Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?)

[Agent reburG]

Medbay right now has the gameplay loop of, Scan, heal using one of your many powerful tools, send off.

What I want the gameplay loop to look like. Triage, Diagnose, Attempt treatment, Keep in medical for any potential secondary effects or if it wasnt the root cause, Release. 

Turning every recipient in medbay into a hostage situation and taking their most valuable thing, time, will absolutely make people hate going there. 
People will start to avoid medbay and just treat themselves or suicide, because cloning would be faster at this point. 
Most critically, this loop only works when treating a singular patient. 
But like problems, patients never arrive alone and no one will have time or patience then. 

Yeah this is something I've personally mulled over in my head a lot,  there's a clear wall between fast ss13 gameplay and satisfying doctor gameplay.

Personally, I wish doctors started with a full medical bag like the Mdir and they had to make use of the full toolset to diagnose and fix people. We *HAVE* tools that don't have uses. Penlights and stethoscope for two.

I also wish the menders weren't better than syringes/hypos in basically every way.

Maybe a small start would be requiring blood tests for detailed toxins testing. Putting a sample in a vial and then a centrifuge to examine exactly what's in someone's blood, perhaps?

It feels like "I wish..." summarized the idea overall, of course, RP for any doctor is a delight. 
But this brings multiple issues  which would in the end brick balance and functionality of the role. 
If someone is poisoned now, I need to know whether it's Cyanide or Ricin, and if it takes more than 2 steps to figure something out, I would rather just nuke it with Calomel to be on the safe side of things. Also, a syringe and spectrometer does the same as described. 

Hyposprays are made to speed up injections...
Automenders is to stop people from just dunking chemicals on people.

As for medbay changes.... I disagree with the full revamping cause that will spiral QUICKLY into:
"Just cryopod em" or "Clone em" then you want to nerf those and now it's...
"Antag punched me to 40% health, better lay in medbay for 3 minutes."

What I recommend is actually an overhaul on the organ damage and damage system in general, rather then auto-mender / scanner changes.

And how do you fix those organs? By treating them with the right medicine or giving a prescription someone needs to keep track of.
Stuff to increase the doctoring but not increase medbay too much.

The old is still there, mender, hypo and get out. But by adding more chances for other treatments... you get to do some actual doctoring.

This, this is a really good addressing of the misdirection this was prompted, doctors have these "powerful" tools, because the alternative would be clunky cheesing with other things that look even less like proper procedure. 
Overhaul things so medbay evolves around it and not change medbay and stomp the rest around it in place. 

how would this play on classic? people dont want to stay in medbay, they want to get back to what they were doing.

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also kinda hurts paramedic medic, running around to heal people, which i quite like.

It doesn't address classic, it abandons it completely and shows how out of touch this is. 

I'm for expanding medical however I'd much rather focus on complicating the treatment/symptoms then the process of diagnosis. Instead of the new player experience being "oh I scan them and they have X let me ask someone or look on the wiki for X" it's now "let me run through a checklist of everything first because I have no clue a wet cough is actually the flu before I even have a clue of what to do with them or how to ask". It just feels like a recipe to make medbay way more overwhelming and not as interesting gameplay wise compared to more ways people can get injured.

Another good example, raising the floor on a role with a low pick-rate, which is also VITAL to the station will not help. 
Again, depths and sideways instead steering everything into one route with questionably ambiguity on "how to learn".

The thing about medbay is that it kinda sucks for the person getting healed, who has to stand there doing nothing. It's also just routine maintenance that gets in the way of what you actually want to do, and given that rounds are getting shorter while mechanics are taking longer, medbay has felt a lot more punishing to stand around and wait around in lately. I don't think this should change as there should be some kind of punishment for playing recklessly and one that gets the crew to interact isn't necessarily bad.

I think this is one of the situations where the "nerf because OP" approach isn't the solution to achieve the desired effect. I think instead, buffs, or rather additions, to the list of afflictions to the crew is better and more fun for the game. Ailments that, similar to what you suggest don't show up in the health scanner and need to be diagnosed via symptoms, for example. But we can take it a step further, what if said ailment was only obtainable via doing something unusually risky? That way we can have the mundane injuries be treated quickly as they are now so people can quickly get back to work, but we also have the more variable gameplay, without it feeling like players go to medbay to get imprisoned against their will; they'll have to have willingly done something they're aware of risks a long stay in medbay.

Also a good addressing of issues, stating the same, but with a nice new spin. 
Most importantly, forcing interactions causes the least favourable outcomes for both sides, especially when done for the  "benefit" of one side. 


I think personally, this would disrupt things in ways that need a complete overhaul of how damage/death itself works in order to work. Because otherwise a single doctor couldn't take care of multiple issues in time. 
But this would need so many other things to change, that it wouldn't be worth it by far.
 Without offense, if you want to play like this, why don't you just do it? 
Everything is there, (and you could use the Gene-Scanner for the ailments that the Upgraded doesn't show, because there are some) forcing everyone else to adapt this way definitely isn't an option. 

In short for those who my yapping was too long:
-Absolutely do not do this, the average Joe will hate this. 
-Give Medbay actual depth and don't over-complicate things.