[DISCUSSION] Medical Pharmacy vs. Chemistry

[Agent reburG]

Is there a reason why the development team is so committed to this change? The stubbornness around this change has felt so frustrating as a player.

its been less than a week

But it's going to permanent right? 
At foremost, our developers are and have been going strong in so many ways and calling them important to this community is an understatement. 

But mistakes happen. 
And be honest, not making this a testmerge, having no prior community open discussion and immediately merging this wasn't the best move. 

The signal that this was just merged without any of this, meant expectations were clearly above average, but it was extremely rushed at the time, so people were disappointed (by the change, not the developers). 

And no steps back have been made currently, the progression is that's being beaten through anyways and everything will be corrected in hindsight. 

People are discussing, because most can't even invision a working future version of the change, but instead see (imagine; feel; to clarify that's not necessarily the truth) a suboptimal revision being rolled up the hill for no ones net gain. 
Telling people to stop doing that, feels counterproductive and kinda rash. 

If chemistry not supplying medical is the absolute underlying issue that these changes is targeting (which was not listed as the reasoning for the original PR), then my view is that I think the team is missing the fact that a large part of this issue stems from medical being overstocked at roundstart. I play doctor a lot, and most rounds I simply don't need to request chemicals from anyone at all because the three nanomeds, lockers full of medkits, port-a-nanomed, port-a-medbay, sleepers, and cryo tubes usually provide enough tools to keep the crew alive for an entire round. Most doctors start the round by printing multiple hypos and filling them with enough chems to tackle any situation, all without anything that a chemistry lab could provide. What chemistry and pharmacists currently provide are chems, that while better, simply don't warrant the extra effort to acquire because the starting supplies are good enough, and can be immediately acquired at roundstart without needing to wait for another player.

But I digress. I don't think making a PR and merging it within 3 hours without any kind of discussion was a healthy move for the game. Ideally there should have been a thread to gage the community's feelings on this issue first, rather than jumping straight to implementation of the development team's idea. Even a surprise testmerge would have felt better. Immediately merging what most players believe was an unfinished PR into main feels permanent, as if the team has already come to a conclusion and won't budge on it. And the request to only use this thread to discuss changes to the current implementation only exacerbated that.

I agree, we definitely could lower the amount of each, but not remove some. 
In the end, if some chemicals are removed from the start and medical not well enough equipped to handle some possible cases, that would only empower the cloner and make medical at this phase more reliant on it. 

And I absolutely loathe this overpowered piece of solve-all-shit (Besides Puritan, but it's rarer than you think at times). 
It already loomes above the necessity and usefulness of almost everything in medical like some hideous guillotine of life. 
But ahem, that's my opinion and not that important at the moment. 

Anyways, yes less of all but not less at all, buying more cartridges at cargo is absolutely acceptable even more, if medbay could get their own funds to buy such things. 

I have yet to see a sjngle satiasying pharmacist round. You cant be the dedicated chemist when botany & sci outperform you, you cant be the dedicated chemist if no one WANTS to touch your stuff

I mean the "noone wants your stuff" is the same problem botany, cargo and chemistry have. That's a systemic problem, not one specific to the pharmacist.

Thing is, 

1.Botany doesn't only supply medical and has incredible indepth game mechanic tied only them alone. 

2.Cargo, while not as gratefully mechanic-wise still has other things too they can accomplish, like hunting things (or people) for their requisitions. 

3.Chemistry, isn't a role, it's something scientist can decide to do, and isn't remotely bound to only creating requested chemicals, but to unholy mixtures of "F.U.N." and in case they get bored of that, can evade to the other fields of SCI. 

So it's mostly a systemic issue for the pharmacy at the moment, because they really do not have anything else otherwise going on for them.