salix_catus Wrote:The general idea is to give the cloner to the department that actually wants to help people stay alive.
AKA the department that seems to spawn at least two scalpel-wielding lunatics per round.
Look, there's a problem with genetics the same way there's a problem with Security: When people want to grief the people playing the job for shits and giggles on the assumption that they aren't doing their job (even when they are), that's sure as shit not going to help them find the initiative to do that job.
Just last night I'd spent all round flitting from the modifier to the cloner, popping bodies in and prepping them and monitoring them while still doing my research. Someone busts in from the back dragging a body and starts calling us lazy assholes who aren't cloning anyone. The body he brought in was braindead, same as at least half the bodies we'd received. But every body that had been brought in that could be cloned had been cloned. That doesn't stop people from harassing us, either for the perceived notion that we're not doing our jobs or for the perceived notion that we can make them supergods in an instant.
We have to deal with all the grief security gets, with the added bonus of greedy motherfuckers begging us for superpowers and then not being satisfied when we do give them superpowers, and subsequently hanging around the office for the rest of the round asking why their laser eyes aren't working seriously you guys it's not there i keep clicking the button but i dont have powers even though the evidence of them can clearly be seeeeeen!!!! And then you have the type of person who will fuck up the APC to dick with genetics, despite the fact that the porta-genes don't require APC power but the cloner does. But no, I can totally still hear when someone drops a body off up at the top of the office or when someone comes into the morgue who ISN'T just some joyriding assistant, no, I'm psychic like that. I just get cheap thrills from wasting my psychic powers by dicking around with monkeys in a tube all day.
Here's a tip: Drop bodies off by the airlock that we can actually see if you want to get them cloned. Just to be sure, make sure you announce there's a body there over the radio (bonus points for using the medical channel, because the purple is attention-grabbing where the green blends together). See, the thing is that the DNA modifier window takes up at least half the screen. So you're either deaf or blind. I keep mine over the radio, because I can't keep up with that shit anyway, especially not while working. But if someone drops a body off outside the door, I drop what I'm doing and drag it in and run it through. No reason not to, it takes a minute at most. But for some reason people drop off bodies at the top of the office all the time - the part of the room that no geneticist ever has any godly reason to go to - and then they get pissy when we don't realize there's bodies there, and instead of bringing them where they can actually be seen, they just bust in through that window and come in anyway. So now on top of our work distracting us we have an influx of the aforementioned assholes either harassing us or begging us for free stuff or stealing free stuff from the corpses waiting to be cloned. This kind of behavior does not provide much incentive to actually help people. Frankly, I'm far more likely to give out free mutations to people who are just dropping in to clone a guy than I am to the assistant who stands outside the office all round waiting for one (though if he's patient about it he might still get it).
Also, a reason some geneticists don't do their job is because they're new and inexperienced (or afk half the time - this is a problem in any department). SS13 is pretty fast-paced sometimes, and a new player might find it hard to keep up with all the stuff they have to do. Keep also in mind that genetics is one of the few jobs that is actually super-important on the station. People don't sabotage engineering because they thing the engineers aren't doing their job (mostly because all engineers have disappeared by the two minute mark, and also because joe schmuck can't just break into engineering with a fire extinguisher and moxie).
So maybe, MAYBE don't jump to the conclusion that rendering genetics useless (making it impossible for them to do their job) is a way to get back at those lazy geneticists for not doing their jobs. And maybe don't punish ME for the fact that my partner is making me clone everyone by myself (when I'm even allowed to do that, because half the time I open the door to grab a corpse the person who brought it just drags it in and starts cloning them before I can even touch the body). Try to be nice and helpful to genetics without being obnoxious and maybe they won't need to be replaced by doctors. They're elitist jerks BECAUSE they care.