Make pathology a little more accessible

[Berrik]

It says a lot that after it being in for months now, only one person has bothered to seriously learn it.

Also, stop coding things that are so complex that only three people will ever enjoy them.

[Midaychi]

Myself, I read the wiki and played with it for about ten minutes and figured it out. The most difficult part is messing with the hexidecimal obfusticated base 10 code until rng jesus decides to bless you with the effect you were going for. Everything else is either tedium or begging cargo/chemistry to give half a shit about you.

[Midaychi]

Clarification: I think it's fine as is.

The whole reason it's hard to figure out is *because* of its situation; Any ol' medical access person can walk in and with a few learned steps, design a pathogen that they can then spread around the station. Considering how *extremely difficult* it is to cure a pathogen within 20 minutes, ASSUMING that cargo/chemistry even helps you (otherwise it's near impossible), and how actually impossible it is to cure a pathogen if someone destroys the cure-o-matic machine in pathology. (unless you're lucky with RNG on a celestial level)

If there was one change I'd suggest, is moving pathology (bacK) into science, as then it'd reduce half the artificial access-level difficulty of creating/curing diseases. (chemistry)

[Grek]

Hint: There is a reason why Pathology starts with a toolbox. It is so that you can give yourself chemistry access.

[Midaychi]

On the other hand, if you somehow coerce cargo into ordering you modules, synthesizing cures becomes pretty easymode. Idk.

[Noah Buttes]

On the other hand, if you somehow coerce cargo into ordering you modules, synthesizing cures becomes pretty easymode. Idk.

I've never actually seen it ordered from cargo, I think it's actually a space merchant.

[Tom Clancy's Gay Ghost]

It says a lot that after it being in for months now, only one person has bothered to seriously learn it.

Also, stop coding things that are so complex that only three people will ever enjoy them.

I have to agree here. Learning it is just such a chore, to the point where it's easy to give up halfway through.

[Noah Buttes]

Also, I'd like to keep pathology as obtuse as it is right now, actually.

Once you actually learn how to do it properly, it's pretty intuitive to use, while still being time-consuming to make anything lethal. This, in my opinion, is the sweet spot for pathology.

[Sundance]

Code-wise pathology is fine. Nothing wrong with it, it works. If you want my honest opinion, it's not very fun, but it works.
Content-wise, it's lacking. Since it recreation, only Shakespearean symptom really stood out for me. Everything else is just.. eh.
Which is a damn shame, because pathology has avenues of a whole bunch wacky and gross symptoms.
And then there's the magic 1 in maybe 10,000 rounds where someone creates a death virus that's akin to airborn kuru. Which begs the question if someone accidentally causes something in pathology that wipes out 2/3's of the station, should that player be regarded as reckless to the point of griefing? Some might compare it to bombing the chapel because it's big and nobody uses it.

And that's the crux of the problem with pathology. There's two things you can do with it.
1. Create a death virus. Well that's ok, chemists can create liquid death and for the majority of the times they're not sarin gassing the crew if they're non antags, but with pathology you have the worry of it spreading simply due to the nature of the job. And you could argue that you should wear biosuits to protect you, but that doesn't stop nosy people from busting in. I've seen people literally wall off pathology so that people dont bust in. Which is a two-handed sword as this arouses suspicion as much as a traitor twirling their mustache at passerbys. And now that you have the death virus, what fun can you do with it? Experiment on monkeys in a closed environment, hope that nobody interrupts the process and in turn gets infected..

2. Create a cure. A cure for what? The random events where pathogens are about literally just give you a cold or flu which most ignore. The only purpose of you creating a cure would be if you introduced a bad pathogen in the first place. D'oh!
It's also painfully slow. Let's say some of the issues were dealt with, one of those was having an event with releases a non-deadly but potentially annoying/crippling
pathogen. You'd spend so long at finding a cure, that the quickest way to end the annoyance would be to call the shuttle.

So yeah. I disagree with people saying pathology is fine. It's less used than the observatory at this point. There needs to be things re-balanced, avenues for goofing/benefiting with the crew rather than outright killing them, events where pathogens are introduced into the crew and just generally the whole process of it all.

[Noah Buttes]

You can actually make beneficial pathogens, if I am not mistaken.


Secondly, finding a cure is far quicker than making a disease.


Really, I think the most important part would be better feedback on which symptoms do what, I'm probably one of the few people who've managed to make a plague, and I even still have no god damn idea what any of the stuff under the microscope means.

[Mofleaker]

You can actually make beneficial pathogens, if I am not mistaken.

You can, but there's no solid way to achieve beneficial symptoms other than building your own and praying that it isn't something bad (extremely unlikely btw). Though, I can't say I've personally ever seen a beneficial symptom in action.

Pathology is overall very unfun to work with. It's like old botany and old genetics had a horrible monotonous love child.

[Vitatroll]

It's a shame. All of that code practically going to waste. Regardless, it still has huge potential.

I don't know enough about pathology to criticize it. Even for a person who loves the nerdy side of SS13 like packets and dwaine scripting, the process just looked monotonous. I'll speak about the things I can from the point of view I have. These are some of the problems I see contributing to people not using pathogens.

The Wiki: It's a tad nebulous. No, not in the sense that you can't understand it. It's just that it's basically an infodump if you exclude the last bit which is apparently trying to teach you how to gib everything. The guide should probably be upfront and dumbed down as much as possible. Maybe with a goal that isn't killing everything. The more people using pathology the better, so it needs to look inviting. It being used by idiots is better than it being used by nobody. Now let me be smote by Jesus.

Lack of Goals: "Killing people", "Healing people", and "Mildly annoying people"; those are our current goals. The first two apparently take 30 minutes minimum, if not more, of sitting in pathology with no interaction from other players. No thanks. The last one just pisses people off. Again, nah. I want some wacky things to do. We could all exude colorful reagent smoke every time we expel gas! or expel cats every time we puke! What about the bees? So many bees. Furthermore, viruses can affect DNA right? Well then, why can't we have one that turns everyone into a lizard? or one that gives you a random whacky hairdo? or makes you fat? or perhaps even a really high tier symptom that gives you a good mutation like X-ray or Thermal Resistance? There should be more goals for us to work towards. If there are, and I don't know this, then it's because I wasn't told and I haven't seen it in game.

Too much RNG: From what I understand and have read, you can't realistically aim for a goal if you have one. You basically just have to hope things work out your way. I'm really talking over my head here, but for the sake of fun the ability to steer your pathogen down the path you want is needed. It's okay if the gains are diminished, so long as you can reliably shoot for your goal.

[Noah Buttes]

I will admit, the RNG aspect is infuriating.

[Midaychi]

Code-wise pathology is fine. Nothing wrong with it, it works. If you want my honest opinion, it's not very fun, but it works.
Content-wise, it's lacking. Since it recreation, only Shakespearean symptom really stood out for me. Everything else is just.. eh...

Coming from playing all of the codebases, I can say that the open source branches have the opposite problem; Code-wise their virology is a mess, and mechanic and backend wise it's not that gr8. it's fun if you're an antag but doesn't always work. Content-wise it's got a bunch of stuff.

The two main open source versions of virology are 'tgstation' and 'baystation'.

Tg's involves minor chemistry and mixing symptoms together, and has a lot more 'beneficial' symptoms,
whereas Bay's involves mutating through radiation, and has a lot more negative symptoms than beneficial.

In both cases, their viruses can have up to four symptoms at once, that take effect in stages as the virus progresses in its host.

http://www.ss13.eu/wiki/index.php/Infec ... d_Diseases
http://wiki.baystation12.net/Guide_to_Virology

Coming from someone who clearly has experience with pathology's depths, Do these give you any ideas for suggestions on increasing the fun and content of pathology?

[Erev]

There's some older posts about pathology - mostly from Lamar and myself (two of the few others that are also proficient). I'd given up lobbying for it but since this is here I'll go ahead and post some stuff.

First up, Path isn't just too RNG dependant but also too click dependant. I would suggest having an option to use an incubator to continuously grow strains rather than going though pipette harvesting hell. I would also suggest that modifying the attribute numbers is done through a system similar to the chemistry reagant heater/cooler but slower. I'd also suggest removing the random DNA collapse chance from splicing - make it only occur during fuckups.

Symptoms are a problem too - there are far too few beneficial symptoms so making a 'good' pathogen is often an excersize in futility. Symptoms in general also tend to be either too weak or too infrequent to be an issue - though there are exceptions of course.

Also the time gate on the process is a bit long and I'll explain why. While forming a hellchem can (and should) take time and the same could be said (and be true) about path, path has other things to take into account. For example, for an infectious disease to take off it needs a bare minimum amount of people - and thus late round releases when almost everyone is dead rarely works well. It also has its own built in delay through incubation and if you make it get to GBS levels too fast you infection burns itself out before getting nice and transmitted. As a whole I'd say that the process should be made faster but that the incubation time/advance speed should be slowed.

I'd make a more coherent and probably longer post but I'm stuck on my phone on my lunch break. I'm happy to toss more ideas at the thing if people like though!