka]

not a big fan of this one

[JOELED]

I've had time to think about this and the other PR now and I agree i don't like either of these changes. The way cloning has been is fine and I'm hoping we go back to that

[daWay]

I believe that this will just make roboticist even more useless, while also incentivising antags to destroy the cloner when they can.

Maybe it could become a mindhack cloning implant thing?