[PR] Increase chances for clone defects & add new defects

[444explorer]

I like these changes. I recently messaged Glamurio about changing Clown Clumsiness/Dyspraxia by making it temporary or killing it all together - that's my one concern. Some bad luck just puts you out of the round in a way that I don't think is super fun. Blindness? Get some VISORs and say goodbye to your glasses. Deafness? Okay, a little more troubling, but you can pocket headsets. Clown Clumsiness doesn't have anything like that, and you can't keep an eye on something like Stamina when you get the Pug Sprinting.

I've been told a solution to this will be coming so overall this looks good to me. Hoping to see a little more fear of death and maybe even some more cyborgs with the Puritan Defect? One could dream

I was on the fence about baldness but if you know the gist of how to have barbering chances work in your favor (those could be more clear but that's its own issue), it should be a pretty easy fix? Just a few minutes or grab a recognizable hat and your good to go.

[Error2147483647]

I like everything about this except for the baldness effect. Hair is 99% of recognisability in this game to the point where almost every single lizard player uses the wig option, and it's not actually all that fun to go and fix it, just tedious and annoying.

[Kamikaze Mongoose]

I like the idea of more cloning defects but it seems weird to me that it would apply after every single cloning attempt. Wouldn't it be better if it started off with a really low chance to get any but spike up quickly after cloning attempts after that? Cloning is really punishing as it is if you factor in the minutes you waste hoping someone clones you on top of having to sit and wait to pop out of the tube.

Just to tack this on since it's relevant, it'd be great if we had a trait where you start off as the droopy, gooey clones you become after a few tries. I just wanna be a little guy who gurgles and has a picasso face.

[Snoid]

i know most people dont care about classic, but its worth mentioning that this kind of change would be extremely brutal on classic and would make antags significantly more powerful. if youre lucky enough to get cloned, doctors are not gonna have the spare time to try and find synthflesh to fix your face or voice. if sec is just barely holding on and still cloning themselves, being more likely to be missing arms or legs is just gonna be the nail in the coffin.
on a server thats more punishing and less populated, this is a bit too much of a balance shift. its just a "if crew is losing, they now lose harder with less of a chance to fight back" change.

also getting the plasmalung trait just fucking kills you. swapping out the plasmalungs for robo ones doesnt fix it, you dont have enough time to run and find an empty holdable tank + find a plasma canister that you have access to (and if you dont have access, you cant beg ai to open the door cause you cant breathe), let alone pray theres plasma canisters left on the station that havent been used by the engis making a 800000000 TW engine, or have already been used by the ai/emagged borgs plasmaflooding.

[cyberTripping]

Note: This is from my perspective as a roleplay player who hasn't played in probably over a year because I can't be assed to set up a VM in linux.

I always thought cloning was too free, but I feel like the penalties need a bit of work. Penalties like the health damage, organ problems, etc. seem good. Makes cloning more resource intensive for medical, encouraging them to actually keep people alive in the first place, and makes the process a bit less reliable for instantly returning to play the moment you die since you're going to need aftercare. Others seem like annoyances that don't really affect the core issues.

The problem with cloning, in my (pretty outdated, tbf) view is that it's too reliable. Between prescans and cloning speed, its quite difficult to actually remove people from a round, which is an important part of death having stakes and antagonists being able to remove specific personnel in their way. Things like blindness, deafness, baldness, or mutantrace change don't really address that: players return to the round just as quickly, but they happen to be personally inconvenienced. This would certainly discourage people from being careless with their lives at least, but it might lead to a lot of player resentment as well due to the "feels-bad" nature of it.

[Finnalin]

if baldness is an issue maybe bring barber into full rotato? itd give a more lived in world with the barbershop in-use, which it never is.

but I wholly agree with limiting cloning in some way. people really don't care if they die currently, just a tiny inconvenience

[Kotlol]

I do like the idea of the barber always being there like it used to be.
Seriously though.. if you can easily fix these cloning defects with medicine and a barber. There is nothing wrong with minor defects being there at the 1st and 2nd cloning.

But as someone who thinks cloning is fine and we had a while when defects were on and well.. it made everyone miserable.
"I got killed by an antagonist easily" - gets cloned - "I am now permanently damaged" On classic it's the norm..

But on roleplay.... this will result in everyone not wanting to be killed to not kill their roleplay since "Cloning defect just ruined it"
Let's say you had an epic roleplay with the antagonist and they kill you, it's funny and your corpse gets dragged off.. you are reaady for me.. but then.. OOPS you got leg arms.. now you gotta spend 3 more mins in medbay or longer to get arms. But the antagonist has escalated to rampage.. doctors are swamped.
Now roleplay and interaction is still "DEAD" for you. You can talk and roleplay to other patients in the line... but these are brief.

The problem lays in the fact a lot of massive defects back in those days just "ended your roleplay for a long while" Atleast when you are dead you can watch the chaos unfold, but a heavy cloning defect that gets fixed later? Now you are just watching Medbay...

We suggested a lot of ways to make cloning more interactable, more doctoring, less of a "fix everything" and more a "You had no other alternatives"
So if we bring back the defects. Make sure every minor defect requires minimal doctoring... no stuff like "legs for arms" or "You lose all your mutations including the race one you started with." ... Baldness isn't too bad since you can get it fixed at the barber or some hairgrownium.
But I do say... don't have the minor defects take too long...

[freedo5]

I think trying out some debuffs for cloning is a good idea, i've seen doctors who drag people to get scanned instead of treating a character who can very much be saved and even a doctor just scanning you and waiting for you to die. This might help address the problem. I will also say that in my opinion the moment this issue really gets out of hand when mutliple cloners are involved, at that point an antagonist killing many or even a radstorm that got unnoticed will just become trivial things, when they really shouldn't be.

[Cal]

Between prescans and cloning speed, its quite difficult to actually remove people from a round, which is an important part of death having stakes and antagonists being able to remove specific personnel in their way. Things like blindness, deafness, baldness, or mutantrace change don't really address that: players return to the round just as quickly, but they happen to be personally inconvenienced. This would certainly discourage people from being careless with their lives at least, but it might lead to a lot of player resentment as well due to the "feels-bad" nature of it.

Got it in one. This will not fix the issue of people coming back, only making it more frustrating to do so and making rampaging particularly effective.

[Glamurio]

Okay, from the feedback I'm gathering that most people agree that cloning as it is right now has issues, but some don't feel like defects are the way to go. I'm more than happy to tweak defect intensity or rarity, as well as obviously ways to treat it.

For those of you who do not think that defects are the way to go, what methods would you prefer?

Longer respawn times? A more involved process of scanning / cloning? I'd really like to hear feedback. In my mind, giving someone disabilities is a middle ground between removing them from the round longer and returning them to the round at 100% capability.

[Snoid]

Okay, from the feedback I'm gathering that most people agree that cloning as it is right now has issues, but some don't feel like defects are the way to go. I'm more than happy to tweak defect intensity or rarity, as well as obviously ways to treat it.

For those of you who do not think that defects are the way to go, what methods would you prefer?

Longer respawn times? A more involved process of scanning / cloning? I'd really like to hear feedback. In my mind, giving someone disabilities is a middle ground between removing them from the round longer and returning them to the round at 100% capability.

an idea i sat around for 20 minutes brainstorming to come up with is some kind of "cloning whiplash" sickness. where once you get cloned, give or take the usual defects youre fine for a while (exact time threshold pending but imo maybe 10-15 mins), but after a bit then you get a cloning sickness that debilitates you to an unspecified extent and requires treatment at med if you dont wanna deal with it. time threshold and how heavy the effects are would obv ramp up the more times youve been cloned.

 ideally this means that if you get emergency cloned like theres a rampage or nukies going on then you CAN function as good as you currently can, but once that whiplash hits then youre gonna need med help, so all cloning instead of healing is gonna do is delay the medical assistance they need. the main benefit of this is that its very predictable, you can function NOW so you have time to prepare for when the effects kick in.

also for extra fun i think it would be nice if there were multiple flavors of the whiplash you could get, like one gives you a few bad mutations suddenly, one could put some poison in you, set you on fire randomly, etc. but i think all of them should do some minimum amount of tox, just to put more pressure on med that if youre wantonly cloning instead of saving then you ARE gonna run out of charcoal

edit: also mindhack cloned people optimally should be immune to this cuz that would suck ass

[Finnalin]

the sickness is a pretty intresting route! though it will just feed back into medbay again after

[Emimiyu]

Actually, yeah, I might gotta disagree with having clone defect chancd bigger, especially major defect... for classic reason. Even then, a lot of things are now deadlier like brute damage and bleeding. And I don't see how "Doc relies too much on cloning instead of healing them" is a good argument. People less likely to die because of "just clone them", most of the time it is too late, people are faraway from medbay. And this feels like punishing newbee doctors for not knowing medbay meta heals.

Also, "makes people less careless about dying" feels like "skill issue just don't die?" Or bringing back "Always one tile away from everyone or you get clicked" mindset on roleplay. Which I dislike, kinda sucks the fun out of the game when everyone first mind is to never die on my silly fart game whatever.

On the other hand, it doesn't seem to change that major defect only show up when second time cloning? Which is probably isn't that bad.

[Silent Majority]

i'm all for a lot of them. i wouldn't mind clone freshness perhaps adjusting these weights instead of just being a flat 40% chance to get fucked no matter what precautions you take.

Alot of this...i play pretty much only sec. If i get clonrd clumbsy I'm prolly just gonna cryo. I try to take percautions and stuff..its rough when you get an rng thst msked your job unfun

When we played with the higher major defects it d9dn6 pead to alot of emergent rp. It just lead to people dnring or suiciding after cloning.

Personally id rathet there be a 20 percent flat chance of clone failure requiring recanning of original body. Someone grinded it? Woops.

[Retrino]

a couple people have mentioned it but some of the defects are so obnoxious or debilitating that at a point youd rather just cryo. personally id rather see prescanning removed, with some way to still save records to cloning disks. that way there would be some material cost, but not completely eliminate the possibility to be recovered when going on a dangerous mission, ie an azone or something where your body would be harder/impossible to get back. this could bring down the risk of an antag killing someone who went for their roundstart clone scan to pop out of the cloner and out them, while not making cloning itself a worse off experience