Thoughts and suggestions on medical department

[cyberTripping]

I believe Kotlol's point is that the floor needs to be maintained to some extent even while the ceiling is raised.

I agree. What i think is also thst we have to accept that once we start to raise the skill ceiling, more people will die in medbay and  likely stay dead for longer.

Death having more impact on a round is absolutely a good thing, especially for RP servers. It's a bit too trivial to die and come back which takes a lot of the drama out of, yknow, what should be a pretty big deal. I'd advocate for cloning to be made more difficult, as many others here have. There's simply no point to healing someone in deep crit to full when you could just let them die and clone them in as much time, outside of roleplay. What should be an exhillerating and heroic process to bring someone back from the brink just being a waste of time and resources doesn't feel great.

I agree with egregorious' idea on organ damage as a long-term form of damage that requires higher effort to fix. Back when I played a bunch of doctor, I was really excited about the organ update adding some much needed depth, but I feel the organ system hasn't truly matured outside of the bionic replacements in the time since.

[colossusqw]

Giving death more impact should definitely be a thing, and cloning in it's current form is just kinda anthitetical to that. I've been running puritan on most of my characters for ages and hadn't had problems with it at all, and even when i die, that isn't the end of the world, it's an expected part of the game loop that you may be killed mid way through a round. I understand wanting to make medical new player friendly and having a minimum effectiveness floor everyone can have, but to be honest that just undermines the countless ways of re-entering the round(via critters, player respawns and so on) and most of the possibility for interesting mechanics and complexity of medical.

Medical, imo, cannot both be an easy role anyone can instantly be effective at(for example by cloning everyone that shows up) and be interesting to master in the long run at the same time. It shouldn't be a bad thing if subpar treatment causes you to die, because dying from time to time shouldn't be a punishment, but an expectation that makes actually surviving thrilling.

[Egregorious]

Medical, imo, cannot both be an easy role anyone can instantly be effective at [...] and be interesting to master in the long run at the same time.

When it comes to this notion in a vacuum, my take is that obvious mechanics to deal with the basic damage types are all that's needed to make the medical role accessible to new players. A lot of issues that people show up in medbay for wind up just being fixable by automenders or charcoal. I think it's fine that these basic medical mechanics make new players effective as doctors to approximately the degree that they do.

So adding complexity on top of the four damage types does, in my opinion, allow the medical role to be something that someone can immediately be effective to enough of an extent, and also be interesting in the long run. Jimmy the Newbie can very easily tell how to heal the brute damage of the guy who got beat up by the clown - I think that works well. Jimmy the Newbie has no idea how to cope with the guy whose lungs just got stolen and is now suffocating to death in the lobby - I think that also works well.

Of course as it stands now Jimmy probably knows exactly how to cope with the guy whose lungs just got stolen because Jimmy has been cloned before; that's the issue in my mind.

[colossusqw]

Hmmm, i gotta agree with that, tbh.

[Kotlol]

I may have something in mind to fix a simple problem with this all.

"Emergency COMA device."

If someone is in crit, you can use this device to put them in a "COMA" , wich keeps them in a statis and will slow down dieing by a ton.
Kinda like the sleeper units but insted this time it won't let the patient slowly die and agonizing, but put em on pause with 1st responders (or atleast 10 times slower)

Another variant was just "pausing them" but allowing them to talk with only a few words. So they can utter the words: "End... me...."

Eitherway something to compliment nerfing/changing cloning so doctoring can take more place.

Something so if someone in an emergency 1st respond or in those 1st aid kit lockers to put someone into "medical statis" but also dissallowing them to do anything so they can stay in "CRIT" longer and thus get to the medbay for a doctor to treat them.

And while it takes a while to die in crit. Just giving that extra time via a device will help a lot more.
(Remember being in Crit means you can't do anything anyway, so essentially "Dead" without being "DEAD" , would also stop people dieing, then ghosting then being cloned and using lil information like that)

[rando212]

I may have something in mind to fix a simple problem with this all.

"Emergency COMA device."

If someone is in crit, you can use this device to put them in a "COMA" , wich keeps them in a statis and will slow down dieing by a ton.
Kinda like the sleeper units but insted this time it won't let the patient slowly die and agonizing, but put em on pause with 1st responders (or atleast 10 times slower)

Another variant was just "pausing them" but allowing them to talk with only a few words. So they can utter the words: "End... me...."

Eitherway something to compliment nerfing/changing cloning so doctoring can take more place.

Something so if someone in an emergency 1st respond or in those 1st aid kit lockers to put someone into "medical statis" but also dissallowing them to do anything so they can stay in "CRIT" longer and thus get to the medbay for a doctor to treat them.

And while it takes a while to die in crit. Just giving that extra time via a device will help a lot more.
(Remember being in Crit means you can't do anything anyway, so essentially "Dead" without being "DEAD" , would also stop people dieing, then ghosting then being cloned and using lil information like that)

While I do think this is a good idea and I see where you are coming from this littearly already exsits but is just not well known. Both cryoxadone in the cryo tubes and the combination of atropine and synaptizine have the same effect of reducing the chance of death to basically none allowing you to save people who are in very deep crit. The reason no one uses these features is A: its just not advertised anywhere but the wiki page for chemicals, and B: cloning is just easier and a far smaller waste of resources. Something else is I actually talked about this idea when I wrote up a document on a medical doctor rework and one peice of feedback was that medbay is a already pretty cramped space and medical doctors have a lot of gear so adding a new tool/machine would be fairly difficult. In my opinion what should be done is rather then make a new device just make it more well know like being in the handbooks or being put in a description that this feature exsits being the compliement to a cloning nerf.

[meaow589]

I want medibot to get nurf and unable to synthesis medicine to free heal patients and need to have doctor to add medicine beaker on it instead.in exchange make medibot can have more option to apply medicine on skin or injection.and can set type of damage detection sensor.
Reason support is medibot I. Game now is abit OP and can heal easily only problem from it is can make hypertension if use much.and medibot is very too convenient and didn’t need medicine to refill it. So my point is make them more reasonable to make medsci more interaction.

[Waffleloffle]

an important element I think people are glancing over in this thread is how fun it is to be on the other side of these proposed doctoring changes - the one being treated, not the one treating them. a lot of proposed solutions do seem very fun to treat, but they don't really provide a patient experience other than to Sit There For A While, sometimes in a way that doesn't even allow the patient to eavesdrop on nearby conversations while it's happening. this is kind of an issue with a lot of medical's Loop as a whole, to be fair; more complexity would be great, but it's difficult to come up with a solution that adds more for the doctors while also still providing an interesting experience for the patient, rather than just giving them another reason to have to go to medbay.

the social upside of cloning is that it allows people to get back into a round relatively quickly after death, but also doesn't force anyone to stick around if they die and decide they've had enough of this round. I've played a few rounds on a tg fork, and had a round where surgery to revive me took Literally An Hour total, because I would just reach the death threshold instantly after being revived and all I could do was attempt to say something, which would then kill me again. it was not a fun experience. in my opinion, any proposed nerfs to cloning need to either not interfere with its efficiency, or provide just as efficient an alternative

[Azurnite]

an important element I think people are glancing over in this thread is how fun it is to be on the other side of these proposed doctoring changes - the one being treated, not the one treating them. a lot of proposed solutions do seem very fun to treat, but they don't really provide a patient experience other than to Sit There For A While, sometimes in a way that doesn't even allow the patient to eavesdrop on nearby conversations while it's happening. this is kind of an issue with a lot of medical's Loop as a whole, to be fair; more complexity would be great, but it's difficult to come up with a solution that adds more for the doctors while also still providing an interesting experience for the patient, rather than just giving them another reason to have to go to medbay.

the social upside of cloning is that it allows people to get back into a round relatively quickly after death, but also doesn't force anyone to stick around if they die and decide they've had enough of this round. I've played a few rounds on a tg fork, and had a round where surgery to revive me took Literally An Hour total, because I would just reach the death threshold instantly after being revived and all I could do was attempt to say something, which would then kill me again. it was not a fun experience. in my opinion, any proposed nerfs to cloning need to either not interfere with its efficiency, or provide just as efficient an alternative

This honestly is something I have been seeing with recent testing and noting of things I have observed. A lot of ideas being presented are very doctor/medical sided, but y I have noticed that players have expectations of medical turning them around quickly. Hell I've seen some even act like medical is the dentist with how much avoidance they put on it. Just to avoid spending a few minutes to get fixed up. I recently tried to use more alternative ways to healing people that wasn't mendor/hypospray and I did see a bit of impatience from patients. The goal I had in mind was to see how patients reacted to slower paced methods of healing as well as how other medical doctors saw it. The usual I got was, "Why not use your mendor?" So my conclusion on this is that outside perspective and expectations placed on medical would need convincing of the change as much as people playing medical.

In another vein of discussion, one possible suggestion I can put forth is one that would be allow medical to be more involved with optional work internally and possibly independently of the cargo requisitions. This could be research of some kind perhaps that one can do while there are no patients. This could be an extension of Medical-Cargo collaboration of some kind.

[rando212]

an important element I think people are glancing over in this thread is how fun it is to be on the other side of these proposed doctoring changes - the one being treated, not the one treating them. a lot of proposed solutions do seem very fun to treat, but they don't really provide a patient experience other than to Sit There For A While, sometimes in a way that doesn't even allow the patient to eavesdrop on nearby conversations while it's happening. this is kind of an issue with a lot of medical's Loop as a whole, to be fair; more complexity would be great, but it's difficult to come up with a solution that adds more for the doctors while also still providing an interesting experience for the patient, rather than just giving them another reason to have to go to medbay.

the social upside of cloning is that it allows people to get back into a round relatively quickly after death, but also doesn't force anyone to stick around if they die and decide they've had enough of this round. I've played a few rounds on a tg fork, and had a round where surgery to revive me took Literally An Hour total, because I would just reach the death threshold instantly after being revived and all I could do was attempt to say something, which would then kill me again. it was not a fun experience. in my opinion, any proposed nerfs to cloning need to either not interfere with its efficiency, or provide just as efficient an alternative

This honestly is something I have been seeing with recent testing and noting of things I have observed. A lot of ideas being presented are very doctor/medical sided, but y I have noticed that players have expectations of medical turning them around quickly. Hell I've seen some even act like medical is the dentist with how much avoidance they put on it. Just to avoid spending a few minutes to get fixed up. I recently tried to use more alternative ways to healing people that wasn't mendor/hypospray and I did see a bit of impatience from patients. The goal I had in mind was to see how patients reacted to slower paced methods of healing as well as how other medical doctors saw it. The usual I got was, "Why not use your mendor?" So my conclusion on this is that outside perspective and expectations placed on medical would need convincing of the change as much as people playing medical.

In another vein of discussion, one possible suggestion I can put forth is one that would be allow medical to be more involved with optional work internally and possibly independently of the cargo requisitions. This could be research of some kind perhaps that one can do while there are no patients. This could be an extension of Medical-Cargo collaboration of some kind.

I actually like that idea of having some sort of research the only issue is one you actually mentioned of needing to convince people. This is because a pretty large amount of people want to stay away from TG design as much as possible so any form of a "research" system would require a lot of convincing. Something else you mentioned is how people reacted to you using methods that healed people slower and while I definitely do think there are people who would react badly to medical requiring more time to heal someone I think its also likely that people thought you did not know mendors healed them faster. Something else people have mentioned is how little value people currently hold to getting hurt/diying and I feel like that is not a good thing so healing times going from like 2 minutes to 3-4 minutes may make people put more value into their life.

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After reading some the responses here and thinking on it for a few days I think the easiest way that would cause the least issues to make medical doctor as a job more fun for experienced players would be to just give more options for healing. Someone else in the post mentioned it but right now for most cases your only option as a doctor is to just use a burn and brute auto mendor or charcoal and thats pretty much it. So I think just giving more chemicals and chemical combinations as well as more tools a doctor can use that are better then just stypic powder and silver sulfadiazine would go a long way in making the job more varied. And for making the job itself more difficult I really do not think that is a bad thing or will effect the amount of people playing doctor if this was true engineering and science would have zero new players ever because those are jobs with skill floors monumentally higher then doctor yet new people play them all the time.

[Egregorious]

an important element I think people are glancing over in this thread is how fun it is to be on the other side of these proposed doctoring changes

The way I see it, any changes need to account for two things: uninteractable time in medbay, and unavoidable time in medbay. You don't want players to have to wait long before being administered to, nor need to spend time in medbay despite having successfuly avoided harmful situations. This also accounts for your example where you kept getting semi-revived and presumably didn't have the option of observing properly or respawning because of it.

As long as those two things are limited - not necessarily avoided altogether - I think patients just have to suck it up, because there should be an impact for getting into trouble. Patient-doctor interactions are fun even if all you're doing as a doctor is telling them what sort of damage they've taken and what you're doing to fix them. I love telling my patients they have lacerations or bruising, especially if it prompts them to explain what caused it.

For instance the issue with flatly-applied cloning defects is that it causes those issues to scale with how often the cloning machine is used in succession. Which tends to mean that the highest number of cloning defects being generated are happening when medical doctors are already too busy to treat them, and thus just forces an extra queue onto patients. That's uninteractive time spent in the medbay - they're forced to just twiddle their thumbs until a doctor becomes available.

I think the easiest way that would cause the least issues to make medical doctor as a job more fun for experienced players would be to just give more options for healing

I do not think more options in a vacuum is going to accomplish anything. There are a bunch of extra, more advanced, options for dealing with damage which just never get used because the next most efficient thing after basic chems is cryo, and after that it's cloning. There's very rarely a need to go past that.

My favourite Goonesque medical mechanic is that the best toxin medication is homeopathic beer delivered straight to the veins; which not only do I think is hilarious, it also requires some imagination and setup. There are a lot of advanced doctoring techniques that rarely get used because you'll be fighting a losing battle against other doctors who just want to stick someone in cryo or in the cloning machine since it's just as if not more efficient than what you're doing. More options in a vacuum won't alleviate that; they'd need to be better options to be interesting, which is hard to do because of the current efficiency of the more basic mechanics.

[Azurnite]

I actually like that idea of having some sort of research the only issue is one you actually mentioned of needing to convince people. This is because a pretty large amount of people want to stay away from TG design as much as possible so any form of a "research" system would require a lot of convincing.

To clarify what I was thinking when I say research, it'd be in the same vein as artifact science. As an on-the-spot example, you get a case study with all this information and you gotta diagnose the issue then figure out a way to administer a treatment. I guess a case could come with an empty plastic bottle so that you could make the medicine, then ship it out. This example would give pharmacy a frequent use but would also be limited to only one doctor being able to complete the case study when ideally multiple doctors could work on them at once.