Pathology Feedback

[zjdtmkhzt]

Yeah, I am well aware that the puddles are extremely annoying.
I already made a PR two days ago to replace both clouds and puddles with a decal system that should slip people less, linger less, stop clicks less, and be less visually obnoxious.
Let's hope we can get it merged soon! (:

[zjdtmkhzt]

Puddles are now gone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDU_Txk06tM

[onetoughcreampuff]

I played around with pathology and its working out great, made a couple of good pathogens and also took a opportunity to release a non antags hard worked on bad pathogen as a antag MD. Maybe a ingame book might help ease people into pathology. My only problem is that I use a weird dpi setting (bandaid fix for problems on other servers), i cant access all the buttons as there’s no way to scroll down to reach the other stuff, again i fixed this by messing around with settings. But other than that, it plays out great and I wouldnt mind if it was to be released permanently, with some small fixes.

[CommaIndividual]

Puddles are now gone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDU_Txk06tM

Very nice

[Leeanei]

One week was too short to really get a good grasp on things, tbh. On RP it got much, much less insane but only at the tail end. It actually wasn't all that bad because pathogens generally stayed where they started.

Anyways, intricate system that was vastly improved. I'd give it a "good to go", but that's just my thoughts from a test I think was a little too brief.

[Kapu1178]

after the first few days and with some issues ironed out, 10/10

[Sov]

Posting since no on else has yet - Pathology has been disabled again

[Flourish]

I would like to see interaction with other crewmembers as a key design principle. On RP, it feels out of place when people working on a pathogen stay cooped up in pathology for the majority of the shift, and don't really roleplay with anyone else or even really say anything besides stuff like "I found a T4". I think someone made the analogy of genetics before the interactivity changes. Additionally, it'd be ideal if the interactions that are designed for don't risk the spreading of dangerous pathogens.

On the topic of RP; my experience has been kinda different from some of the other posters'. I've seen many rounds grind to a halt and many people's experiences soured because someone accidentally spread pathogens or whatever. I think some of the PRs Zjd made have addressed aspects of this, such as reducing the spread of cloud based symptoms and limiting it to one pathogen per person. Though, I'd still like it if the spreading of pathogens were more intentional, or if it were easier to track who was infected. Once a pathogen spreads to more than a handful of the crew, it's pretty difficult to instate a lockdown (and lockdowns in general get kinda old fast) or find and cure them all. Some possible half-formed ideas I had include: sec scanners also reporting infected people, health implants displaying if someone has a pathogen (you can check those using MedTrak or the cloning computer), anti-pathogenic fields that you could buy from QM (like the ones that block atmos or fluids, but they block pathogens and people with pathogens).

[Caro]

So, after playing quite a few rounds over the past week, here are my thoughts on pathology and its impact on the rounds:

First of all: I was very happy to see that nerds that occupy the pathology lab usually make either beneficial viruses or beneficial viruses with some gimmicky symptoms such as bee sneezing. That means the beneficial symptoms are now worth researching and are easy enough to research, so you don't need to put too much effort into it. And if you don't like the gimmicky symptoms, you can very easily cure yourself via supressants.

Which also brings us to the next addressed issue: pathogens were difficult to cure, which is no longer the case. All you really need now is health analyzer to know what you need roughly to cure yourself, or, syringe + blood slide to know what you need exactly.

And as I mentioned in the earlier post, the manipulator UI is also much more user friendly and researching pathogens does not take a long time at all. I'm also really looking forward for the pathologist job PR to be merged and in my opinion, pathology might as well stay enabled.

However, I have an issue with one thing: the pathogen particles and other decals. I know one of the main goals of the whole pathology rework was to make pathogens visible. But, in my opinion, they might as well be removed. The presence of the pathogens can be easily noticed by the symptoms and if you don't have 100% viral protection, avoiding the particles still does not make you safe from them. And despite them spawning less frequently than before, once a pathogen with fairly high spread gets released, they still contaminate the whole station. Which also gives the station an uncomfortable, dirty feel. And even if the pathogen heals all your damage and revives you if you die, you still feel like the station shouts at you: Wear viral protection or you'll catch something nasty.

So here are my few suggestions that'd possibly address the issue:
1. Remove the particles entirely
2. Make particles spawn only if the pathogen has patho farts/sneezing symptom
3. Make them visible only if you're wearing some specific googles

To finish it in positive tone, I highly admire what was done to the whole pathology mechanic and I'm very much looking forward to it being enabled permamently. Great work Zjd!

[GORE]

I so far liked all the changes; but in this following post of mine I am just going to adress one singular thing.

- - -

Perhaps some use could be drawn from making the decal based clouds and puddles have various different colors...based on whether the virus is good or bad.

That might be a solution to people shouting all day long about any type of good virus spreading about.

[zjdtmkhzt]

However, I have an issue with one thing: the pathogen particles and other decals. I know one of the main goals of the whole pathology rework was to make pathogens visible. But, in my opinion, they might as well be removed. The presence of the pathogens can be easily noticed by the symptoms and if you don't have 100% viral protection, avoiding the particles still does not make you safe from them. And despite them spawning less frequently than before, once a pathogen with fairly high spread gets released, they still contaminate the whole station. Which also gives the station an uncomfortable, dirty feel. And even if the pathogen heals all your damage and revives you if you die, you still feel like the station shouts at you: Wear viral protection or you'll catch something nasty.

So here are my few suggestions that'd possibly address the issue:
1. Remove the particles entirely
2. Make particles spawn only if the pathogen has patho farts/sneezing symptom
3. Make them visible only if you're wearing some specific googles

They do only spawn when a symptom with airborne transmission triggers. (Farting, Sneezing, Coughing, ..)
And avoiding them should protect you even without viral resistance? They won't do anything to you if you don't touch them.
You can still catch things from the pathogen's other symptoms though, like sweating or hugs.

---

I so far liked all the changes; but in this following post of mine I am just going to adress one singular thing.

- - -

Perhaps some use could be drawn from making the decal based clouds and puddles have various different colors...based on whether the virus is good or bad.

That might be a solution to people shouting all day long about any type of good virus spreading about.

Yup, I had the same thought reading TTerc's post.
Maybe I'll integrate this with the danger-rating stuff I had planned for health scanners.

My original thought was that maybe a pathologist making a good pathogen would just use hugging or infect people manually (with their consent), but I suppose that is unrealistic.

I could see myself implementing something where a common cold, with a minor negative score would be similar to now, while a high danger rating plague would be black or something and a very beneficial pathogen an almost transparent pink.

[Mordent]

I wholeheartedly and vehemently dislike pathology as a feature in general, predominantly because of it being too close to real-life right now. I think it's a poo time to re-add it, and have actively avoided playing this week because of it (so my take is second-hand). That said, I've had to deal with the administrative side of it so:

The number of pathology-related adminhelps has been pretty darned high (understandable), and they are somewhat of a chore to administrate because working out the "why" of a pathogen having escaped can take some time - we can get there, but it's not as simple as seeing "Joe McAssistant attacks Happy the Clown with the toolbox x48" in the logs.

I'd like to see more logging added to be able to tell which strain of a pathogen is being spread around via the pathogen reagents, and the "X is infected by Y" logs should contain a specific location as well (XYZ and area).

[Leeanei]

reading through Virva/Mordent's comments, I can definitely see where they are coming from.

One big thing is more beneficial symptoms, another would be maybe some sort of way to get a benefit from interacting with crew like genetics?

[Rilor]

I think pathology is currently pretty balanced and in its current state its unlikely to cause too many problems unless one of them is a traitor. But I agree that its a bit low on the interaction side.
Perhaps they should need stuff from cargo in order to do stuff? (like to run the incubator or to get anti-agents) and a teleport pad.
pathology due to its nature will probably always disentivice in person interaction, so they'd have to rely on radios and other methods of remote communication (like mail or PDA) I think a intercom system thing the CE has some maps for pathology would be neat, but not sure why they'd end up actually using it.
another idea is that the pathomatic requires blood from players (importantly not monkeys) to edit pathogens or to test or something and that it will use up more and more the more its used without unique blood being input, not sure how this would actually work while being balanced and not too annoying but its a neat idea

[Telareti]

AFTER 1 week of playing pathology i can say i really enjoyed it, i never got to play it before when it was out, but playing this beta has been very fun, in ss13 i am not very nerdy in much like the thing i may know the must about that can be considered nerdy is tele sci, however with this pathology i have became a nerd in it and i enjoyed it so much i spent so many shifts with it and have positives and negatives about it, so at the start when it came out there was problem with outbreaks spreading really fast and no one knew what to do and most of the time the outbreak was started because someone would make a mistake, however with the nurfs and the people like me and stars and other friends becoming nerds in it, it has been very fun, i have noticed when someone who is expericed in it now almost no outbreaks happen and even if a natual one happens or one gets out some how, making a cure is very easy, recently for the pass 4 days i have been joining as a staffie and going to hop to be a plague doctor and as that i would watch over anyone who was inexpericed to make sure a outbreak happening was very low, however if no one was doing it and i was free to i would start finding good symtoms like brute healing and burn and in the best case the T5 that can revive dead people and after i would make sure the parasite had 0 spread and with only good symptoms and go round asking people who wants a good parasite and lots of people would say yes even some people who dont know me wanted it, so in the case where some people say there nothing good about it, i would disagree and i would say it can be really good even fun with the fun symtoms like the one that give people shades. other than making cute parasites i would make lots of cures for people who were big stinky and did not shower and it would take me around 30 sec to 1 min to get sample from blood 2 min to grow it then 1 min 30 seconds to make it into a cure, this was the same with natural or lab pathogens, when i got antag one time i decided to be a plague docter again but make parasite with bad symtoms however i would make sure spread was 0 and i would only give this to people i considered being rotten to others that shift for instance i think someone was being mean to a gene friend because he was being slow, so i injected the rotten person with the parasite it had 3 t5 bad in it but even then they mange to get the CDC before he died so i would say once people know to use the CDC curing should be easy even if you dont do pathology

OVERALL

positives i would say pathology is fun and can be used for good and even when something bad breaks out that being a natural or lab pathogen it is pretty easy to cure even with no pathology experience because of the CDC, the new changes to do with how you can see pathogens and how they have a lower chance to infect people i see as amazing changes, it got reduced to a 5% to 10% chance to still infect people this is not to low becuase some people will still catch it but not to high that it will cause everyone to get infected so i feel its good, in the days after that change i would see around 3 people who would catch it before it was cured, i would even be able to cure it before 2 people catch it if people come to med or med find out it exists and i feel that even with low spread, pathology is still fully functional since you can still inject people if they allow you so i feel this change just stops a lot of cases where a antag or self antag or even a mistake caused a large amount of people to get infected. since someone cant just make a T5 bad infection and spread it to everyone so it means its more to do with injecting people and asking.

second positives this one is more of my opinion but the way making large pathogens and splicing and doing the testing is great, when i do the testing part to find T5 its fun becuase its like a puzzle and you dont have to spend to long doing the splicing bit because once you have a big pathogen you will have a lot of numbers to test with so you can spend a lots of time doing that fun bit

the first negative i would say is one i noticed for maps where pathology is a med job or sci job is that the jobs would always be taken and this was mainly bad for med because the job got taken by people who had no care for healing or helping other than making a good parasite and the people who did wanna help people could not play med, thats why when i wanted to do pathology i would always start of as a staffie and become a plague doctor, so maybe adding it as a job like gene or somthing would be good.

second negative was how people being self antags or antags would make a TERRIBLE PATHOGIN and just make it max spread and infect everyone i feel like pathoolgy should not be played like that on rp at least, since it is not fun for anyone, however the nerf to do with spreading fixed some problems with this and so i dont think this is as bad as a problem as it was however if it still somehow happens when pathology is added back i feel theres many different ways to deal with it. the first way is simply what has already been done and reduce spread to low numbers for all pathogen ways of transmission other than injecting people that way people can still inject good parasites for people who want it and for the antags they can still infect people but its harder to infect a entire station. now if that does not work the harder thing that can be done is make it so pathogens cant spread and can only be given by injections this is a harsher way to do it but it could be done because it would mean all the good elements of pathology are still there but the antags spreading T5 is gone. this way pathology can still be on in RP and not have the antags or self antags making it terrible