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Player Access to Pathology Is Being Removed, Pending Rework
#1
Exclamation 
TL;DR

What this is:
  • Code changes which lock player-accessible methods of creating pathogens behind a define
  • Map changes to remove the ability for players to create pathogens
  • An opportunity for pathology to get a "fresh start", after its more significant flaws have been addressed
What this is not:
  • A complete removal of the system from the codebase
  • A permanent removal of pathology as a concept
Statement

On Sunday, May 3rd, after two weeks of discussion (much of it predating the latest waves of threads and discussions on the topic), and one week of voting, the admin team voted near-unanimously to remove player access to pathology until revisions are made to its core mechanics. Some major reasons are as follows:

1) Pathology doesn't have a clear product owner or direction right now

Marquesas, the creator of pathology's current iteration, left years ago. Some minor tweaks and improvements have made since that time, but core components of the system have needed maintenance and re-balancing on a more long-term basis. Nobody has yet stepped up to the task of doing this work.

2) A break will help the success of the rework

If someone had a fully built rework for pathology in hand and ready to deploy at this moment, this break would likely still be necessary. If we deployed it, the system would have to directly contend with the built up momentum and frustration that currently exists surrounding the system, and it would be unlikely to receive a "fair shot" at success; it would be forced to atone for the sins of the old system instead of being allowed to start fresh.

3) It just isn't a fun system right now

This part sucks to say about something, but pathology itself isn't nearly as engaging, or as fun, as it could be. The current system serves very little purpose other than to destroy the station and move towards round end, but its against the rules to take any preventative measure. The system should be balanced so no prevention is necessary, and the crew needs to have all opportunity to mitigate disaster while/after its happened, but its not balanced that way right now.

Some of the contributing factors are relatively minor (tweaking symptom effects around, adjusting tiers, etc.), but the majority of the problems seem fundamental; for example: the lack of feedback on symptom transmission, the difficulty in mitigating symptoms without the use of the pathology lab, and the rng-balanced nature of creating pathogens in the first place.

While we believe the system has potential to be great, and while someone could definitely come along and rework it into a great thing, it isn't that thing right now, and it doesn't seem fair to the current player base to leave it in while we wait indefinitely for someone to come fix it.

Closing Remarks

The code is staying in the game in order to facilitate efforts to test and deploy changes to the system in the form of monitored, smaller scale play-testing. We are amenable to the idea of helping players create, submit, and test PRs with improvements to pathology on our GitHub. The map changes have not yet been finished, so if you have suggestions for what to do with each map's pathology department, feel free to let us know, or submit a PR.

The rest of this thread will be devoted to answering any questions you might have about this decision. Please be respectful and kind to other community members, whether that is here on the forums, on the Discord, in OOC, or any other medium. While we understand that pathology has been a contentious topic lately, this is absolutely not an invitation for community members to insult, gloat, or otherwise attack one another.
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#2
As one of the biggest proponents for disabling pathology until a rework... this is actually pretty bittersweet. When I was in discussions about this on the discord, I was largely acting out of spite, and didn't care much for improving pathology as much as simply getting something I disliked out of my face for the foreseeable future. After I took a few days away from discord to clear my head, I started thinking about ways pathology could actually be fixed instead of just trashing it. Hell, just a few minutes before this thread was put up I decided to look at the pathology symptoms page and try to come up with ways I could improve them. Reading this thread actually makes me feel bad for how I acted before, cause now I feel like it's partially my fault that pathology is gone.

Anyway, that's enough crying. Expect me to contribute more positively in future discussions about pathology. I'm gonna go back to reading through the symptoms page and try and make a big post about every symptom that I think could be improved.
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#3
On a side-note here........does that mean Cogmap1 loses its medbay-chemstation?
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#4
Oof. Can't say I didn't see this coming. 

I think this is a wise move. Removing it from play but keeping it in code for those to gander at is not throwing that proverbial baby out with the typhoid laden bathwater...  But rather taking a step back and reassessing what needs to be done. 

Personally, I think it needs to be stripped back to the bare bones as a concept, and be far more visual and hands on in its implementation. It was far too bloated, too many nooks and crannies that just made balancing a nightmare.
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#5
In my selfish opinion, I'd personally enjoy a world where Pathology got replaced with something else entirely but I understand that a lot of people are attached to it and I'd be personally content with it getting reworked.
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#6
I'd like to point out: the list of reasons doesn't name a particular person or group of people or describe the things they did. We didn't remove it because one person kept releasing harmful pathogen each and every round, or because some group was spreading around an exploit that makes pathogens super strong; for those things, we'd more likely have talked to the people about it or given bans or patched exploits, not revoked access to pathology for everyone. The discussions really didn't touch upon any particular people at all, and the times it did were like "oh this person has made a pathology patch" or "can someone tell this person to cut this stuff out in the pathology argument in the #spacemen-discussion channel?"

So with that, don't get it in your heads that any one person is to blame for the removal of player access to pathology or worse yet harass or start witch hunts based on that thinking. Response's been alright so far, and I thank you guys for that, for personal attacks have been a real bad issue lately, and I hope people continue to be respectful.

With that out of the way, for the record, Cog1's keeping the Pathology chemical dispenser for now.  There may be more map changes upcoming.
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