Goonhub
05-13-2015, 12:30 PM
And on that note, there's very little motivation to mess around with pathology as a non-traitor. The supposed use for non-traitors, besides curing a pathos that someone else made (Are random event pathogens spreading around the station a thing? I don't think I've ever seen it.), is to create a super-buff pathogen that would turn everyone into super-nerds or something along the lines of that. The problem with that is, from my understanding (The wiki doesn't have a list of symptoms) is that there are barely any beneficial symptoms. There's no good justification for doing pathos as a non-traitor other than to learn how to do it for when you actually are traitor.
The other big problem is the sheer amount of time it takes. It basically has the same feedback loop that genetics have. Geneticists spend all round getting superpowers, and then don't use them due to not being traitors. Traitor geneticists rarely do genetics work, unless it's to leech off the work of a serious colleague. Pathology takes so long that for a traitor to make any use of it they'd have to spend almost all round sitting in the room, so most ignore it.
It also doesn't help when, in my experience, pathogen samples sometimes don't grow, but you have to wait 5 minutes or so for the sample to even begin growing, at which point if you have a bad sample you've wasted your time. Attempting to juggle multiple samples only gets annoying as you have to deal with the sample nutrition-depletion rates, and then you accumulate more petri-dishes as you progress, compounding things. Even more-so, manipulation destruction doesn't help, as the safer you are with manipulating the pathogen, the longer it takes as you're required to grow more versions of the pathogen to avoid losing everything.
So, I basically have two suggestions: One: More beneficial symptoms. Two: A traitor only item for doctors and the MD that can be attached to petri-dishes and ramps pathogen growth rate way the hell up and uses the same rate of resource consumption as normal growth rate. I'm talking near-instant growth of a sample to usable levels.
The other big problem is the sheer amount of time it takes. It basically has the same feedback loop that genetics have. Geneticists spend all round getting superpowers, and then don't use them due to not being traitors. Traitor geneticists rarely do genetics work, unless it's to leech off the work of a serious colleague. Pathology takes so long that for a traitor to make any use of it they'd have to spend almost all round sitting in the room, so most ignore it.
It also doesn't help when, in my experience, pathogen samples sometimes don't grow, but you have to wait 5 minutes or so for the sample to even begin growing, at which point if you have a bad sample you've wasted your time. Attempting to juggle multiple samples only gets annoying as you have to deal with the sample nutrition-depletion rates, and then you accumulate more petri-dishes as you progress, compounding things. Even more-so, manipulation destruction doesn't help, as the safer you are with manipulating the pathogen, the longer it takes as you're required to grow more versions of the pathogen to avoid losing everything.
So, I basically have two suggestions: One: More beneficial symptoms. Two: A traitor only item for doctors and the MD that can be attached to petri-dishes and ramps pathogen growth rate way the hell up and uses the same rate of resource consumption as normal growth rate. I'm talking near-instant growth of a sample to usable levels.