Thoughts and suggestions on medical department

[rando212]

an important element I think people are glancing over in this thread is how fun it is to be on the other side of these proposed doctoring changes - the one being treated, not the one treating them. a lot of proposed solutions do seem very fun to treat, but they don't really provide a patient experience other than to Sit There For A While, sometimes in a way that doesn't even allow the patient to eavesdrop on nearby conversations while it's happening. this is kind of an issue with a lot of medical's Loop as a whole, to be fair; more complexity would be great, but it's difficult to come up with a solution that adds more for the doctors while also still providing an interesting experience for the patient, rather than just giving them another reason to have to go to medbay.

the social upside of cloning is that it allows people to get back into a round relatively quickly after death, but also doesn't force anyone to stick around if they die and decide they've had enough of this round. I've played a few rounds on a tg fork, and had a round where surgery to revive me took Literally An Hour total, because I would just reach the death threshold instantly after being revived and all I could do was attempt to say something, which would then kill me again. it was not a fun experience. in my opinion, any proposed nerfs to cloning need to either not interfere with its efficiency, or provide just as efficient an alternative

This honestly is something I have been seeing with recent testing and noting of things I have observed. A lot of ideas being presented are very doctor/medical sided, but y I have noticed that players have expectations of medical turning them around quickly. Hell I've seen some even act like medical is the dentist with how much avoidance they put on it. Just to avoid spending a few minutes to get fixed up. I recently tried to use more alternative ways to healing people that wasn't mendor/hypospray and I did see a bit of impatience from patients. The goal I had in mind was to see how patients reacted to slower paced methods of healing as well as how other medical doctors saw it. The usual I got was, "Why not use your mendor?" So my conclusion on this is that outside perspective and expectations placed on medical would need convincing of the change as much as people playing medical.

In another vein of discussion, one possible suggestion I can put forth is one that would be allow medical to be more involved with optional work internally and possibly independently of the cargo requisitions. This could be research of some kind perhaps that one can do while there are no patients. This could be an extension of Medical-Cargo collaboration of some kind.

I actually like that idea of having some sort of research the only issue is one you actually mentioned of needing to convince people. This is because a pretty large amount of people want to stay away from TG design as much as possible so any form of a "research" system would require a lot of convincing. Something else you mentioned is how people reacted to you using methods that healed people slower and while I definitely do think there are people who would react badly to medical requiring more time to heal someone I think its also likely that people thought you did not know mendors healed them faster. Something else people have mentioned is how little value people currently hold to getting hurt/diying and I feel like that is not a good thing so healing times going from like 2 minutes to 3-4 minutes may make people put more value into their life.

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After reading some the responses here and thinking on it for a few days I think the easiest way that would cause the least issues to make medical doctor as a job more fun for experienced players would be to just give more options for healing. Someone else in the post mentioned it but right now for most cases your only option as a doctor is to just use a burn and brute auto mendor or charcoal and thats pretty much it. So I think just giving more chemicals and chemical combinations as well as more tools a doctor can use that are better then just stypic powder and silver sulfadiazine would go a long way in making the job more varied. And for making the job itself more difficult I really do not think that is a bad thing or will effect the amount of people playing doctor if this was true engineering and science would have zero new players ever because those are jobs with skill floors monumentally higher then doctor yet new people play them all the time.