Goonhub
06-20-2024, 04:58 AM
As someone who has what I would consider veteran-level experience as medical doctor, I might as well throw my thoughts in.
To me, one of the most important things about balancing any job, in general, is making it fun, and not only fun for new players but fun for players who have a lot of experience as well. This is obviously not an easy thing to do and several concessions usually have to be made for a job to be new player accessible. Still, in my opinion, medical doctor could really do with systems that are more advanced and allow for a player to be able to find out new things and still have fun after hundreds of rounds.
One thing I have noticed over time is that at least for me I have the most fun playing doctor when I treat someone who is near death because rather than just pulling the auto mendors out and sitting there for thirty seconds or so I actually have to think about what information my scanner is giving me and make a plan for how to stop them from dying. Unfortunately, this is an experience that is exceedingly rare and that has to do with two main things one is the fact that the time period where someone is at a point of near death and just being dead is only really one minute or so so it is very likely they will just die before ever even seeing medbay. And, the second point I have is that healing in Medbay has far too many mechanics that are very effective and non-interactive. Both of these issues are exactly easy to fix but I think are the key to having a medical doctor experience that is extremely fun even hundreds of rounds in. I mean think of it this way when you watch a medical TV show do they show the dozens of cases that involve some variation of "here are some pills now get out of here" or do they show the cases where they are having to help some guy with 5 different diseases and is cut in half. To me playing medical doctor right now feels like a hundred cases of handing out some pills and one case that involves thinking for more than two seconds.
The first issue I mentioned was how players who are in Medbay are either fine enough 49% of the time dead 49% of the time or actually in a state of near death 2% of the time. Now the obvious solution to this is to make players live longer in crit but this has some obvious flaws like making all antags have an even harder job keeping people down and making basically any sort of event meant to hurt or kill players less effective and therefore this type of solution would be way too disruptive to the "meta" of the game and wouldn't be ever merged. In my opinion, what could be done is to make it so there are more "states" of death, we sort of have this already with SR where you can revive someone before they are rotting but after they start rotting you have to go to the cloner or borg. Instead of just having two "states" of death I think having something like four or five could be far more interactive. Something where a player who is only 0-2 mins dead can be revived using some drug or device like defib and requires healing up the damage they already had. Then, a player who is dead for 2-5 mins would require more set up like having to cut open their chest to access there heart directly and having to deal with extra organ or brain damage from being dead for a while. and obviously, you can see where this goes to having more and more intensive procedures needed to revive someone the longer they are dead. This would also obviously need for several systems to be revamped such as cloning to become harder SR to become less easy to make or possibly be completely remade for use in a later "state" of death. Also, this would need the time someone died to become easier to know possibly a text message when you examine the body such as "there body still feels warm to the touch" for recent death and etc, as well this would give opportunity for inter-department mechanics with scanner upgrades that give time of death that require materials. Another common point that would go against this would be that having increasingly difficult mechanics for reviving wouldn't be easy for new players to get into, but I feel like this would be a good opportunity for cooperation in the medical department to happen as right now medical doctors usually handle people one on one and rarely does a medical doctor need to ask for help in any way. This could lead the way for doctors on hand to consult each other about a patient if they do not understand what to do or even for newer players to handle alive people and recent deaths while more experienced doctors handle longer ago deaths. Overall, I feel as though the medical department sees far to many cases where someone either walks in not in critical and gets healed in ten seconds with little thought from the doctor or someone gets dragged in dead and gets cloned in ten seconds with little thought from the doctor. A system that requires more effort and allows for doctors to interact with more "extreme" cases and get that satisfaction from being able to heal someone by thinking and making up a plan and putting it to action would be far more fun then the current system we have.
My second point on how to make the medical department more fun to play is to remove or nerf the many different non-interactive tools doctors have. By this, I mean as of right now most if not all of the best ways to heal someone involve littearly zero thought from the doctor and in fact, doesn't even requires them to be there. One example of this is the cryo tubes which not only automatically heal people of all four basic damage types but also organ damage but also does this arguably faster than a medical doctor who is manually healing can. Another example of this is cloning where as people have mentioned you can decide someone is too far gone being -100% and just wait for them to die and throw them in the cloner and they would not only pop out at full health while you get to walk away but they would be healed two to three times faster then if you were to manually heal them. A final example are the sleepers which once again not only heal people automatically of every damage type but also require zero input from the medical doctor at least here manual healing is faster but still not by much. Now think back to these three examples and what is a common trait? None of these methods of healing are in any way fun or interactive for the doctor, now this wouldn't be a huge issue if all these methods were garbage and did not heal much but these methods are also some of the best ways to heal someone. As a medical doctor you could spawn in take off your clothes and all your tools and only use cryo, sleepers, and the cloner to heal people and you would not only have no case where you couldn't heal someone but you would be one of the best doctors in the medbay and I really hope I do not need to further explain why that is not fun game design. So what solution do I propose for this well in my opinion it already exsits if you go to the wiki or open a nanomed you will see your classic meds like burn and brute refills, charcoal, and epi but what about those twenty other chems no one uses. I believe that all we would really need to do to fix this issue for medbay is to make the non-interactive methods of healing less effective than interactive ones and create tiers of medicine doctors can use. Nearly all of this exists already we have teirs of medicine basically the chem wiki even gives you examples of "stronger" chemicals to use but the issue is is that they are very hard to get and are usually less effective or barely any more effective then the basic healing chems.
(creating a new paragraph because I have a lot of thoughts on this and I am having trouble organizing) So the TLDR if you want of my plan would be to nerf objects like the cryo, sleepers, and possibly dialysis machine as well as possibly nerfing the basic healing chems like silver sulfide and stypic powder, and changing the current "advanceded healing chems" as well as adding more. This would create a system where new players can still easily learn how to heal someone and experienced players have a more complex back end to learn. Once again in my opinion this all exists but is just in a state of near uselessness or is just not worth the trouble there are interactions like atropine and epi that heavily reduces the chance someone dies in crit but why the hell would you use that when cloning is easier and quicker. There are chems like pentetic acid that trades lots of tox damage for burn and brute but whats the point when throwing them in the cryo works just fine and doesn't require begging chem to make a chemical that's already annoying to make. All the tools to make a advanced medical system exist they just need to be brought to the surface and refined as well as there to be a use for them as once again even if this is done it doesn't matter when there are machines that do your job faster and let you just walk away.
Overall I feel like medical doctor as a role has a huge chance to be increadibly fun and complex while not being inaccesable to newer players but is bogged down by just plain out unfun mechanics that have to be used because they are either the only way or are just way more effective then manual healing. As well, because of these mechanics such as the cloner cause the most fun part of medical doctor being the weird and extreme cases that give that satisfaction after saving someone from what should have been near death to be skipped over in favor for near-instant healing at zero cost or thought to the doctor player.
Final note: if anyone actually cares to code anything like this I would love to give some of the ideas I have.
To me, one of the most important things about balancing any job, in general, is making it fun, and not only fun for new players but fun for players who have a lot of experience as well. This is obviously not an easy thing to do and several concessions usually have to be made for a job to be new player accessible. Still, in my opinion, medical doctor could really do with systems that are more advanced and allow for a player to be able to find out new things and still have fun after hundreds of rounds.
One thing I have noticed over time is that at least for me I have the most fun playing doctor when I treat someone who is near death because rather than just pulling the auto mendors out and sitting there for thirty seconds or so I actually have to think about what information my scanner is giving me and make a plan for how to stop them from dying. Unfortunately, this is an experience that is exceedingly rare and that has to do with two main things one is the fact that the time period where someone is at a point of near death and just being dead is only really one minute or so so it is very likely they will just die before ever even seeing medbay. And, the second point I have is that healing in Medbay has far too many mechanics that are very effective and non-interactive. Both of these issues are exactly easy to fix but I think are the key to having a medical doctor experience that is extremely fun even hundreds of rounds in. I mean think of it this way when you watch a medical TV show do they show the dozens of cases that involve some variation of "here are some pills now get out of here" or do they show the cases where they are having to help some guy with 5 different diseases and is cut in half. To me playing medical doctor right now feels like a hundred cases of handing out some pills and one case that involves thinking for more than two seconds.
The first issue I mentioned was how players who are in Medbay are either fine enough 49% of the time dead 49% of the time or actually in a state of near death 2% of the time. Now the obvious solution to this is to make players live longer in crit but this has some obvious flaws like making all antags have an even harder job keeping people down and making basically any sort of event meant to hurt or kill players less effective and therefore this type of solution would be way too disruptive to the "meta" of the game and wouldn't be ever merged. In my opinion, what could be done is to make it so there are more "states" of death, we sort of have this already with SR where you can revive someone before they are rotting but after they start rotting you have to go to the cloner or borg. Instead of just having two "states" of death I think having something like four or five could be far more interactive. Something where a player who is only 0-2 mins dead can be revived using some drug or device like defib and requires healing up the damage they already had. Then, a player who is dead for 2-5 mins would require more set up like having to cut open their chest to access there heart directly and having to deal with extra organ or brain damage from being dead for a while. and obviously, you can see where this goes to having more and more intensive procedures needed to revive someone the longer they are dead. This would also obviously need for several systems to be revamped such as cloning to become harder SR to become less easy to make or possibly be completely remade for use in a later "state" of death. Also, this would need the time someone died to become easier to know possibly a text message when you examine the body such as "there body still feels warm to the touch" for recent death and etc, as well this would give opportunity for inter-department mechanics with scanner upgrades that give time of death that require materials. Another common point that would go against this would be that having increasingly difficult mechanics for reviving wouldn't be easy for new players to get into, but I feel like this would be a good opportunity for cooperation in the medical department to happen as right now medical doctors usually handle people one on one and rarely does a medical doctor need to ask for help in any way. This could lead the way for doctors on hand to consult each other about a patient if they do not understand what to do or even for newer players to handle alive people and recent deaths while more experienced doctors handle longer ago deaths. Overall, I feel as though the medical department sees far to many cases where someone either walks in not in critical and gets healed in ten seconds with little thought from the doctor or someone gets dragged in dead and gets cloned in ten seconds with little thought from the doctor. A system that requires more effort and allows for doctors to interact with more "extreme" cases and get that satisfaction from being able to heal someone by thinking and making up a plan and putting it to action would be far more fun then the current system we have.
My second point on how to make the medical department more fun to play is to remove or nerf the many different non-interactive tools doctors have. By this, I mean as of right now most if not all of the best ways to heal someone involve littearly zero thought from the doctor and in fact, doesn't even requires them to be there. One example of this is the cryo tubes which not only automatically heal people of all four basic damage types but also organ damage but also does this arguably faster than a medical doctor who is manually healing can. Another example of this is cloning where as people have mentioned you can decide someone is too far gone being -100% and just wait for them to die and throw them in the cloner and they would not only pop out at full health while you get to walk away but they would be healed two to three times faster then if you were to manually heal them. A final example are the sleepers which once again not only heal people automatically of every damage type but also require zero input from the medical doctor at least here manual healing is faster but still not by much. Now think back to these three examples and what is a common trait? None of these methods of healing are in any way fun or interactive for the doctor, now this wouldn't be a huge issue if all these methods were garbage and did not heal much but these methods are also some of the best ways to heal someone. As a medical doctor you could spawn in take off your clothes and all your tools and only use cryo, sleepers, and the cloner to heal people and you would not only have no case where you couldn't heal someone but you would be one of the best doctors in the medbay and I really hope I do not need to further explain why that is not fun game design. So what solution do I propose for this well in my opinion it already exsits if you go to the wiki or open a nanomed you will see your classic meds like burn and brute refills, charcoal, and epi but what about those twenty other chems no one uses. I believe that all we would really need to do to fix this issue for medbay is to make the non-interactive methods of healing less effective than interactive ones and create tiers of medicine doctors can use. Nearly all of this exists already we have teirs of medicine basically the chem wiki even gives you examples of "stronger" chemicals to use but the issue is is that they are very hard to get and are usually less effective or barely any more effective then the basic healing chems.
(creating a new paragraph because I have a lot of thoughts on this and I am having trouble organizing) So the TLDR if you want of my plan would be to nerf objects like the cryo, sleepers, and possibly dialysis machine as well as possibly nerfing the basic healing chems like silver sulfide and stypic powder, and changing the current "advanceded healing chems" as well as adding more. This would create a system where new players can still easily learn how to heal someone and experienced players have a more complex back end to learn. Once again in my opinion this all exists but is just in a state of near uselessness or is just not worth the trouble there are interactions like atropine and epi that heavily reduces the chance someone dies in crit but why the hell would you use that when cloning is easier and quicker. There are chems like pentetic acid that trades lots of tox damage for burn and brute but whats the point when throwing them in the cryo works just fine and doesn't require begging chem to make a chemical that's already annoying to make. All the tools to make a advanced medical system exist they just need to be brought to the surface and refined as well as there to be a use for them as once again even if this is done it doesn't matter when there are machines that do your job faster and let you just walk away.
Overall I feel like medical doctor as a role has a huge chance to be increadibly fun and complex while not being inaccesable to newer players but is bogged down by just plain out unfun mechanics that have to be used because they are either the only way or are just way more effective then manual healing. As well, because of these mechanics such as the cloner cause the most fun part of medical doctor being the weird and extreme cases that give that satisfaction after saving someone from what should have been near death to be skipped over in favor for near-instant healing at zero cost or thought to the doctor player.
Final note: if anyone actually cares to code anything like this I would love to give some of the ideas I have.