Goonhub
04-29-2020, 06:47 AM
There's a few things about pathology that I personally consider to be problems that I figure I might as well bring up.
First, a number of the high-tier symptoms (plasma farts, explosive gibbing on death, electrical arcs, explosive snapping, and probably others) injure or kill people regardless of whether or not they're infected. What's the point of getting cured of a plasma fart pathogen if I'm going to burn to death in the giant plasma fire started by the people who haven't been cured yet? This leads into my next point.
On the path rounds I've seen lately, the number of cures that manage to get produced are drastically lower than the actual population count, and that's even when the shuttle isn't called the moment a pathogen is announced. From a doctor's standpoint, the most responsible thing to do is just get the shuttle called and end the round asap, since that will result in the lowest body count. But let's say you do manage to get enough cures made.
Curing everyone is incredibly difficult, and, due to my first point, something that really needs to be done if you want to live. There's no long-range method of telling if someone's infected or not, you have to analyze everyone up close to make sure you're not giving the cure to someone who has already been given the cure. You have to find people, most of them aren't going to report to medbay on their own. You have to rely on people letting you cure them. People tend to be iffy about injections, particularly ones with names that sound more like you're giving them a pathogen. And this all leads into my next point.
How do you tell the difference between someone with a pathogen who is running around infecting everyone, not quarantining themselves, and preventing you from curing them because they're an idiot who doesn't pay attention to chat and someone who is doing all that because they're an antag, or just an asshole who decided to use this an opportunity to self-antag with plausible deniability? If I'm going to ahelp everyone I see who seems like they might be doing the last one, I'm going to be sending multiple ahelps every round there's a pathogen. And no, I'm not exaggerating here. Even as a god damned staff assistant who isn't involved in medbay at all I still run into multiple people who refuse to get themselves cured, even as they're sneezing, plasma farting, and people are exploding everywhere.
And then there's one more point, which I think might be contributing to the recent influx of "delete path" threads and sentiment. We are, at the present moment, in the midst of an actual, real-life pandemic. Making and releasing horrible murder diseases round after round may not be the best thing to be doing when that's going on. Whether consciously or not, I think the present circumstances in real life are going to make people react more negatively to pathology than they would otherwise.
First, a number of the high-tier symptoms (plasma farts, explosive gibbing on death, electrical arcs, explosive snapping, and probably others) injure or kill people regardless of whether or not they're infected. What's the point of getting cured of a plasma fart pathogen if I'm going to burn to death in the giant plasma fire started by the people who haven't been cured yet? This leads into my next point.
On the path rounds I've seen lately, the number of cures that manage to get produced are drastically lower than the actual population count, and that's even when the shuttle isn't called the moment a pathogen is announced. From a doctor's standpoint, the most responsible thing to do is just get the shuttle called and end the round asap, since that will result in the lowest body count. But let's say you do manage to get enough cures made.
Curing everyone is incredibly difficult, and, due to my first point, something that really needs to be done if you want to live. There's no long-range method of telling if someone's infected or not, you have to analyze everyone up close to make sure you're not giving the cure to someone who has already been given the cure. You have to find people, most of them aren't going to report to medbay on their own. You have to rely on people letting you cure them. People tend to be iffy about injections, particularly ones with names that sound more like you're giving them a pathogen. And this all leads into my next point.
How do you tell the difference between someone with a pathogen who is running around infecting everyone, not quarantining themselves, and preventing you from curing them because they're an idiot who doesn't pay attention to chat and someone who is doing all that because they're an antag, or just an asshole who decided to use this an opportunity to self-antag with plausible deniability? If I'm going to ahelp everyone I see who seems like they might be doing the last one, I'm going to be sending multiple ahelps every round there's a pathogen. And no, I'm not exaggerating here. Even as a god damned staff assistant who isn't involved in medbay at all I still run into multiple people who refuse to get themselves cured, even as they're sneezing, plasma farting, and people are exploding everywhere.
And then there's one more point, which I think might be contributing to the recent influx of "delete path" threads and sentiment. We are, at the present moment, in the midst of an actual, real-life pandemic. Making and releasing horrible murder diseases round after round may not be the best thing to be doing when that's going on. Whether consciously or not, I think the present circumstances in real life are going to make people react more negatively to pathology than they would otherwise.