i do not think the cryoxadone change is good, or needed

[Zamujasa]

https://github.com/goonstation/goonstati...93df24ff3e


this cryox change appears to be largely intended to break the "cryo pill" method of healing. it was specifically changed to make cryox worse.


the change makes it so that
- cryox now heals different types of damage based on body temperature difference from base
- the healing is based on curves so that there are "optimal" temperatures to heal certain types of damage


here is a graph from admin chat i made myself of what the curves look like, in terms of real-in-game-damage-per-tick:

every horizontal line is one damage point, so at peak performance you heal 12 of one type of one damage.



here are several reasons why this change is not good and is actively bad:

- cryox has already gotten nerfed repeatedly w/r/t requiring active cooling (because it heats you up as it heals)

- "body temperature" is a broken, buggy mechanic, and is not good to base precise effects on
for this one try watching your body temperature. humans have basically zero thermoregulation and will gravitate towards whatever the environment is set at. notice when you spawn in that you have a normal body temp of 98 F -- within a few life ticks you'll slowly start cooling off down to the ambient station temp of 20 C. your icon even changes to "it's a little cool" because of this. also a lot of bugs around insulation and cold/hot protetion

- even if it wasn't bugged, body temperature changes constantly, and the cryo tubes have their own separate effects on body temperature

- body temperature is constantly changing in the cryo tube, multiple times per tick, meaning accurately targetting certain values is all but impossible

- even if you do try and target a specific damage type, there are two cryo tubes that you need to manage

- there is no actual information on what you're accomplishing with a given temperature unless you're constantly watching four different damage numbers and taking notes on what's changing and by how much (as someone who did this with a constantly-visible health readout: good luck)


i gave a target dummy about 2000 of each non-oxy type of damage and put it in a cryo tube. i got lucky and it started healing about 15-20 hp/processing tick at best, which was about 3 tox and the rest being a mixture of brute/burn. letting it get healed by medibots or putting it in a sleeper healed about 13/tick depending on rolls from charcoal and saline.



the effective changes made by this change:
- cryox is now absolutely worthless in pill form
- the default cryo setup that everyone has known for half a decade now results in zero benefit to patients with no obvious reason why
- even if you do play with the gimmick, body temperature jitters and changes so frequently that you're just throwing darts blindly; accurate targeting of damage isn't possible

nobody understands how this works and even when you do it still doesn't make sense and doesn't add anything fun

[Vlad_3]

Cryox nerf was in order, but not like this.

EDIT: no more graph

[warcrimes]

        not_a_cryo_pill
            name = "Cryofailane"
            id = "cryofailane"
            result = "CBD" // not totally useless but very limited use.
            required_reagents = list("cryostylane" = 1, "cryoxadone" = 1) // there ya go bye
            result_amount = 2
            mix_phrase = "The deep blue hues fade to an impotent green."
            mix_sound = 'sound/misc/drinkfizz.ogg'

[Tarmunora]

cryox has already gotten nerfed repeatedly w/r/t requiring active cooling (because it heats you up as it heals

Since cryox no longer runs on a boolean heal/noheal threshold, the active heating was already removed as part of the update

i gave a target dummy about 2000 of each non-oxy type of damage and put it in a cryo tube. i got lucky and it started healing about 15-20 hp/processing tick at best, which was about 3 tox and the rest being a mixture of brute/burn. letting it get healed by medibots or putting it in a sleeper healed about 13/tick depending on rolls from charcoal and saline.

Shocking. A cryoxadone change that makes it heal different damage types based on temperature makes cryoxadone no longer a cure-all-at-once.

- cryox is now absolutely worthless in pill form

Good.

- the default cryo setup that everyone has known for half a decade now results in zero benefit to patients with no obvious reason why

Ok so it needs new documentation, we can do that

- even if you do play with the gimmick, body temperature jitters and changes so frequently that you're just throwing darts blindly; accurate targeting of damage isn't possible

After staring at 5 minutes or so of debug outputs at fastest life interval, temperature was typically fluctuating by +- 2 degrees at the coldest peak value, (i.e.: highest thermoregulation) giving me efficacy > 95%, and at worst about a 5 degree fluctuation (still ~90% efficacy)
with longer life intervals (highpop), there was less fluctuation still

nobody understands how this works and even when you do it still doesn't make sense and doesn't add anything fun

Again, can add documentation, and people can learn it just like any other game mechanic (also since when was "making sense" a metric we use but whatever).
And finally, fun is subjective. I think that this version of cryo is more fun than a "get people chilly and then it's omnizine but six times better" chem that would simply trivialize any and all damage whenever used

[Zamujasa]

i can't believe i had to actually replace your graph with a different one that shows the same data just because you made it and only posted it in admin chat. oh well, this one's free to share since i made it by porting the code to something else and graphing its results

Since cryox no longer runs on a boolean heal/noheal threshold, the active heating was already removed as part of the update

ok

]Shocking. A cryoxadone change that makes it heal different damage types based on temperature makes cryoxadone no longer a cure-all-at-once.

yes, which removes its use as a great heal-everything chem with the downside of needing to be cold.

- cryox is now absolutely worthless in pill form

Good.

i'm glad you're at least honest with your intention of nerfing a use of it into the ground.

- the default cryo setup that everyone has known for half a decade now results in zero benefit to patients with no obvious reason why

Ok so it needs new documentation, we can do that

not only new documentation, but actively reminding people of the change, because (again, for over a decade now) the conventional wisdom was "set to cold and let it work"

- even if you do play with the gimmick, body temperature jitters and changes so frequently that you're just throwing darts blindly; accurate targeting of damage isn't possible

After staring at 5 minutes or so of debug outputs at fastest life interval, temperature was typically fluctuating by +- 2 degrees at the coldest peak value, (i.e.: highest thermoregulation) giving me efficacy > 95%, and at worst about a 5 degree fluctuation (still ~90% efficacy)
with longer life intervals (highpop), there was less fluctuation still

this doesn't jive with what i was seeing yesterday but i'll accept this

nobody understands how this works and even when you do it still doesn't make sense and doesn't add anything fun

Again, can add documentation

you actively removed documentation from my post

and people can learn it just like any other game mechanic (also since when was "making sense" a metric we use but whatever).
And finally, fun is subjective. I think that this version of cryo is more fun than a "get people chilly and then it's omnizine but six times better" chem that would simply trivialize any and all damage whenever used

there's no fun in this mechanic. this is you deciding you don't like cryo pills, and so you get rid of them while ruining an adjacent system. you even said as much that your goal was to make cryo worse. well, you did, i guess





this whole thing is an amazing trail of broken features and bugs

- cryox is supposed to only work if you're cold enough
- body temperature breaks in a way where it takes forever to warm up again
- cold body slowdown is removed in favor of "shivering" because it turns out you are almost always cold
- cryostayline no longer actually slows you down because you just "shiver" sometimes
- now cryo heal pills have basically no disadvantages, so we have to nerf them, and...

the whole fault of this is bodies don't thermoregulate properly so it's too easy to get and stay cold, and then because you would always get stuck being cold, the penalty for being cold was heavily changed, and thus the penalty of using cryo healing, greatly reduced movement speed for a while until you recovered, no longer exists.

one thing broke, so three steps later it's time to smash something else with a hammer.

[Lady Birb]

I know goon devs pride themselves in being unique™ and different™ from other servers, but maybe you should take note of how most other servers don't direct commit major balance changes(or pretty much anything at all) and PR it instead so you can get feedback before it goes live

[Cal]

maybe you should take note of how most other servers don't direct commit major balance changes(or pretty much anything at all) and PR it instead so you can get feedback before it goes live

isnt tg known for making radical changes such as removing cloning or changing their intent system with no player feedback whatsoever


as for feedback: I have not toyed with this yet. I don't give a shit about cryo pills but I believe the cryo in medbay should not be touched.

as it is it's a necessary crutch for inexperienced or overwhelmed doctors and i'd like to keep it simple.

[DioChasek]

Yeah honestly if there is a department that you shouldn’t ever try and make more complicated than it needs to be it’s medical and anytime you remove a tool from their box it does just that.

[Waffleloffle]

as a filthy RP player I always appreciate more complexity when it comes to medical care but this new cryo change is... not the sort of complexity I usually have in mind. it's very obtuse and, compounded with the weirdness of in-game body temperature as a mechanic and the fact that the changelog itself doesn't give me much to go off of, just feels really confusing in general. can't even trust the cryotubes to properly stabilize really bad patients now like they used to

[Zamujasa]

i did more testing and under certain esoteric conditions Spoiler!

being a lizard and wearing 100% cold proection

you can dunk yourself into the healing cold ranges, chug cryoxadone, and then enjoy ice-cube free healing for perhaps a minute or more depending on dosage because now it doesn't automatically heat you up. it's beautiful what happens when multiple broken systems collide like this


can't wait for the new meta

[Mouse]

It seems to me that the best way to nerf cryo pills while preserving the usefulness of the cryotubes would be to have cryox need the tubes to function.  Just say it has special requirements or something.

[WrongEnd]

I agree with Zamu that the solution should be to fix thermoregulation and return the downsides to being cold rather than wildly smashing everything that interacts with temperature. That's how you get technical debt.

[Lucky.Cobra]

agree with cal, the medbay cryo pods should be left alone, most of the time medbay is full of dying people and not enough medics so cryo can help 2 patients while doctors deal with other stuff, also if the healing of the cryo was *busted* it aint the only chem that can heal absurd amounts easily and is fast to make, heck i mean you can even farm omni from donk pocktets or make yourself if you are a botanist

[stuck_in_void_HELP]

Other servers, particularly CM, have very very complicated medical systems. This results in a situation where there's almost never enough doctors to go around because the learning curve is too great and people decide they just want to play as something else.

One of the main features about Goon that draws people in is the "easy to learn but hard to master" aspect. Cryo pods are a part of that. A crutch that a new, still-learning doctor can use so that they don't have to worry too much about dying patients in time-critical situations, they can make use of the pods while they learn about styptic, silver sulf, calomel, charcoal, p-iodide, mannitol, mutadone, salbutamol, etc; learning what they are and what they do and when to use them is quite the task!

Sure, the pods can be quite OP. People can be brought from the brink of death by shoving them into a pod and occasionally giving them meds with minimal attention required. You can treat several different people at the same time you're trying to bring back a dying person all the way to full health by making use of the cryo pods. I get that - it's overpowered. But it's not broken.

Adding a layer of complexity to a game mechanic that new players can use as a crutch until they get a good grasp of the medical system is not good.


Bottom line is: i don't mind the pill thing. I've never really even used them, to be honest. But i think that we should leave the pods alone. Messing with them is harmful to the game.

[Kotlol]

Other servers, particularly CM, have very very complicated medical systems. This results in a situation where there's almost never enough doctors to go around because the learning curve is too great and people decide they just want to play as something else.

One of the main features about Goon that draws people in is the "easy to learn but hard to master" aspect. Cryo pods are a part of that. A crutch that a new, still-learning doctor can use so that they don't have to worry too much about dying patients in time-critical situations, they can make use of the pods while they learn about styptic, silver sulf, calomel, charcoal, p-iodide, mannitol, mutadone, salbutamol, etc; learning what they are and what they do and when to use them is quite the task!

Sure, the pods can be quite OP. People can be brought from the brink of death by shoving them into a pod and occasionally giving them meds with minimal attention required. You can treat several different people at the same time you're trying to bring back a dying person all the way to full health by making use of the cryo pods. I get that - it's overpowered. But it's not broken.

Adding a layer of complexity to a game mechanic that new players can use as a crutch until they get a good grasp of the medical system is not good.


Bottom line is: i don't mind the pill thing. I've never really even used them, to be honest. But i think that we should leave the pods alone. Messing with them is harmful to the game.

Let alone Cryo doesnt fix everything.
All it does is remove all kinds of damage and removes things like shock.

But diseases, bodily damage, organ damage and such aren't healed and need to be done manually. 

I think the Cryo pods have several downsides of existing and maybe one nerf would be good to it.. but not the way described here.
For one.. Cryo pods are ONLY IN MEDBAY! And are just as fast if not safer then administering medicine by hand. (No allergy stuff either)
Also like sleeper pods can inject whats needed.. I think it should be much simpler how to fix cryo pods to make em.. a good crutch but not the BE ALL END ALL.

Make em slower to administer the drug or something. Since the Cryox almost never runs out. Or the pod CONSUMES MORE CRYOX and if the player over uses it. Since we know how much we run out of stypic in 1 shift.

Now onto the downsides of a cryopod and number 1 is easy:
"It's stationary"

We get 2 of them stationary and able to be sabotaged or blown up easily.
Sleeper pods are stationary too.. but.. they don't require as much set up as a cryopod.

Number 2:
"It's a regen tank"

Sleeper pods and our Port-a-medbay (wiich is basicly a sleeper pod) are litterly 1 inject and regen time.
By hand you treat them instantly unless it's something like Tox damage, but again 1 injection.

The cryopod you must stay in there till the treatment is done. Or else it does nothing or you barely heal at all.

So yea.. that's all I had to add. If you want to nerf Cryox cause of Cryo Pods, nerf how cryopods work or remove one of them from medbay and all should be balanced.