remove patho

[Mopcat]

it's not fun. it's not engaging. it's easily abused. it destroys entire stations with little to no effort. it's practically unstoppable the vast majority of the time. it has no place in the game. nobody likes it, and nobody will miss it. it literally contributes nothing to the station. get rid of it already. please. excise this fucking tumor of a mechanic already because it's genuinely the worst thing in the game to a lot of people and always will be unless it's basically turned into an entirely new mechanic.

[Skornzy]

It seems like pathology has gotten seriously out of hand recently. The only two rounds I played yesterday were back to back plagued by a similar sickness that made people teleport at random, fart plasma, randomly combust, and violently explode on death. Dying to something as unavoidable as a disease is possibly the least fun, and most obnoxious thing in the game currently regardless of how deadly it is, or how quickly it kills you.

[Lady Birb]

At least disable it until a complete overhaul, if you don't want to remove it outright

[Frank_Stein]

My experience with pathogens is mostly on the receiving end of some hell virus, so here's my two cents on the subject

Learning pathology just isn't interesting to me. It seems overly complicated and RNG based for the sake of placing overpowered effects behind a complexity wall.

Which, I don't have a problem with complexity for complexities sake. Some people enjoy that and I consider asymmetrical mechnics a feature of this game.

I just would like if pathology wasn't such a hard extreme between being ignorable to devastating from round to round. Maybe focus it more around treating debuffs that occur because of environmental circumstances like exposure to elements and decay rather than creating your own pathogens. More medical than Science, I guess

[saccharineChampion]

Related recent thread: https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid=14365

[zjdtmkhzt]

The issue with current pathology is that a certain semi-intended method of acquiring symptoms has gotten seriously overbuffed, so people can just click the same button for 20 minutes and end up with 4 times as many bad symptoms as was originally intended. I have submitted a patch to remedy this yesterday.
Shameless plug: https://github.com/goonstation/goonstation/pull/470
If you have a constructive opinion on this, please feel free to weigh in, github isn't that scary a place.

I believe this alone will suffice to make the current situation on the server a lot more palatable, because people will have to actually put effort into making a pathogen via the dna analyzer, and even then it will usually not be as bad as what you can make right now via spamming mutations.


Another issue is people not wanting to learn pathology in order to not have to die when a disease is around. I've seen this sentiment a lot, and it's kind of understandable. So I'll probably look into also making a patch to make pathogen curable via just the suppressant (which can be things like chems, but also things like being cold, sleeping or being exposed to radiation.) For people that do not want to do those things, the old cure system will also remain in place. This would also fix the issues with pathologist blowing up the pathology machines before releasing something bad (though I have only seen that very rarely).

Lastly, I'll probably look into limiting the number of symptoms and specifically spreading symptoms that go into a disease, so it will be easier to protect yourself if you take appropriate steps. (Because right now apart from a biosuit and internals you also need latex gloves and white shoes, which is just dumb.)

Anyway, the point of my post is, I don't think removing pathology right now would be a good idea. I think that the negative effect we have seen recently can be easily fixed with my first patch and the deeper, less pressing issues that people have with patho can hopefully be adressed via further patches over the next weeks. Removing it now would make it a lot harder to put it back in later and would also rob people that want to make patches to fix it of valuable feedback.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

EDIT: And of curse, in the long term hopefully more beneficial symptoms will be added, so pathology can aid the crew more as a nonantag, although there are already quite a few options right now, though most are just passive healing.

[Sundance]

For a long time when cog1 was the only map and there was no map rotation, pathology was an old ruin that people could visit and gawk at. "what happened here?" people would often wonder, along with "I wonder if pathology is ever going to be reintroduced".

Enter Marq, headcoder and resident turbonerd. He recreated pathology from the ground up. In turbonerd fashion, he made it so incredibly complex it was inaccessible to the average gooner who likes to smack things with wrenches and screech at locked doors. There was heavy criticism at the time then too, people felt he made the system that made sense to him and only him. That and most importantly - it wasn't fun.

So all this effort was effectively for naught for a while as nobody was actually playing with it, aside from Noah Buttes (Camryn) and the odd chemnerd who felt like they reached their limit in chemistry. Which is a damn shame, because despite its faults, there was lots of work put into it.

Enter the patch forum. More work was put into it, creating more interest. Then comes the greytide of 2019, pumping in fresh blood into the community.

Present date. Forked coding allows for some unforeseen changes and now we have some players going into pathology, making super viruses, "oops it got out" or "see! pathology is unbalanced, now you see, now you seeee", whichever flavor it chosen, it's still inflicted on the station, much to the chagrin of crew.

So. What can be done? I'd support zjdtmkhzt's additions, that'd be a start. Here's a few pointers:

1. The complete removal of Airborne transmission. You see, this was also raised back when pathology was first introduced. "How does airborne diseases actually transmit" was raised and I distinctly remember the answer "I dunno, code is a mess". This is not good. There's literally no control over a virus once it is airborne. It just exists in the ether and indiscriminately kills everything. If removed, it could then be reintroduced as a detectable gas.

2. Tactile transmission. Someone with a disease and they sneeze? You get an obvious message that you have been hit by a glob of snot. Waterborne transmission, meaning you can spike people or create floods with the virus and people walk through it. Basically physical and obvious methods of transmission, the opposite to airborne. 

3.  zjdtmkhzt's point regarding suppression. Suppressive medicine should not cure the disease but mitigate its symptoms. In that light More Suppressive medicine. Less to do with eating chemicals, but some suppressive medicine could simply be present in types of food, i.e cholesterol could be suppressive. 

4. Finally, this is a long term goal, but make pathology more fun and accessible, but you gotta tackle to above first. This is an issue, if pathology actually isn't fun, then people aren't going to bother with cures. The greatest weapon pathologist has is apathy. Create virus. Unleash on crew. "Hey i can make a cure". "Nah, lets just call the shuttle". I see it all the time.

[zjdtmkhzt]

Hey, I would just like to adress some of these points:

1. I don't think airborne transmission like you describe it actually exists, afaik. All transmission is person-to-person. (Except for one case I will mention now.)
2. Food and other things can already be spiked via blood from an infected person into them! Also, all the spreading symptoms pretty much fit into this category. Also, the framework for giving the person that gets infected a message already exists, but it is only used for Fluid Speech, Snaps and Hugs. Perhaps we should add those to every spreading symptom, that sounds like a great idea!
3. Suppressants already mitigate pathogen's symptoms right now, they reduce the stage down to 3, which makes symptoms trigger much less commonly and also much less severely. Judging by the current situation on the server, that might not be enough.
4. There's already been quite a few improvements to the pathology machine usability lately, which I find has increased my enjoyment of making pathogens quite a bit. I am always open to more suggestions for how the interface could be improved, though. Maybe we should remove all those lights where noone is quite sure what they do...

[Sov]

Once mutations are addressed and making a virus with a t5 goes back to taking 45 minutes this issue will become moot

Most of the time you don’t even know there’s a pathogen because by the time it’s begun people have already called the shuttle since it’s 60 minutes and the other traitors have caused chaos

A lot of people are calling for knee jerk responses to a mechanic that’s only become highly abused in recent time. Additionally many base their arguments on out of date or just incorrect information.

Bonus, guide to making a cure:
1. Put infected blood on bloodslide
2. Put blood slide and a clean petri dish into centrifuge, turn it on, you have the pathogen
3. Eject the Petri dish, pour it into a vial
4. Put vial into synth-o-matic along with an antagent from the vendor (99% of the time anti-viral because no one uses the others)
5. Click the vial in the menu to make it the active one
6. Click cure by irradiation

You don’t need to examine the pathogen in the microscope
You don’t need to understand viral colors or shapes
You don’t need to use suppressants of any kind
You don’t need to worry about the suppression threshold
You don’t need to understand the symptoms
You don’t need to use the pathogen manipulator

Most of the cure mechanics been scrapped (and can be completely ignored) in order to make curing a 15 second process. The current issue is that the current plagues based on abused mechanics are killing people ungodly fast which is not normal. You normally have several minutes to cure yourself of a virus during which time you will notice low tier harmless symptoms before they become damaging to you.

If that’s still not enough, then just make suppressant reagents easier to identify from a health scan. I believe all the obscure ones have been removed, if not remove them

[Mouse]

There's a few things about pathology that I personally consider to be problems that I figure I might as well bring up.

First, a number of the high-tier symptoms (plasma farts, explosive gibbing on death, electrical arcs, explosive snapping, and probably others) injure or kill people regardless of whether or not they're infected.  What's the point of getting cured of a plasma fart pathogen if I'm going to burn to death in the giant plasma fire started by the people who haven't been cured yet?  This leads into my next point.

On the path rounds I've seen lately, the number of cures that manage to get produced are drastically lower than the actual population count, and that's even when the shuttle isn't called the moment a pathogen is announced.  From a doctor's standpoint, the most responsible thing to do is just get the shuttle called and end the round asap, since that will result in the lowest body count.  But let's say you do manage to get enough cures made.

Curing everyone is incredibly difficult, and, due to my first point, something that really needs to be done if you want to live.  There's no long-range method of telling if someone's infected or not, you have to analyze everyone up close to make sure you're not giving the cure to someone who has already been given the cure.  You have to find people, most of them aren't going to report to medbay on their own.  You have to rely on people letting you cure them.  People tend to be iffy about injections, particularly ones with names that sound more like you're giving them a pathogen.  And this all leads into my next point.

How do you tell the difference between someone with a pathogen who is running around infecting everyone, not quarantining themselves, and preventing you from curing them because they're an idiot who doesn't pay attention to chat and someone who is doing all that because they're an antag, or just an asshole who decided to use this an opportunity to self-antag with plausible deniability?  If I'm going to ahelp everyone I see who seems like they might be doing the last one, I'm going to be sending multiple ahelps every round there's a pathogen.  And no, I'm not exaggerating here.  Even as a god damned staff assistant who isn't involved in medbay at all I still run into multiple people who refuse to get themselves cured, even as they're sneezing, plasma farting, and people are exploding everywhere.

And then there's one more point, which I think might be contributing to the recent influx of "delete path" threads and sentiment.  We are, at the present moment, in the midst of an actual, real-life pandemic.  Making and releasing horrible murder diseases round after round may not be the best thing to be doing when that's going on.  Whether consciously or not, I think the present circumstances in real life are going to make people react more negatively to pathology than they would otherwise.

[zjdtmkhzt]

Curing everyone is incredibly difficult, and, due to my first point, something that really needs to be done if you want to live.  There's no long-range method of telling if someone's infected or not, you have to analyze everyone up close to make sure you're not giving the cure to someone who has already been given the cure.  You have to find people, most of them aren't going to report to medbay on their own.  You have to rely on people letting you cure them.  People tend to be iffy about injections, particularly ones with names that sound more like you're giving them a pathogen.  And this all leads into my next point.

Prodoc Health Goggles should show something like maybe a small biohazard symbol on or next to the heart of people that have at least one pathogen, that sounds pretty sick. I can't sprite, though. :/

[Technature]

Despite my shitty experiences with pathology, it does feel like it had a lot of effort put into it, and just annexing it would feel like all of its work was ultimately wasted.

I think a big thing would be to make actually curing things easier. I tried using it to cure diseases, and I just can't figure it out. Even when I went through the whole process, figure out what actually does the curing, it still somehow doesn't work. It just feels like it was a process made with being an unopposed antagonistic fuck in mind. If actually finding and producing a cure was something that anyone who put a small amount of effort into could do, I don't think it would be nearly as frustrating.

Also, get the CDC working. It's not an easy pay cure at this point. It's just a black hole of money that gets people to hunt you down because you spent that precious Station Hole fixing money on something worthless.

[zjdtmkhzt]

It's actually really easy to cure:

Put infected blood into a blood slide.
Put blood slide and petri dish into centrifuge.
Isolate.
Check the sample in a microscope to find out the type of microbody.
Put at least 2 units of the sample into a vial.
Put the vial into the synth-o-matic.
Put the appropriate anti-agent for the microbody type from the vendor into the synth-o-matic.
Select the sample in the synth-o-matic.
Click "Serum from irradiation".

Boom, you now have 4 cures.
If you want me to show you, feel free to ask ingame. I play as malcolm curry and I am in pathology every round instead of doing anything remotely useful.

[Skornzy]

It's actually really easy to cure:

Put infected blood into a blood slide.
Put blood slide and petri dish into centrifuge.
Isolate.
Check the sample in a microscope to find out the type of microbody.
Put at least 2 units of the sample into a vial.
Put the vial into the synth-o-matic.
Put the appropriate anti-agent for the microbody type from the vendor into the synth-o-matic.
Select the sample in the synth-o-matic.
Click "Serum from irradiation".

This doesn't seem easy to the average player. Especially when they are under the effects of a multilayered hell disease. Maybe it would help if there was a book written, and put on the bookshelves for anyone interested in combating rogue diseases?

---

It would be great if there were extra bio suits in EVA too. I'm not sure if QM can order more. There needs to be more counterplay involved in battling viruses if nothing's going to be changed about pathology I feel.

[Sundance]

Hey, I would just like to adress some of these points:

1. I don't think airborne transmission like you describe it actually exists, afaik. All transmission is person-to-person. (Except for one case I will mention now.)
2. Food and other things can already be spiked via blood from an infected person into them! Also, all the spreading symptoms pretty much fit into this category. Also, the framework for giving the person that gets infected a message already exists, but it is only used for Fluid Speech, Snaps and Hugs. Perhaps we should add those to every spreading symptom, that sounds like a great idea!
3. Suppressants already mitigate pathogen's symptoms right now, they reduce the stage down to 3, which makes symptoms trigger much less commonly and also much less severely. Judging by the current situation on the server, that might not be enough.
4. There's already been quite a few improvements to the pathology machine usability lately, which I find has increased my enjoyment of making pathogens quite a bit. I am always open to more suggestions for how the interface could be improved, though. Maybe we should remove all those lights where noone is quite sure what they do...

1. Sorry I should clarify what I mean by airborne, as i've been on the receiving end of this, but perhaps it's not how I imagine it. There has been times where I've been in a room with a diseased player and I have received the disease. It was incorrect for me to state that it's in the "ether" but effectively it appears that way. That's what I mean by "airborne". And it sucks really badly.

What I feel should happen as per transmission is far more visceral and methods of transmission broadened. Some examples:

A) Sneezing should have a physical form of a spray (see janitor cleaner bottle), getting hit with this spray gives you disease unless you are wearing a mask (breath mask won't cut it)
B) Projectile vomiting, another form of possible transmission, like sneezing but far more intrusive. 28 Days later style.
C) Diseases that are transmitted, but only through open wounds.
D) Waterbourne diseases 
E) Diseases that are transmitted through physical contact (literally touching the player, not walking into them).
F) Diseases that are passed through biting (some diseases could cause rabies-esque effects where you can't help but bite??), etc etc. 

You see where i'm coming from. The current path doesn't really have this framework, from what I have witnessed. It should, as it would make diseased players far more obvious and easier to tackle.

2. Spiking food wasn't really what I was getting at (see above), but that should absolutely be a method of transmission, as would any direct form, like injecting.

3. Yes, i'm aware that suppressants mitigate symptoms, but with many advanced diseases where you are teleporting around the place, sneezing bees and farting plasma, it just simply isn't enough. And there needs to be more common "household" suppressants that the average crewmembers should get their hands on.

4. That might be true, but idk if it's truly enough to entice players, given the current pickle we're in.