Remove sentient disease Part II

[HeyHey]

Sentient disease is not an awful idea but it's current application is awful. Since it spawns around the half hour and hour mark it often is ruined by two factors.
Everyone has a mask on already
Viro made a good disease that prevents the player from infecting people
This might be resolved by making sentient disease a round start antagonist or making it a early shift spawn around the 10-15 minute mark.

[The Wrench]

Code issue. I say fuck it, make sentient diseases overwrite or mutate other deseases to serve itself.

Or we could remove virology

[Shadowflame909]

Yeah it should be moved to an earlier start time (if config can change that)

Viro doing his job completely negates this antag and wastes rep

[NecromancerAnne]

The other day, to deal with three viruses of various lethality, I created a completely neutered 18 resistance disease that overrode everything else (including my healing virus). While it wasted my own work, I had effectively made everyone immune to viruses from then on, as nothing naturally would generate with as powerful a resistance as what I pissed out with virus food and formaldehyde in under a minute.

Including the sentient disease that spawned the same round, which just died immediately as its only host caught my extremely virulent virus blocker disease.

Virology sucks, yo.

[sinfulbliss]

On the flipside I’ve seen sentient disease almost always cause a pretty big issue on Sybil at least. Just like a couple days ago everyone caught a sentient disease dormant DNA activator virus and started having their heads pop off and people glowing green.

Sure sometimes they get cucked by virology, but to be honest with you if virology actually has someone bother doing their job to the degree that they create a strong antivirus, that sorta seems like intended gameplay. Of course the virology department is going to get in the way of the sentient virus, you’d expect nothing less.

[HeyHey]

On the flipside I’ve seen sentient disease almost always cause a pretty big issue on Sybil at least. Just like a couple days ago everyone caught a sentient disease dormant DNA activator virus and started having their heads pop off and people glowing green.

Sure sometimes they get cucked by virology, but to be honest with you if virology actually has someone bother doing their job to the degree that they create a strong antivirus, that sorta seems like intended gameplay. Of course the virology department is going to get in the way of the sentient virus, you’d expect nothing less.

Thank you for gracing my thread with a sinfulbliss tier take, when have you seen this? in the last 3 days on sybil i've seen 2 sentient disease rounds and BOTH resulted in 0 new hosts.

[nianjiilical]

sentient disease's problem is either you win and get to have fun making everyone miserable or you lose and you waste an antag roll, and which of the two happens is determined entirely by the state of the round when it pops

there are rounds where disease randomly rolls and i think "maybe i should just cancel it and spawn a ninja or something manually" because i already know from just looking at the round that the disease has no chance of working

its one thing when an antag gets cucked because there are pro gamers online, its another when an antag gets cucked because the virology system already happened long before the roll could even occur

which kind of sucks because tbh i like sentient disease as a concept

[iain0]

How often do you want sentient disease to wipe the crew and end the round? If it succeeds its inevitably round ending.

It is and should be a bit like heretic in its balance ; when 'completed' its very powerful, as such its quite difficult to complete. Its success rate should be low therefor overall, like if it spawns twice a day and you want it to win once a week it needs a low success rate of 7%. Heretic maths is more interesting since there's multiple heretics in a heretic round. But if you tip the success rate too much then you need to consider balancing the weight or antag more generally, because giving it a 50/50 win rate means its going to become a dominant round ender currently.

That said, a little extra luck on the side of the disease would be good imo, I was actually against this change for example https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/issues/74220 - sentient diseases with anacea are /not/ uncurable but in practical terms rarely get successfully cured (i'm about 50/50 myself as CMO in completing the cures, partly due to external interferences). That was the "sentient disease lucking out and having a chance of really winning", and removing that only serves to further weaken an antag that is already pretty weak and very heavily at the mercy of what cures it randomly rolls (which the vast majority of the time are not difficult, it was the purging interaction of anacea that actually made it complicated to cure).

[Farquaar]

The other day, to deal with three viruses of various lethality, I created a completely neutered 18 resistance disease that overrode everything else (including my healing virus). While it wasted my own work, I had effectively made everyone immune to viruses from then on, as nothing naturally would generate with as powerful a resistance as what I pissed out with virus food and formaldehyde in under a minute.

Including the sentient disease that spawned the same round, which just died immediately as its only host caught my extremely virulent virus blocker disease.

[zxaber]

Diseases tend to be really unfun to fight. It's not like a murderboner that you can juke out, shove, or run from. It's not like a plasma fire that you can dip out on and wait out or suit up and try to fight. Diseases mean draining health, aggravating symptoms, and the inability to do anything about it for 90% of the crew.

Sentient disease is the above, with a confused antag that can't decide if it should be a round-ending plague or just an evolving mass grief virus. To my knowledge, it can't even talk to its hosts, so you can't meaningfully interact with them outside trying to kill them.

The antag should be disabled until we can figure out how to make it engaging for both the disease player and also the crew players.

Remember that video with the sentient disease that had wazard powers? Sentient virus would be better if that was a feature.

[Indie-ana Jones]

I had actually talked to Mothblocks a bit about Sentient Disease, and yeah, it does need a rework. However, this is policy discussion, so I can't very well discuss the matter here. One thing I'll just quickly throw out there is that it's not hard or impossible to let players have more than one disease.

[Armhulen]

I had actually talked to Mothblocks a bit about Sentient Disease, and yeah, it does need a rework. However, this is policy discussion, so I can't very well discuss the matter here. One thing I'll just quickly throw out there is that it's not hard or impossible to let players have more than one disease.

IMO: I like only one disease, so viruses don't turn into giving someone as many viruses as you can at once like chemistry, but making an exception to sentient diseases applying even to sick people just makes sense

[sinfulbliss]

Would probably fix the issue if sentient disease could only spawn roundstart, that way it gets some hosts before virology has to a chance to spread anything.

I don’t like the idea of making it work as a secondary virus to viro’s viruses because viro already has very little they can do to contribute to the crew, taking away their ability to fight against sentient disease with their own stronger virus by making both work at the same time would be weird. Surely the virology department should be useful against the only antag virus.

[Armhulen]

Viro shouldn't be a job and shouldn't be designed around even existing atm tbh

Sentient Disease makes for a bad roundstart because it scales as if it was dropped in halfway through. Also, Sentient diseases are boring roundstarters. I mean like, really? The first threat on the station is a disease?

[GPeckman]

Having multiple viruses at once would also allow someone to stack multiple good viruses at the same time. And each one could be optimized to hit all of the stat thresholds, since you would only have to spend one symptom on the actual good symptom and could spend the rest on stat boosts. I don't think the coders would be okay with that.

[Armhulen]

which is why i'm saying sentient disease should be the ohnly kind that stacks with others... for the reasons i already said that you repeated

[saprasam]

yeah sentient disease literally doesnt function unless you have an understaffed medbay
i'd say "lets rework it" but at the same time dealing with diseases, sentient or not are already some of the most mind-numbing actively atrocious parts of the sandbox

[BrianBackslide]

I could have sworn that at one point not too long ago you could have a basic disease, a virology disease, AND a sentient disease all on the same person. I'll say that even if you do infect someone, the instant they cough they'll run to medbay. It's far too easy to metagame the sentient virus even unintentionally. Or worse, you infect someone and they decide they're going to go SSD/suicide before you get to infect anyone else. No amount of extra virus slots will save you from THAT.

Even when you do get rolling, it's not really much from a gameplay perspective. You either kill everyone in the most boring and passive way possible, or get found out and the cure is known. No matter if you try to go stealthy by refunding traits, the cure will be administered, and then vaccines and you're done. There is no back and forth with sentient virus; you just hope that people aren't paying attention or some other threat is too high a priority.

Disable it until someone bothers to rework it. Also, you're supposed to ESCAPE with an infected crewmember, so why give the ability to just murder everyone? I get its like IRL viruses, but those survive in unaffected carrier animals. A sentient virus wouldn't want to kill all its hosts before it had the chance to infect others.

[RedBaronFlyer]

Reposting something I said back in September:

Sentient disease is probably up there as one of my least favorite antags (probably tied with progtraitors all being samey). It either gets cured in two minutes, or the chemist/virology makes a fucky wucky and medbay lobby becomes a hell of people on fire getting stun locked by coughing fits until someone finally decides to call the shuttle after two thirds of the crew has been killed. The most riveting counterplay for 99% of the crew is sitting in your department until some idiot decides to run right into you despite them being very clearly sick, and thus getting you sick as well. There was one round a few weeks ago where the sentient disease cure was made of two chemicals, one of which canceled out the other, making it impossible for people to be cured.

Virology and sentient diseases are both a fantastic idea in theory, but in practice, it is probably the most boring antag from a crew member viewpoint.

Virologists either make a virus that heals you for one tick of damage every twenty seconds when standing in starlight and you've eaten potatoes recently, or if they're an antag, they make "Mega Death Aids Covid: Expansion Deluxe, Featuring Dante from Devil May Cry: NEW Funky Mode", which stunlocks you with coughing fits while you simultaneously burst into flames and have your skin melt off. You could remove diseases and virologist in their entirety and it would make barely any difference in how 99% of rounds progress.

Also, for some reason (at least on manuel), command has a massive issue of not calling the shuttle on those occasions where nearly 3/4 of the crew is dead, leading to non-infected but vulnerable (non-biosuited) crew sitting in their departments and dead people just linger around as ghosts for 30 minutes. There have been a few rounds where literally all of command died, and people left the server. At least blob kills the entire station if the crew fail to take it out.

[kieth4]

We have no interest in removing sentient disease.

Misdoubtful: No.

Timber: No.