Goonhub
03-04-2016, 11:44 AM
Simply put, pathology is in a pretty bad shape right now. It is probably one of the more difficult things to get into and even if you decide to spend a whole round doing it, you might not gain anything out of it. I will now proceed to go into detail as to what is wrong from perspective of a traitor and a non-traitor.
Traitor
First of all, pathology/virology becomes an option to traitor medical doctors/medical director/captain/HoP as they have the easiest access to it and cause the least amount of suspicion actually being there. In matter of fact, if you are doing something in that room, you will most likely be questioned (mainly because it is so rare to see someone do ANYTHING there.) I think this is because pathology has exactly seven "good" uses, which most of us probably have never even seen.
A good comparison point for pathology is the toxic lab. In pathology, it takes a decent player anywhere from 8 to 15 minutes to produce a "good" sample which can be used to crack those tier 3-5 symptoms. A good bomb maker can get his preparations done in less then five, after which its just a waiting game for the optimal mix. Here is the first issue with pathology in general, you might get fucked over by the symptom generation code and you will be missing a single tier 1 symptom which you need to form a tier 3, 4 or 5. For example: Deadly tier 4 disease is AAA BBB CCC DDD but sadly, out of all the 10 samples that you get on round start, you never acquired DDD. The only way for you to even have a chance to get DDD is by infecting the whole station with a disease that spreads quickly and has very high mutativeness, hoping that it will generate something which uses the symptom DDD. Not to mention that you then actually have to extract samples of blood from people to acquire the new strand... This would be really tedious and generally just about anyone would just go get some genetic powers instead. Anyway, back to the comparison point. 40 minutes into the round, a half decent chemist has produced bombs and more then likely already blown half of the station to hell and back. A VERY lucky virologist could have a tier 5 by this point, if he was lucky enough to get every symptom on the round start. Now he only needs to grow it, mutate it so it actually is able to progress, then grow it again and then spread it.. Except that if he does spread it this way, he runs the risk of getting the same disease on himself and thus killing himself. So it will take a traitor 10 more minutes to go to a non-specified trader in space to acquire the vaccine module, so he can safeguard himself. By this point, it would really be much easier to get telekinesis, five other genetic powers and a c-saber. Or a bunch of bombs. Or hellfoam.
If you decide to continue, you actually need to figure out how to create the randomly generated suppressant. (These range from radiactive substances to chicken soup and medical chems.) Currently, they seem to be bugged (?) because if you use a petri dish on microscope and then using a dropper, drip some of the suppressant on the dish and view it, it usually doesn't show you anything, which seems to be the same thing when you are trying to investigate what does the symptom actually do.
Lets take a small sidetrack here, especially now that some of us have had the advantage of taking a look at the code. There are THREE heat based symptoms which all share the text of "The pathogen appears to be creating a constant field of radiating heat. The relevant membranes look like they might be affected by painkillers." The difference between these is that one raises your body temperature slightly, one sets you on fire and one literally firegibs you. Due to the bugged (?) dripping mechanic on the petri dishes, it is impossible to tell these apart and yet again takes time. (You actually need to go find the chemical, take the vial, pour it into petri, put petri into microscope and then drip the solution on it.) Why can't we have three distinctive messages for each of the different, similar diseases? For example: The pathogen appears to be creating a constant field of radiating heat. The relevant membranes look like they might be affected by painkillers. / The pathogen appears to be creating a LARGE amount of constant radiating heat. The relevant membranes look like they might be affected by painkillers. / The pathogen appears to be creating a EXTREME amounts of radiating heat. The relevant membranes look like they might be affected by painkillers. This theme of same identification text on symptoms is a reoccuring theme and while immersive, it does waste a large amount of already limited "traitoring" time.
In the end, if you managed to vaccine yourself, reach a high tier of symptoms and if you managed to spread it around the station, the station is literally fucked. The worst of the worst diseases are very deadly, some of them gibbing you in just a few minutes after some scary messages. It's possible but requires A) you to be lucky and have all of the tier 1 symptoms B) the round to be a very long one, we're talking 85mins here. And I can tell you that its not exactly enjoyable to sit pressing buttons at the computer for 85 minutes. Atleast the geneticists click buttons for 20-40 minutes and then get to assault people. Another issue is also that as soon as people start noticing that a disease is loose, someone will scan the pathology lab for fingerprints. It's pretty much guaranteed that you are the only person to ever visit that place.
So in short, traitor pathology is too risky, takes way too long and is simply unfun. What can be done to change this?
- Give us a traitor virologist item. Hell, let us pay 12 telecrystals for a single pathogen vial which contains a random tier 3-5 malificent symptom. I'm tempted to ask that the vaccine module would be introduced as a baseline to the synth-o-matic, but that might be pushing it.
- We need more uncommon/common/rare symptoms that are annoying but by no means deadly. This would allow pathology to be a great assisting tool for a traitor, a disease that gives you an edge against the crew. Make them easier to acquire, allow people to choose if they want to spend 10-20 minutes making a disease which gives you an edge in combat (granted that you make yourself immune to this disease) or if you wish to spend 40-60 minutes in creating a disease that will kill the whole crew if not cured/put an end to.
- Put one of those pathology vending machines to the "secret" space pathology lab. That place is a great for any traitor virologist who wishes to take the risk, but a lack of vending machine makes it unusable. If synth-o-matic is blown up by a traitor, this also renders this "backup" lab unusable.
- Diverse the "symptom" messages. Like I pointed out, its not fun to have two different farting diseases with the same text, its not fun to have two coldness based diseases with same text. The whole process has to be sped up due to how short the usual shifts are.
- The chemists don't start off with 1/4 of their chemicals being unavailable for the whole round, why should the virologist have a chance for this to happen? Make sure that every tier 1 symptom is contained in those starting vials. You spawn as traitor medical doctor, you work towards a tier 4/5, only to find out that you are missing one symptom. This is very stupid and should not be like this. In my own very BIAsed opinion, the tier 1 "common" symptoms should always be prefixed to a certain number of hex. AAA could be always cough, BBB could always be farting, CCC could always be Shakesperian etc. Make tier 2,3,4, and 5 completely random.
- The rarity of symptoms has to be adjusted. One "very rare" per round is fine, but after that it becomes slightly mundane due to how little of actually useful symptoms we have. This is exactly why we need more symptoms that are annoying but not deadly. I will give out examples of new diseases later on.
Non-traitor
What does the pathology lab offer to a person who is not a traitor? Well first of all it may be used in very rare case of "random event" disease, but that rarely if ever even happens. It can also be used to spread a helpful disease, but the biggest issue here is that there is only SEVEN helpful symptoms, which honestly all suck. One that heals each damage type VERY SLOWLY, as in.. If you are dying from a fire, this said disease will do absolutely nothing to help you. It is quite literally one damage away per three minutes. I simply cannot see this ever helping anyone, it is too slow. One that reduces how drunk you are, one that destroys harmful poisons in your body and thats about it. Not to mention that nearly all of them are very rare and very, very hard to acquire. It literally takes you the same amount of time to spread a good, O2 healing disease as it takes you to release a gibbing disease on the station. This is absurd and makes no sense, no-one in their right mind would want to bother with something like that. Thankfully the solution is much easier then to the traitor one.
- Add tons of new beneficial symptoms and make the current ones all common or uncommon, there is no reason for them to be rare or very rare. Make beneficial symptoms easier to acquire, move most of the deadlier and more harmfull stuff to tier 3/4/5. Make a couple new beneficial symptoms that can be tier 3/4/5, for example one that activates helpful superpowers on people from their DNA pool. A disease that completely prevents corpse necrosis. There is so much more that can be done with pathology if only the beneficial diseases would be easier to acquire and would be slightly more powerful. The interesting concept here is that by spreading a helpful, healing disease on the station, you also help the antagonists, accidentally.
- Same as before, there is no good reason for us to have a missing tier 1 symptom which later ruins a higher tier symptom.
- Balance the rarity of all the symptoms. Make deadlier stuff automatically higher tier, while the "basic" healing symptoms baseline common.
- Duplicate symptoms have to go. It's not fun first figuring out that AAA BBB CCC is a symptom that heals brute damage, only to figure out ten minutes later that BBB CCC AAA is exactly the same, the RNG has to go. I would rather have the round start with every possible disease ever, rather then having five of the same. This is the issue why there is a chance for the 10 pathogen samples you start with, only to contain 10x of tier 1 cough.
Pathology UI
As far as I know, the "new" pathology computer is still work in progress, but I might aswell give some criticism on it. First of all, the new "sequence" list is handy, you used to have to do that on paper/docs, so thats good. The sequence checker which verifies if the symptom will collapse or not is utter garbage and does not work even half of the time. It predicts wrong and that big red "FAIL" encourages me to check the whole code again, only to verify that it is correct and when I save it, it actually is correct, even if the computer was telling me that it was not. Add a function to check what each seperate symptom does, the microscope can still be used to check suppressant is used. For example, you have symptom AAA BBB, you click on it and it opens you a new window which tells you that its cough. For example if you have a very long pathogen with tens of symptoms, the microscope is very hard to use as it lists them in a big wall of text and isolating a single symptom takes long time.
Honestly other then that, I have no issues with the current UI.
Microbodies
Next I want to focus on the pathology microbodies and how they can be improved on. Currently there is little to no difference between them except for activity and the fact that some of them have auto-immunization and some of them can be vaccined against. Oh and some of them have less stages then the others. I think the introduction of microbody specific symptoms would be a good addition. For example parasite could have a bee parasite which when fully developed plants small bee eggs inside you, which later turns into a swarm of bees that assaults you or anyone who is in one tile radius of you, doing some very minor brute and toxic damage. Shameful self-advertisement. Fungal microbodies could form a symbiosis connection with its host, for example turning harmful chemicals into sugar or something else.
All in all, pathology is currently too complicated for what you manage to achieve with it. I guess people are still scarred by the old pathology, but hopefully with the bigger focus on beneficial symptoms it could be wastly superior to the old one. I would also wish to discuss the current rarity of all the diseases and how those should be changed, but I'm not sure if we are yet allowed to discuss such things due to the code still not being public (?). I'm personally big fan of pathology and stuff that is related to it (Plague Inc, cough cough.) and am actually willing to re-write the symptom examination texts if the coders would be willing to actually change those. Hopefully this will cause some attention towards pathology and some changes would be done. The code is all there and it works quite well, it just needs to get the same treatment as genetics, more symptoms and it will be a very good, useful addition to the station.
Traitor
First of all, pathology/virology becomes an option to traitor medical doctors/medical director/captain/HoP as they have the easiest access to it and cause the least amount of suspicion actually being there. In matter of fact, if you are doing something in that room, you will most likely be questioned (mainly because it is so rare to see someone do ANYTHING there.) I think this is because pathology has exactly seven "good" uses, which most of us probably have never even seen.
A good comparison point for pathology is the toxic lab. In pathology, it takes a decent player anywhere from 8 to 15 minutes to produce a "good" sample which can be used to crack those tier 3-5 symptoms. A good bomb maker can get his preparations done in less then five, after which its just a waiting game for the optimal mix. Here is the first issue with pathology in general, you might get fucked over by the symptom generation code and you will be missing a single tier 1 symptom which you need to form a tier 3, 4 or 5. For example: Deadly tier 4 disease is AAA BBB CCC DDD but sadly, out of all the 10 samples that you get on round start, you never acquired DDD. The only way for you to even have a chance to get DDD is by infecting the whole station with a disease that spreads quickly and has very high mutativeness, hoping that it will generate something which uses the symptom DDD. Not to mention that you then actually have to extract samples of blood from people to acquire the new strand... This would be really tedious and generally just about anyone would just go get some genetic powers instead. Anyway, back to the comparison point. 40 minutes into the round, a half decent chemist has produced bombs and more then likely already blown half of the station to hell and back. A VERY lucky virologist could have a tier 5 by this point, if he was lucky enough to get every symptom on the round start. Now he only needs to grow it, mutate it so it actually is able to progress, then grow it again and then spread it.. Except that if he does spread it this way, he runs the risk of getting the same disease on himself and thus killing himself. So it will take a traitor 10 more minutes to go to a non-specified trader in space to acquire the vaccine module, so he can safeguard himself. By this point, it would really be much easier to get telekinesis, five other genetic powers and a c-saber. Or a bunch of bombs. Or hellfoam.
If you decide to continue, you actually need to figure out how to create the randomly generated suppressant. (These range from radiactive substances to chicken soup and medical chems.) Currently, they seem to be bugged (?) because if you use a petri dish on microscope and then using a dropper, drip some of the suppressant on the dish and view it, it usually doesn't show you anything, which seems to be the same thing when you are trying to investigate what does the symptom actually do.
Lets take a small sidetrack here, especially now that some of us have had the advantage of taking a look at the code. There are THREE heat based symptoms which all share the text of "The pathogen appears to be creating a constant field of radiating heat. The relevant membranes look like they might be affected by painkillers." The difference between these is that one raises your body temperature slightly, one sets you on fire and one literally firegibs you. Due to the bugged (?) dripping mechanic on the petri dishes, it is impossible to tell these apart and yet again takes time. (You actually need to go find the chemical, take the vial, pour it into petri, put petri into microscope and then drip the solution on it.) Why can't we have three distinctive messages for each of the different, similar diseases? For example: The pathogen appears to be creating a constant field of radiating heat. The relevant membranes look like they might be affected by painkillers. / The pathogen appears to be creating a LARGE amount of constant radiating heat. The relevant membranes look like they might be affected by painkillers. / The pathogen appears to be creating a EXTREME amounts of radiating heat. The relevant membranes look like they might be affected by painkillers. This theme of same identification text on symptoms is a reoccuring theme and while immersive, it does waste a large amount of already limited "traitoring" time.
In the end, if you managed to vaccine yourself, reach a high tier of symptoms and if you managed to spread it around the station, the station is literally fucked. The worst of the worst diseases are very deadly, some of them gibbing you in just a few minutes after some scary messages. It's possible but requires A) you to be lucky and have all of the tier 1 symptoms B) the round to be a very long one, we're talking 85mins here. And I can tell you that its not exactly enjoyable to sit pressing buttons at the computer for 85 minutes. Atleast the geneticists click buttons for 20-40 minutes and then get to assault people. Another issue is also that as soon as people start noticing that a disease is loose, someone will scan the pathology lab for fingerprints. It's pretty much guaranteed that you are the only person to ever visit that place.
So in short, traitor pathology is too risky, takes way too long and is simply unfun. What can be done to change this?
- Give us a traitor virologist item. Hell, let us pay 12 telecrystals for a single pathogen vial which contains a random tier 3-5 malificent symptom. I'm tempted to ask that the vaccine module would be introduced as a baseline to the synth-o-matic, but that might be pushing it.
- We need more uncommon/common/rare symptoms that are annoying but by no means deadly. This would allow pathology to be a great assisting tool for a traitor, a disease that gives you an edge against the crew. Make them easier to acquire, allow people to choose if they want to spend 10-20 minutes making a disease which gives you an edge in combat (granted that you make yourself immune to this disease) or if you wish to spend 40-60 minutes in creating a disease that will kill the whole crew if not cured/put an end to.
- Put one of those pathology vending machines to the "secret" space pathology lab. That place is a great for any traitor virologist who wishes to take the risk, but a lack of vending machine makes it unusable. If synth-o-matic is blown up by a traitor, this also renders this "backup" lab unusable.
- Diverse the "symptom" messages. Like I pointed out, its not fun to have two different farting diseases with the same text, its not fun to have two coldness based diseases with same text. The whole process has to be sped up due to how short the usual shifts are.
- The chemists don't start off with 1/4 of their chemicals being unavailable for the whole round, why should the virologist have a chance for this to happen? Make sure that every tier 1 symptom is contained in those starting vials. You spawn as traitor medical doctor, you work towards a tier 4/5, only to find out that you are missing one symptom. This is very stupid and should not be like this. In my own very BIAsed opinion, the tier 1 "common" symptoms should always be prefixed to a certain number of hex. AAA could be always cough, BBB could always be farting, CCC could always be Shakesperian etc. Make tier 2,3,4, and 5 completely random.
- The rarity of symptoms has to be adjusted. One "very rare" per round is fine, but after that it becomes slightly mundane due to how little of actually useful symptoms we have. This is exactly why we need more symptoms that are annoying but not deadly. I will give out examples of new diseases later on.
Non-traitor
What does the pathology lab offer to a person who is not a traitor? Well first of all it may be used in very rare case of "random event" disease, but that rarely if ever even happens. It can also be used to spread a helpful disease, but the biggest issue here is that there is only SEVEN helpful symptoms, which honestly all suck. One that heals each damage type VERY SLOWLY, as in.. If you are dying from a fire, this said disease will do absolutely nothing to help you. It is quite literally one damage away per three minutes. I simply cannot see this ever helping anyone, it is too slow. One that reduces how drunk you are, one that destroys harmful poisons in your body and thats about it. Not to mention that nearly all of them are very rare and very, very hard to acquire. It literally takes you the same amount of time to spread a good, O2 healing disease as it takes you to release a gibbing disease on the station. This is absurd and makes no sense, no-one in their right mind would want to bother with something like that. Thankfully the solution is much easier then to the traitor one.
- Add tons of new beneficial symptoms and make the current ones all common or uncommon, there is no reason for them to be rare or very rare. Make beneficial symptoms easier to acquire, move most of the deadlier and more harmfull stuff to tier 3/4/5. Make a couple new beneficial symptoms that can be tier 3/4/5, for example one that activates helpful superpowers on people from their DNA pool. A disease that completely prevents corpse necrosis. There is so much more that can be done with pathology if only the beneficial diseases would be easier to acquire and would be slightly more powerful. The interesting concept here is that by spreading a helpful, healing disease on the station, you also help the antagonists, accidentally.
- Same as before, there is no good reason for us to have a missing tier 1 symptom which later ruins a higher tier symptom.
- Balance the rarity of all the symptoms. Make deadlier stuff automatically higher tier, while the "basic" healing symptoms baseline common.
- Duplicate symptoms have to go. It's not fun first figuring out that AAA BBB CCC is a symptom that heals brute damage, only to figure out ten minutes later that BBB CCC AAA is exactly the same, the RNG has to go. I would rather have the round start with every possible disease ever, rather then having five of the same. This is the issue why there is a chance for the 10 pathogen samples you start with, only to contain 10x of tier 1 cough.
Pathology UI
As far as I know, the "new" pathology computer is still work in progress, but I might aswell give some criticism on it. First of all, the new "sequence" list is handy, you used to have to do that on paper/docs, so thats good. The sequence checker which verifies if the symptom will collapse or not is utter garbage and does not work even half of the time. It predicts wrong and that big red "FAIL" encourages me to check the whole code again, only to verify that it is correct and when I save it, it actually is correct, even if the computer was telling me that it was not. Add a function to check what each seperate symptom does, the microscope can still be used to check suppressant is used. For example, you have symptom AAA BBB, you click on it and it opens you a new window which tells you that its cough. For example if you have a very long pathogen with tens of symptoms, the microscope is very hard to use as it lists them in a big wall of text and isolating a single symptom takes long time.
Honestly other then that, I have no issues with the current UI.
Microbodies
Next I want to focus on the pathology microbodies and how they can be improved on. Currently there is little to no difference between them except for activity and the fact that some of them have auto-immunization and some of them can be vaccined against. Oh and some of them have less stages then the others. I think the introduction of microbody specific symptoms would be a good addition. For example parasite could have a bee parasite which when fully developed plants small bee eggs inside you, which later turns into a swarm of bees that assaults you or anyone who is in one tile radius of you, doing some very minor brute and toxic damage. Shameful self-advertisement. Fungal microbodies could form a symbiosis connection with its host, for example turning harmful chemicals into sugar or something else.
All in all, pathology is currently too complicated for what you manage to achieve with it. I guess people are still scarred by the old pathology, but hopefully with the bigger focus on beneficial symptoms it could be wastly superior to the old one. I would also wish to discuss the current rarity of all the diseases and how those should be changed, but I'm not sure if we are yet allowed to discuss such things due to the code still not being public (?). I'm personally big fan of pathology and stuff that is related to it (Plague Inc, cough cough.) and am actually willing to re-write the symptom examination texts if the coders would be willing to actually change those. Hopefully this will cause some attention towards pathology and some changes would be done. The code is all there and it works quite well, it just needs to get the same treatment as genetics, more symptoms and it will be a very good, useful addition to the station.