Goonhub
TL;DR
What this is:
On Sunday, May 3rd, after two weeks of discussion (much of it predating the latest waves of threads and discussions on the topic), and one week of voting, the admin team voted near-unanimously to remove player access to pathology until revisions are made to its core mechanics. Some major reasons are as follows:
1) Pathology doesn't have a clear product owner or direction right now
Marquesas, the creator of pathology's current iteration, left years ago. Some minor tweaks and improvements have made since that time, but core components of the system have needed maintenance and re-balancing on a more long-term basis. Nobody has yet stepped up to the task of doing this work.
2) A break will help the success of the rework
If someone had a fully built rework for pathology in hand and ready to deploy at this moment, this break would likely still be necessary. If we deployed it, the system would have to directly contend with the built up momentum and frustration that currently exists surrounding the system, and it would be unlikely to receive a "fair shot" at success; it would be forced to atone for the sins of the old system instead of being allowed to start fresh.
3) It just isn't a fun system right now
This part sucks to say about something, but pathology itself isn't nearly as engaging, or as fun, as it could be. The current system serves very little purpose other than to destroy the station and move towards round end, but its against the rules to take any preventative measure. The system should be balanced so no prevention is necessary, and the crew needs to have all opportunity to mitigate disaster while/after its happened, but its not balanced that way right now.
Some of the contributing factors are relatively minor (tweaking symptom effects around, adjusting tiers, etc.), but the majority of the problems seem fundamental; for example: the lack of feedback on symptom transmission, the difficulty in mitigating symptoms without the use of the pathology lab, and the rng-balanced nature of creating pathogens in the first place.
While we believe the system has potential to be great, and while someone could definitely come along and rework it into a great thing, it isn't that thing right now, and it doesn't seem fair to the current player base to leave it in while we wait indefinitely for someone to come fix it.
Closing Remarks
The code is staying in the game in order to facilitate efforts to test and deploy changes to the system in the form of monitored, smaller scale play-testing. We are amenable to the idea of helping players create, submit, and test PRs with improvements to pathology on our GitHub. The map changes have not yet been finished, so if you have suggestions for what to do with each map's pathology department, feel free to let us know, or submit a PR.
The rest of this thread will be devoted to answering any questions you might have about this decision. Please be respectful and kind to other community members, whether that is here on the forums, on the Discord, in OOC, or any other medium. While we understand that pathology has been a contentious topic lately, this is absolutely not an invitation for community members to insult, gloat, or otherwise attack one another.
What this is:
- Code changes which lock player-accessible methods of creating pathogens behind a define
- Map changes to remove the ability for players to create pathogens
- An opportunity for pathology to get a "fresh start", after its more significant flaws have been addressed
- A complete removal of the system from the codebase
- A permanent removal of pathology as a concept
On Sunday, May 3rd, after two weeks of discussion (much of it predating the latest waves of threads and discussions on the topic), and one week of voting, the admin team voted near-unanimously to remove player access to pathology until revisions are made to its core mechanics. Some major reasons are as follows:
1) Pathology doesn't have a clear product owner or direction right now
Marquesas, the creator of pathology's current iteration, left years ago. Some minor tweaks and improvements have made since that time, but core components of the system have needed maintenance and re-balancing on a more long-term basis. Nobody has yet stepped up to the task of doing this work.
2) A break will help the success of the rework
If someone had a fully built rework for pathology in hand and ready to deploy at this moment, this break would likely still be necessary. If we deployed it, the system would have to directly contend with the built up momentum and frustration that currently exists surrounding the system, and it would be unlikely to receive a "fair shot" at success; it would be forced to atone for the sins of the old system instead of being allowed to start fresh.
3) It just isn't a fun system right now
This part sucks to say about something, but pathology itself isn't nearly as engaging, or as fun, as it could be. The current system serves very little purpose other than to destroy the station and move towards round end, but its against the rules to take any preventative measure. The system should be balanced so no prevention is necessary, and the crew needs to have all opportunity to mitigate disaster while/after its happened, but its not balanced that way right now.
Some of the contributing factors are relatively minor (tweaking symptom effects around, adjusting tiers, etc.), but the majority of the problems seem fundamental; for example: the lack of feedback on symptom transmission, the difficulty in mitigating symptoms without the use of the pathology lab, and the rng-balanced nature of creating pathogens in the first place.
While we believe the system has potential to be great, and while someone could definitely come along and rework it into a great thing, it isn't that thing right now, and it doesn't seem fair to the current player base to leave it in while we wait indefinitely for someone to come fix it.
Closing Remarks
The code is staying in the game in order to facilitate efforts to test and deploy changes to the system in the form of monitored, smaller scale play-testing. We are amenable to the idea of helping players create, submit, and test PRs with improvements to pathology on our GitHub. The map changes have not yet been finished, so if you have suggestions for what to do with each map's pathology department, feel free to let us know, or submit a PR.
The rest of this thread will be devoted to answering any questions you might have about this decision. Please be respectful and kind to other community members, whether that is here on the forums, on the Discord, in OOC, or any other medium. While we understand that pathology has been a contentious topic lately, this is absolutely not an invitation for community members to insult, gloat, or otherwise attack one another.