Remove/nerf/change menders + hypospray suggestion

[RelentlessGarbage]

all doctors did before pharmacy was ask chemists to make chems they need to do their jobs, get ignored, then break/sneak in to do it themselves. the key thing is to -encourage- interaction, not force it. as of late it seems goon is finally shifting towards this idea.

doctors still regularly ask chemistry for things, but at least now they dont need to rely on chemists having the patience to make more basic meds every 5 minutes

The QM also exists, and they provide a means for bulk-orders of basic medications as an alternative to Chemistry. Botany is also a thing, but even as someone who loves botany, I will admit that it's mostly people growing rainbow weed and getting horribly stoned. Still, it wouldn't hurt to try and get them to do something useful every once in a while, as they can single-handedly supply Medbay with drugs if their mind is set on it. (Having thousands of units of Synthflesh, Charcoal, Omnizine, and similar are not unheard of in botany, and that's with it only being a single person's pet project.) 

It's also not clear to me how large the supplies of basic medications are in Medbay, since I don't play as a doctor, but if Medbay is running out of them so quickly, then perhaps we should consider giving them more so that there's more of a buffer in times of demand before having to make more at a chem dispenser. My take is that forcing doctors to be chemists because nobody else is helping should be reserved for when the station is blown to smithereens and everyone needs to fend for themselves, not because it's the natural order of things on Goon1.

Back to the talk on menders; while I don't think they need to be nerfed, a buff to Hyposprays (with the understanding that such a buff will also help antags, due to the capabilities of emagged hyposprays), such as doubling their capacity from 30u to 60u, could at least diversify the number of tools that medical doctors have and use by making them more practical for field use. While they could never replace automenders, they could at least act as a better compliment to them by containing more restricted or niche-use drugs that need lower doses, without requiring that the doctors carry around another container to refill the hypospray out of necessity. Having more career medics pitch in on this topic would also be good, as they can speak with more authority on the topic.

[Kotlol]

I'll just reitterate one thing...

"If medbay suffers, the round suffers"

Heck in the old days you needed a QM each round or else the Payroll budget would go empty as the cargo budget was the only one you could get more money in.
So when NO ONE can operate QM in those days... people wouldn't get paid. Now it's done by an auto budget and Cargo can be missing a whole round and everyone would be paid.

With medbay in the other hand. Anything that nerf's them or handicaps them (like the annoying random cloning mishap, I am sorry but don't have it be on 1st cloning. More times then often it just ruins my motivation to play as my charater is horribly mutated and cannot do their species gimmicks anymore.)
The more time they will do to fix things, but also it will discourage a lot.

Changing medbay is fine, but slowing down and nerfing medbay? Guess what happens:
- Newbie doctors will be confused and people die.
- More people waiting in line , while waiting, they can't do their job or play.
- Doctors getting stressed to do their job and opt out of being a doctor for future rounds.
- More people dieing/being cloned/being in line = emptier station = less interaction
- Buffs antagonists, as people will now take longer to go back after them if they escaped injured, may result in people rather dieing.

As for Relentless suggestion on buffing hyposprays? YES! That is perfectly servicable as it buffs both antags and doctors.

[Retrino]

worth throwing out there that pre menders, patch boxes were inf capacity and beaker heal splashing/patches themselves were a lot more effective. removing menders would set us back miles for absolutely no reason and make med more annoying for people to play

[Goat_Real]

If we were to switch back to patches, don't patches have the effect of making medbay's medicines less effective due to patches only apply half of the reagents that are in the patches? This would basically force the playstyle of beaker splashing as you'd be wasting medicine and time, due to the inherent slowness applying medicine via patches, if you were to use patches.

[TDHooligan]

...It's also not clear to me how large the supplies of basic medications are in Medbay, since I don't play as a doctor...

...forcing doctors to be chemists because nobody else is helping...

...a buff to Hyposprays ...

1: There is a lot of medicine, there are also a lot of doctors that think injecting people with 20, 40, 100 units of charcoal will somehow help. It only takes one prank, one terrible doctor, etc to turn "5x more than you'd ever need" to "zero"

2: This is why doctors got pharmacy. It's just that a lot of players still think that both players 'win' when a doctor *has* to nag a chemist til they stop their fun task solely to make some boring-ass charcoal so the doctor can do his goddamn job and go back to having fun.
Not like you can't ask now, either. Odds are if they said 'No' today they'd have said 'No' back when you -needed- them to do it, and you'd hate their guts.

3: hyposprays are instant, adjustable syringes that can hit someone with 30u instantly. all you need to do is carry a beaker to carry more fluid.
not only that, but non-topical medicines are significantly more potent - salicylic acid is 10x stronger than styptic.

as for botany, they provide white weed when they feel like it and doctors will graciously accept it, and that's fine.

[Lord_earthfire]

2: This is why doctors got pharmacy. It's just that a lot of players still think that both players 'win' when a doctor *has* to nag a chemist til they stop their fun task solely to make some boring-ass charcoal so the doctor can do his goddamn job and go back to having fun.
Not like you can't ask now, either. Odds are if they said 'No' today they'd have said 'No' back when you -needed- them to do it, and you'd hate their guts.

Thjey not only "win" when they have to nag the chemist, they "win" when they run out of recources as well. That's what is missing: the variation that is created in struggling to supply your damn department. Medbay is self-sufficient and this robs so much potential for the department. Because let's face it: If my department is running low on recources, i need to improvise. And this creates story and engaging gameplay.

This is one of the causes of the symptom of people waltzing into your department, getting healed, and just waltz out without no interaction. It's running too smoothly.

If you can just do your job, that's boring. Except for the occasionall bombing of your department. The most memorable shift are the ones where everyones hunting a power sink, multiple bombings unite people to fix the damn hallways or you go on a oddisey to get a very specific secret chem for a insuspicious gimmick.

as for botany, they provide white weed when they feel like it and doctors will graciously accept it, and that's fine.

No, they simply don't care. Going in RP into medbay and seeing it decked out with perfluordecalin and pentetic acid is just dishearting when so much of botany, chemistry and other department is focussed on generating healing chems. I can count the amount of requests i got from medbay in RP on one hand.

Overall:
Pharmacy is removing interaction with other departments, which isolates these departments, invalidates a huge chunk of avaible healing chems from other departments and, and this is the worst, robs medbay from the struggle of supply chain management.

[babayetu83]

is it so bad that there's no supply issues? that you'd have those expectations thrust on you if you decided to roll botanist/scientist that you would be dedicating at least some time of your shift to having to slave away on the behalf of other departments and that you might have people cry and complain at you for not making the things they need? personally i'd stay as far away as i could from those roles as i could to avoid the stigma/avoid being nagged. it's different from the interactions botany and the kitchen has (because for the most part 1, 2 good harvests is all you really need to sustain the chef's needs)

forcing interaction is not fun, all it does is generate friction and breed contempt and frustration. just shout out that you can provide whatever, and just do your own thing. go to the market place and hawk your goods if you're absolutely feeling starved for that kind of interaction with other players/departments

[Lord_earthfire]

At that point most likely different playstyles do clash kinda hard. Because half the reason botany and science do kinda bum around doing nothing except drugs and endangering the rest of the station is because they don't have these expectations. Above that, i kinda like running around departments and request stuff/do requests. It's a change of pace and a great opportunity to get dragged into other peoples gimmicks.

It is, in fact, a reason to leave your department. And this is very important for RP.

Besides, to some extend, yes, i want these expectations. That's why i am in departments that supply others. More drastically, i want to enable a department, what i am unable to do if the chem dispenser they have enable them 1. to do the work of another department and 2. just do it faster to some degree because they got more tools/base chems to start with (or in case of botany, got straight up better chems that take botany 15-20 minutes to match).

To be honest, i would be content if the dispenser on pharmacy could only do basic med chems like charcoal, silver sulfazide, epi, potassium iodine, styptic and saline-glucose (explicitely no advanced chems like mannitol, synap, mutadone or calomel). Like a podwar chem-dispenser. That way, medbay would be able to do their job but when they want to be more effective, they should bug other departmants over it.

On top of it, that change would make it far more easy for beginner doctors to resupply themselves. And stop other people greytiding into pharmacy, which is a problem in classic.

[TDHooligan]

this is getting horribly off topic so i'll just post my final thoughts:

All the supply chain issues you think are important/fun aren't as interesting as you think they are.

I dare you to try playing chef for an extended period of time and see how enjoyable it is to have to spend the first 10 minutes of *every* shift trying to get hold of botany, get nothing, then do it yourself. that's 5~15 minutes tedium, not the 'enjoyable roleplay' that some people have the idea of.
This is why basically every chef becomes a pastry/meat chef, because botany is unreliable.

Goon has a large number of unique departments that can function independently and do their own cool stuff. Not only that, any cool stuff one department makes can be given to another department, and combined with their cool shit. *that* is your fun co-operation.

Wishing that medbay *had* to come crawling to you every shift isn't fun for them. Doubly so on the rounds you (or a similarly altruistic chemist) aren't in. If you're so desperate to mix up the basic medicines they need, you can just play pharmacist and let the other chemists run wild making firebombs and drugs.

[Lord_earthfire]

I dare you to try playing chef for an extended period of time and see how enjoyable it is to have to spend the first 10 minutes of *every* shift trying to get hold of botany, get nothing, then do it yourself. that's 5~15 minutes tedium, not the 'enjoyable roleplay' that some people have the idea of.
This is why basically every chef becomes a pastry/meat chef, because botany is unreliable.

I have an extensive list of chef and bartender rounds, i know how it can be a struggle if you try to forcefully push onto one department and ignoring the rest of the options avaible. The best way to handle this is just this: changing plans.

To be honest, the worst thing about being chef is people simply ignoring what you are doing because hunger makes you just somewhat less robust and hardly matters. And even this is leviated by food vendors being literrally everywhere.

Goon has a large number of unique departments that can function independently and do their own cool stuff. Not only that, any cool stuff one department makes can be given to another department, and combined with their cool shit. *that* is your fun co-operation.

Well, if the "cool shit" would be so much better in comparison to what the department has access to. And with medbay having access to perfluorodecalin, pentetic acid and all healing chems a scientist could create, that is simply not the case.

What the other department have to offer simply does not outcompete what medbay has from the get go. And we are talking about chems. Let's not get started on the sorry place robotocist is because of cyberorgans being avaible in normal medbay and being the top organs to replace anything with, with no option to upgrade (in contrast to borg limbs).

Sorry, i will book out of the discussion because i agree, it gone way too much offtopic and, honestly, i contributed much for how it went.

[Kotlol]

On the topic of "Departments who are forced to work together"

I always say this:
"Departments should NOT be forced to work together to get things done for their BASIC JOBS. They should work together to remove tedium or costs"

Example:
Medbay can make their own chemicals, but science can make them too, thus having the pharmacist able to doctor anyone else across the station as a EMT or at a medical checkpoint.

With the chef/bartender... I always recommended a "Farmers market terminal" where they can buy certain stock that is in offer with their own paychecks. (Thus paychecks and budgeting becomes more useful). Just like the cargo one, it rotates what it sells and for what prices. Botany can also use this to sell some produce without worrying about Cargo as well. (But cargo gets the general market still and is easier to bulk sell at)

Now if a chef is on board and no botanists/ranchers are on board. You can BUY what you need from the farmers market.
Heck... you know how hard is it to get fish on SS13 if it's not of the stations with water in it?

Farmers market solves it.

anyhow enough of my suggestion... the best form of running the station is having EVERY OPTION POSSIBLE.
Every department has a form of medicine infact, but they are good for 1-2 emergencies but the rest goes to medbay. THAT KINDA OPTIONS is what we all need for perfect cooperation.

[NightmarechaMillian]

honestly, I still feel like menders could use a nerf, or a change in some fashion to make them slightly less powerful of a healing tool. Both antags and helpful crewmember can just delete burn/brute damage with menders. When you compare this to literally any other form of healing (patch/pill/chems), I feel like it constrains med gameplay.

Are they a nice QoL item? Fuck yes. Should they be the core of healing? Also yes.

Should they be as good at patching spacemen back together as they are? Ehhhhhhh...

My two cents is to either

A) Reduce their capacity

or

B) Make them slower

With A, it adds complexity to playing MD and incentivizes doctors to do more inventory management, whilst making them less potent tools.

With B, it adds more meaning to getting crit/damaged at the cost of detracting slightly from engagement.

[Decarcassor]

I really don't see what a mender nerf would bring beside making playing medical more annoying. I thought the whole point was that brute and burn are the easy damage types to heal.

Things can already get pretty complicated in medbay when other damages types are involved since you need to treat the damages themselves but also their cause.

If peoples can recover from the crit state without too much issues, I think its a probelm with the crit state not being as harsh as some feel it should be, not because brute and burn medicine come in a convenient application tool for the peoples who choose to play as doctors.

[Mouse]

Personally I'd prefer to see more long-term effects from heavy damage than necessarily making it harder to heal or crit more punishing.  More organ damage, basically.  Or add bones.