Remove pathology until it's balanced.

[trerri]

AORN many players agree that patho brings 0 fun to the game. As such, I think it would be appropriate to temporarily empty the rooms, not unlike Manta's Mining, until somebody takes it upon them to make it more fun. Maybe even have a contest for it or something.

[Ludwig]

Maybe we could try talking to the one person who's almost certainly in pathology every shift when massively horrible pathogens are released onto the station first.

[saccharineChampion]

Would addressing a single person help underlying issues with both perception and negative applications of pathology currently?

While I agree somebody who's currently being consistently unfun with it should be personally addressed, I only see this as another case in a constant trend. The entire time I've played, there's been a consistent ebb-and-flow of nobody really using pathology for awhile, somebody then becoming interested in it, such a person running it into the ground, and then the person get complained at.

I think it's important to examine why, in particular, this occurs with pathology. Public opinion is, to my knowledge, low with regard to pathology. It's a different low than usual jokes at the expense of genetics and (to an extent) chemistry; while those two are best known for just sitting at their computers and blowing up their own lab, respectively, pathology is generally seen as "arcane difficult mechanic that can make everyone unable to move how they want, or make plasma everywhere all of a sudden, or spam chat." It tends to have more of a negative effect on others' rounds when it's noticeable. Even the common harmless ones - in particular, I consider the Shakespeare virus - it doesn't really add anything, just annoyingly spams up chat with messages several players have already seen several times before.

Personally, I think the effectiveness of Pathology should be heavily rolled back, then have it be made a bit more accessible, then probably having the more dramatic or sweeping effects re-added at a later time. In this paradigm, what would remain during the rolled-back time?

Tier 1: Gasping, Shivering, Sweating.
Generally, just a few symptoms which causes some emotes. The difference between emote symptoms and shakespeare is that people tend to pay more attention to things being said. The Shakespeare quotes have the same appearance as normal conversation, while emojis have the faded grey that makes them easier to skip.

Tier 2: Indigestion, Farts, Fever, Detoxification, Snapping
At tier 2, there would start to be actual effects. Indigestion to express the damaging nature of some pathogens, farts and snapping are audible emotes, detoxification as an early example of a positive pathogen, and fever as a different way for pathogens to be noticeable - and also have a possible beneficial effect. Note the lack of Common Chills; becoming cold is annoyingly detrimental, to a degree that would not be wanted to be expressed at such low levels.

Tier 3: Deathgasping, Neuron Restoration, Paranoia
In this rollback idea, tier 3 in particular is weakened particularly hard. This is because it's a reasonable stopping point for beginner pathologists to strive towards; most of the more debilitating symptoms are pushed up to Tier 4+ so that a new pathologist doesn't accidentally or "accidentally" unleash them while learning the basics and practicing. It again follows the pattern of noticeable emotes, healing, and some other way for things to be noticeable, just more effective than Tier 2.

Tier 4: Plasma Farts, Bee Sneezing, Disorientation, Smoke Farts, Accelerated Metabolisis, Sunglasses Glands
This is where most of the more complained-about and common to see symptoms would be pushed into. Most of the above are generally crippling or have serious implications for the station at large.

Tier 5: Teleportation, Radioactivity, honestly most of the current Tier 5s.
The gloves come off here. Besides a couple of existing Tier 4s being bumped up here, the rarity and difficulty of getting these would justify keeping them as a tool for experienced antagonist pathologists to unleash.


All in all, I think that removing pathology entirely would be a bit hasty. However, a way to push it to being more publicly looked well upon, with an emphasis on reducing the miserable rounds and making it more accessible so counters could more easily be figured out, would do well for both those who currently enjoy pathology and those who dislike pathology as-is.

[TDHooligan]

I think a big issue is that the only cure to virology is virology or the QM, which to this day im pretty sure nobody uses.

SS13 is extremely social, people will inevitably meet each other (isolation is kind of boring, biosuits are hard to get) - There's no way to know what suppresses a virus, little potential to fight back at all once they've contracted it and the odds of actually avoiding it are extremely low.

Perhaps minor symptoms should better represent what suppresses the virus? If you get chills, drink hot chocolate, set yourself on fire... Even if it simply halts or marginally reverses the virus' progression, the general chaos caused by it would give some leeway to justify the work gone into it.

It's a lot easier for one person to shout "All of you who are getting a fever, take a short space walk!" and be heard than it is for the QM to force everyone to come to him for the cure he can only get 1-2 doses of. At the same time, if the cures become appropriately dangerous when relied upon, they become an issue in and of themselves - Hot chocolate puts sufferers in a hyperglycemic coma, spacewalkers suffocate...

Instead of disorienting symptoms being permanent round destroyers, they work like addictions and something that can be handled in the short term somewhat regularly, but help the virologists by distracting and weakening people. Should the supplies of the appropriate medicines no longer be available, i think the virologist has either been devious enough or waited long enough to earn their gibby murder montage.

[saccharineChampion]

I knew I was missing something from my post, and that's exactly it! I hadn't thought of the whole "temporary cures" part of it, I love it. I think it'd also slot well into "rollback, then reintroduce as appropriate" since it would give people a much smaller pool of symptoms to become at least passingly familiar with the cures for. "Memorizing" a bunch of "If I notice X symptom, do Y" is, imo, actually good because it's not really rote memorization but rather association, and as long as the associations make sense, that's a fun "aha!" to figure out.

Later tiers can not only be more threatening, but require supplies that can run out - as you say, supplies of a medicine running out is another vector of attack an antag virologist could use. It'd be much more interactive and have more counterplay than the current system, at any rate.

I consider the addition of more suppressor to be part of Part 2 - making virology more accessible. Not only using it but, arguably more importantly, countering it.

[Ion Mage]

I've done many 'practice runs' in patho for the day I roll antag and get to use my patho skills, and my final conclusion is that the randomness makes it nonviable.  I play on RP so one is supposed to run with some kind of gimmick as an antag, and since I have no idea what kind of symptoms I'll have to work with, I really cant come up with any decent plans to that effect. 

Meanwhile, the time investment involved means I have to basically retreat to the lab and never interact, also a no-no in RP.  I often try to get player volunteers for experiments, and its made a few neat mini-scenarios, but thats really it.


Hell of it is, if either of those issues are resolved, it would potentially make patho even more OP for the basic, murderboning Pathologist types.  Nobody wants that.

I love RPing as a medical researcher like in aforementioned human experiment scenarios, so I'm not too keen on outright removing it yet, but it definitely needs an overhaul/replacement.

[GORE]

In comparison to genetics - pathology takes an awful long time to get anything done.

You can drop in mid-round as a genetecist and still have some jolly good fun - but the long time and tedious mechanics to create a fun pathogen really take away from the experience.

Embracing a more random approach even more could help aliviate the current problems. Why not find basic pathogens in some rotten or stale foods? Perhaps taking blood from a cropse might even yield the chance of a cool pathogen and then you can expand on pathogens like science is expanding and approaching every departement for their work. Pathology is just too isolated.

[zjdtmkhzt]

In regards to suppressants: while they are not currently tied to t1 symptoms, a health scanner does give you a pretty good idea of what it might be, even if noone in the crew knows how to use a microscope.
For instance, if the health scanner shows that a thermal suppressant is required, there are really only two options, so in that case crewmembers *could* suppress their symptoms via walking through a slightly cool or slightly hot room.
This would repress their pathogen back to Stage 3, which does a LOT to lessen the effects of pathogens. For something like a Virus (which is the most commonly used microbody) this would half the rate at which symptoms occur.
But this is also on top of symptoms taking effect less often in lesser stages, so it's actually more likely to quarter the chance or something of an effect happening.
Additionally, effects will be less severe, so you won't be able to be instagibbed by something like Gibbing, Arctic Chills, Dragon Fever, ...

It's just that these things are known by very few people, which is a problem that I am not sure how to tackle. But in these discussions I often hear the sentiment that curing pathogens is too hard, when really I feel like the issue is that very little people actually have pathology knowledge. (Even if the curing itself is pretty easy and quick.)
I feel like maybe this would be less of a problem if pathology had more ways to benefit the station, which would lead to more people actually learning pathology, which would make it more likely that there is a person that would know how to make a cure.

In comparison to genetics - pathology takes an awful long time to get anything done.
...

Have you tired pathology more recently? I feel like with some of the changes that Zamujasa made semi-recently, it is now relatively quick. I mean, you can't just go there and have laser eyes in 2 minutes like genetics, but with some experience you can usually whip something good up in 10-15 minutes.

TLDR: I feel like pathology needs more beneficial stuff, so people will actually learn it. That will make it easier to deal with rogue pathogens because the crew will be on average more experienced.

[GORE]

@zjdtmkhzt - yeah - like a month or so ago. Thing is - I do not understand why it is necessary to get all the base pairs on a pathogen - then splice it with one another 3-6 times so that you have one pathogen with all the base pairs in the amount of 8-16 times all the base pairs.

Clicking cut and paste one by one is the most tedious aspect of it. There is no cut and paste all and clicking faster than intended usually bugs the system out.

This is the most horrible aspect of it.

[zjdtmkhzt]

That is indeed a really annoying part and it would be great to have a button that splices everything that is left at once. And I agree that the lag makes it really horrible to splice large parts of pathogens safely.

I feel like I should mention though that Podrick made a patch that reduced the number of t1 symptoms from 8 to 6 a while ago, so it's much easier to get all of them (and to find combinations of them) now.
Also, I don't usually splice things together several times anymore, I just refill vials very quickly, because pathogen is pretty much an unlimited resource and vials are reusable. So I get by with a pathogen that often just has some t1 symptoms once (although it is kind of annoying).
There could definitely still be some QOL adjustments in that area though, it's still a lot of busywork.

If we are throwing out radical ideas, maybe the dna splicer could just have an infinite amount of t1s that you've put in at least once, although that would definitely need some nerfs in other places.

Less radically, I think it would be a great help if the dna analyzer screen just sorted the t1 segments that you have available and compacted them.
What I mean by this is that, say, when you destroy a sample that has aaa|bbbccc|aaabbbccc|def it would turn into
aaa x 2 | bbb x 2 | ccc x 2 | def
instead of
aaa | bbb | ccc | aaa | bbb | ccc | def.
That would make searching for the segment you are looking for way faster and less of a pain.
Another improvement to the dna analyzer that could be made is to remove the useless segment at the start that signifies the suppressant and is never part of a symptom, because it is a real noob trap.

[GORE]

I would also argue for displaying exactly what a sympton does - because - usually when you try to create a pathogen you are REQUIRED to have open the wiki pages because if you do not and just set a T3 free to find out what it does - Admins usually (at least they talked to me once about it) like you to know what symptons you have before setting them free.

That kinda puts it into a requirement. I personally would love to just experiment without using a cheat-sheet for knowing what the hell the thing is I am dealing with...but then you do something too bad and you are in trouble.

Thus I do not understand why it is required for you to look these symptons up online - you could just add them to a tooltip in-game.

[Trustworthy]

Having to check the wiki works fine for chemistry, I don't see why its not alright for patho. As for it being unbalanced, I agree. Its very underpowered for the effort required to cure it, without going full nerd mode. In fact, its pretty binary with regards to curing. You either blow up the centrifuge and make it impossible to cure, or you don't and make it take two minutes to cure completely. Just remove the rad module, and make sure theres no bullshit suppressants. The only reason its not cured consistently is because people seem to be too lazy to look up how to cure it on the wiki. Oh yeah and fix the damn CDC already jesus fucking christ.

[Technature]

Knowing that someone is in pathology leaves in the back of my mind for the rest of the round "Great, when is the fun going to grind to a halt? When am I gonna be unable to play the game at all because I can't go 5 steps without passing out/being stunned/catching on fire?".

Pathology is just an unfun feature in general because there's almost nothing beneficial in doing pathology for the crew as a whole, and people aren't willing to work for a cure for it. Even worse, the easy way for getting the cure, sending shit tons of money out of QM to order one, straight up doesn't work, and from what I can tell will never be fixed.

Honestly speaking, the only reason I don't blow up Pathology every round I can is because it's against the rules. It's that frustrating to deal with.

[zjdtmkhzt]

Knowing that someone is in pathology leaves in the back of my mind for the rest of the round "Great, when is the fun going to grind to a halt? When am I gonna be unable to play the game at all because I can't go 5 steps without passing out/being stunned/catching on fire?".

Pathology is just an unfun feature in general because there's almost nothing beneficial in doing pathology for the crew as a whole, and people aren't willing to work for a cure for it. Even worse, the easy way for getting the cure, sending shit tons of money out of QM to order one, straight up doesn't work, and from what I can tell will never be fixed.

Honestly speaking, the only reason I don't blow up Pathology every round I can is because it's against the rules. It's that frustrating to deal with.

To be fair, when I play I spend a lot of my rounds in pathology and very rarely am I an antag, so in those rounds that would not be accurate. (I have not been playing the last 2 months though.) And a lot of things have been added to make beneficial pathogens more viable, although more symptoms are still needed.
Also, yeah, the cdc stuff is really weird. It pretty much never works on the server, but I have never been able to reproduce it on a local server, which is annoying. Even if it's fixed, it could use some changes, because the random delay until the cures come combined with the lack of feedback from the console regarding the delay often makes it rather confusing.

[MarkNstein]

I don't have much to add except:
My pull request just got merged.
https://github.com/goonstation/goonstati...-616984968

About the PR
Viewing a pathogen with a zoomed-in microscope will show each symptom's DNA string.

Why's this needed?
Makes patho easier for benevolent virologists, and does very little for malevolent virologists, as they'll likely include every symptom anyways.

It's not a very thematic or realistic method, but it's an easy code-change that helps a department that suffers a lot of public vitriol.