/tg/Station 13

Byond account and character name: FumeKnight, Ambrose Trost
Banning admin: NecromancerAnne
Ban type (What are you banned from?): total/job
Ban reason and length: Total ban for one day, medical ban for one month for releasing a harmless revitiligo/alopecia virus on the station
Time ban was placed (including time zone): 2019-07-18 17:26:49
Server you were playing when banned (Sybil or Bagil): Bagil

Your side of the story: Round starts, i decide that i want to make a harmless prank virus. i throw together the appropriate buffing symptoms along with revitiligo and alopecia.

the complete disease was
Revitiligo
Sneezing
Eternal Youth (neutered)
Vitiligo (neutered)
Alopecia
Fever (neutered)

I then infect myself, then wander around the station infecting others. then i head to dorms to disguise myself to avoid a lynching. some time passes, i get boinked by necromanceranne for my shenanigans, and figuring there wasn't much else to do, i suicide and go make lunch.

Why you think you should be unbanned: I am well aware of my past transgressions as viro, and have since avoided doing anything directly and physically harmful again (diseases that deal damage or in any way impair a player's ability to play the game). When I decided to make the revitiligo virus, i took extra steps to insure that the disease would be both effective and completely harmless. there is only one hazardous symptom in this disease, which was neutered. the disease can literally do nothing except make you black and bald. As a matter of fact, due to the diseases high resistance stat, it would actually protect the host from being infected by all but the most infectious diseases. I make no pretense of doing anything other than making a meme disease, but as the meme disease in question was harmless, i see no reason why it should be an admin issue.
No one's ability to play the game was impaired. no damage was dealt. the issue is entirely in character and a ban was completely unnecessary.

This ban occurred in 113457 on Bagil. (src, statbus, scrubby)

thank you strange bee creature

I don't think i stressed enough that this was a complete med-bay ban for a non bannable offence.

Is no one going to look at this?

FUMEKNIGHT wrote:Is no one going to look at this?

I'll ping them on Discord, in the future you can do this yourself or PM an admin to do it for you (or just wait since sometimes the banning admin is just busy)

allright, thanks.

Sorry about the delay.

At the time of dropping the ban, I had spoken with admins on at the time about the matter and how to handle it. We came to the conclusion this, given your previous history and a previous ban from medical for virus related grief, was probably the most sensible approach to hopefully get through to you that behavior like this, especially line-toeing after previous warnings/punishments of a similar nature, isn't acceptable. Especially tired edgy memes like black/bald viruses. You aren't the first person to do this, but we don't like it when people make a habit of trying to find ways to skirt the rules so as to enable their behavior. Eventually, you need to catch on that nobody finds this funny or that you are not funny. If you think you can hide behind the fact that it isn't hurting anyone that's when it's time to take a hard look at your actions and why you're playing this game. Going from a kill virus as a nonantag to a grief virus as a nonantag in a short amount of time is clearly not a way to gain our trust that you've learned anything at all.

Additionally, while this is a recent change, upon thinking about the situation afterwards it brings up further problems with the virus. It had a resistance of 14. In of itself that's hard to cure, but since the new cures were added to viruses, when a virus has a resistance of 14 it uses fairly dangerous and poisonous medicines for the cure. And since it has resistance 14 you need a lot of it. I believe yours had a cure of modafinil, which has a random and fluctuating overdose threshold and metabolism rate. It could have been also anacea (don't think it was but it is randomly one of those two), which deals a not insignificant amount of toxins damage and lasts a significant amount of time in someones system since it has an unbelievably low metabolism rate. That also purges chems from your system so the only way to get rid of the toxin damage is if the anacea is flushed first, you can't keep dosing yourself on charcoal while taking the cure. So, to even fix your virus, people may need to be hurt en masse. It should also be worth pointing out modafinil requires multiple tier two chems and I do not believe at the time the chem machines were upgraded.

These viruses are no longer 'harmless pranks' because the virus mechanics have changed. You cannot hide behind that defense any longer if fixing this takes longer than 10 minutes and will cause actual harm to the person or could cause harm to the person (modafinil overdose is pretty dangerous). Poisoning the crew by proxy is still poisoning the crew because of your actions.

On top of this, your workplace was exposed to space. I have no idea how the bomb occurred but that leaves only the holodeck or someone with a spacesuit to make a vaccine.

I'm denying this appeal.

You don’t need a larger quantity of the cure with higher resistance levels.

Unless something changed, resistance determines per tick whether the virus is cured or not. It effectively increases the amount required to cure. Or at least, it means the cure would have to be in your system for longer for it to cure, so you can't effectively microdose it once to cure it.

Nothing changed. There's an upper and lower bound on your cure chance, with max resistance having about half the chance to cure per action compared to no resistance. Uou don't have a required minimum amount of chemical in your system for it to take effect which is what I thought your original post meant. Having a minimum reagent required in your body would make slower processing chemicals more dangerous. You can still microdose, you would just want to wait and see if it's cured before taking a second pill.

Regardless this isn't important for the resolution of the ban. The more important part is that "the cure caused damage, so this was no longer a harmless virus".

if the cure to a harmless virus causes damage, then it isnt on me if they take damage. its the players decision to cure the harmless disease, not mine.

this all circles back to the fact that the disease itself was harmless. there is no reason to cure it. curing revitaligo or alopecia doesnt undo its cosmetic effects.

ADDITIONALLY, (and i think you missed this the first time) having a harmless virus with high resistance is BENEFICIAL because it stops other diseases with low transmission to catch hold. curing this PURELY COSMETIC disease does nothing but harm, so it is not my fault if the players take damage from curing a disease that doesnt need to be cured.

You spread the virus. You take responsibility for everything that comes about as a result of that virus. That includes damage caused by the cure.

can i get a headmin ruling on this as theres no previous precedent on this that i know about

Curing a virus with modafinil does not cause harm unless the person administering the cure is grossly negligent.

It is mathematically impossible to overdose at appropriate dosage levels and statistically unlikely even if the chemist makes the pills stronger than they need to be.

i went back and did some sperg math.
Even if the chemist used anacea, which is a slightly more harmful drug on the same cure tier, the damage done for the minimum cure dose is so minuscule and slow that eating some charcoal would completely nullify it. the only way a player could be killed by this cure is if they took a 50 unit pill (of a drug that is pretty hard to make) and waited an hour without treating the toxin damage.

An important thing here is that you do in fact have a history of making annoying viruses in virology as a non-antagonist, and have been warned in the past for making some deadly things. While this one wasn't deadly outright, it does seem explicitly designed to be annoying, to make the crew mad, and to be difficult to get rid of. That is, in its purest form, a rule 1 violation.

The cure being potentially harmful is just icing on the cake as far as I'm concerned. The most distressing part is the fact that you intentionally made something as a non-antagonist to antagonize the crew, hoping to skirt by on the virtue of it being not DIRECTLY harmful. Frankly you know how our playerbase would react to something like being made it into a black person, and given your history with virology I can't think it was anything other than intentional.