Delete virology

[toemas]

We literally cant go 1 round without a cancer virus that hardstuns you every 5 seconds or makes you completely unable to move anywhere forcing you to suicide. Its seriously making me want to quit the game at this point, virology is easily the worst content in this game, theres absolutely nothing fun about it, the "gameplay" it adds is standing outside of chemistry waiting for someone to make a cure while your skin melts off. Unironically remove it from the game entirely, im literally begging you.

[Cobby]

You will need to replace it with something or rework it.

I agree it sucks, nearly the entire gameplay loop is done before you even play the game in an excel, and was made worse when the only balancing mechanic being RNG was lowered so you could get a smaller pool of symptoms (aka a higher chance of getting the symptom you want) with very little work, ESPECIALLY WHEN ITS PROVIDED TO YOU ROUNDSTART

[Farquaar]

We literally cant go 1 round without a cancer virus that hardstuns you every 5 seconds or makes you completely unable to move anywhere forcing you to suicide.

I'm afraid that I can't relate to this experience. It's rare for me to even see a virologist, much less an antag virologist that released a harmful virus.

[toemas]

We literally cant go 1 round without a cancer virus that hardstuns you every 5 seconds or makes you completely unable to move anywhere forcing you to suicide.

I'm afraid that I can't relate to this experience. It's rare for me to even see a virologist, much less an antag virologist that released a harmful virus.

on sybil the past few days theres been a cancer virus every other round

[Mothblocks]

as someone who admins back to back rounds on sybil, those are from the dead bodies and gibs and stuff

[Jonathan Gupta]

as someone who admins back to back rounds on sybil, those are from the dead bodies and gibs and stuff

this is why jannies are needed.

[TheFinalPotato]

as someone who admins back to back rounds on sybil, those are from the dead bodies and gibs and stuff

I stopped hearing complaints about those like 4 months ago, assumed they weren't an issue, since I never saw it cause hell problems in the (few) games I've played. Thoughts?

[Mothblocks]

as someone who admins back to back rounds on sybil, those are from the dead bodies and gibs and stuff

I stopped hearing complaints about those like 4 months ago, assumed they weren't an issue, since I never saw it cause hell problems in the (few) games I've played. Thoughts?

they're not really that bad anymore

[TheFinalPotato]

K

[cocothegogo]

ngl i dont think anyone has ever said "that super aids virus last round was really fun"

[bastardblaster]

Don't step on the dead bodies or gibs or blood and you won't contract turbo aids

[Jonathan Gupta]

Don't step on the dead bodies or gibs or blood and you won't contract turbo aids

You can also wear white shoes to stop getting super aids(And a gas mask).

[RaveRadbury]

I've had some alright times when a sentient disease was pretty bad and I had to hang out in the medbay lobby with the other afflicted as our eyes went bad and we burst into flames. From a gameplay perspective it's like "Oh guess I gotta wait" but from a story-telling immersive experience perspective it's pretty fun and cool to occasionally suffer from a plague in space and be one of the suffering extras in the background as medbay frantically turns out a cure.

[Super Aggro Crag]

ok i will
*deletes virology from the game*

[EuSouAFazenda]

You can measure basically every feature by how many cool experiences it lead to minus all the shit experiences it lead to. And I don't think there's any feature in the game with a worse score than viruses.

[Super Aggro Crag]

but dude think of the guy who healed himself 2 points of damage he got from touching lightbulbs bare handed or of the doctor who realized he couldn't give his patient CPR and had to pump them full of epinephrine and drag them to the cryo tube

[sinfulbliss]

Used to be worse, no longer that bad. Yeah on Sybil this has happened a lot in the past few days but that's just how it goes my man. If it's annoying enough, learn a fast way to make the common cures so it's a simple matter of making them yourself on the chem machines when med is struggling.

[datorangebottle]

Most of the complaints used to remove nanites can be applied to virology, such as passive regen being bad for the game.
On top of this, virology has a weird gameplay loop where the virologist doesn't do any of the work to actually cure the virus, it's the chemist who does all the heavy lifting.

[Valorium]

What do we replace it with then? We justified the removal of nanites by having circuits as a replacement (though the degree to which they actually function as such is a subject of debate), what do we replace not only a significant sub-department but an entire job with? Medical already struggles with content when people aren't dying horrible painful deaths, removing one of the two passive activities afforded to it isn't gonna prompt people to play.

Additionally, we'd need a new source of self-resp, given the two most obvious alternatives are Genetics (which puts full space worthiness in the sole hands of one job, which seems inadvisable) and Nani- oh wait.

[EuSouAFazenda]

Additionally, we'd need a new source of self-resp, given the two most obvious alternatives are Genetics (which puts full space worthiness in the sole hands of one job, which seems inadvisable) and Nani- oh wait.

grab a hardsuit

[datorangebottle]

What do we replace it with then? We justified the removal of nanites by having circuits as a replacement (though the degree to which they actually function as such is a subject of debate), what do we replace not only a significant sub-department but an entire job with? Medical already struggles with content when people aren't dying horrible painful deaths, removing one of the two passive activities afforded to it isn't gonna prompt people to play.

The idea that medical doctors and paramedics would lose a ton of work by not having a garbage death virus overwhelm their department half an hour in baffles me. Again, most of the work in curing a virus comes from asking the chemist to make one, maybe two chemicals- some of which are readily available in the chem dispenser or bar already. After that, it's a matter of making vaccines, which is a completely braindead single button press and another trip back to chemistry, then 500 pills are dumped onto the lobby floor so people can cure themselves. The only people losing out on work here are viro mains, chemists(who already don't do enough medical-related work and mostly just make grenades and factories, from what I can tell), and CMOs(lol one button press).

Medbay is normally plenty busy when I walk in there- at least one stasis bed has a patient on it, and others are in the lobby waiting. I don't know about Manuel, but people get in fights a lot on LRP, so there's always someone wandering in with "i stubbed my toe" or "someone made a fucked up disposals trap and broke both my legs".

The only work medical would really lose and miss is the 'making viruses' stuff, which is a position usually occupied by a single person and typically ends after they make their healing / death virus and become a regular doctor or start murdering everyone.

Additionally, we'd need a new source of self-resp, given the two most obvious alternatives are Genetics (which puts full space worthiness in the sole hands of one job, which seems inadvisable) and Nani- oh wait.

I dislike the idea that we NEED a new source of something that neuters the ability to flood gases outside of plasma, annoys MDs, and deletes oxygen tanks. Self-resp isn't great design and we'd probably be better off without it.

[Farquaar]

Some of the most memorable rounds I've ever had in SS13 included a virus throwing a wrench into the order of things.

The huddled masses of crewmembers pounding at the medbay doors while doctors try to cook up a cure
The feeling of paranoia when you start to cough after biting into a burger
The chaos of people running out of their departments to get cured, only to spread the virus further in the process
The feeling of sinister glee as you give a patient infected medicine, while he's blissfully unaware that he'll shortly become patient zero.
The rare, but exciting shifts where a virus is actually deadly, forcing everyone to treat their fellow crewmembers as life-threatening disease vectors

A virus isn't supposed to be the star of the show. It's supposed to shake things up, which it excels at. In short: Virology Good

[Valorium]

I feel as though I'm being misinterpreted. Right now, Medical has very little in the way of Station Advancement (TM), wherein the work they do improves the station rather than fixing something damaged (i.e. people being murdered brutally in some horrible industrial accident or by their pals). Science has this by doing research and handing out gear, Engineering has this by improving power generation and making machines, Service by keeping crewmembers happy, fed and drunk, Cargo by buying important gear for other departments and crew members, Medical (until this change) makes crewmember improving viruses and so on. The ONLY departments without any of this content is Security (which I think is a design flaw but arguably one that can't be avoided because having Sec do busywork while they should be finding criminals is a bad idea) and Medical under this change, unless you can argue that Chemistry chucking floorpills full of space drugs and crayon powder out of the Pharmacy windoor counts as "station improving content". I'm obviously being hyperbolic (and yes, I am aware that Medical has fancy surgeries that get done only as a rare gimmick on slow rounds or by very, VERY bored powergamers), but stuff that a department can do when it's not in crisis that benefits the station at large in some capacity is *generally* a good idea, and getting rid of Virology means eliminating the only commonly-seen facet of Medical that performs that function.

The topic isn't "get rid of obnoxious gib viruses/Sentient Viruses because they suck", it's "delete Virology", which means DELETE ALLLLL OF VIROLOGY.

Edit: Re-reading some of the above commentary, I agree that Self-Resp can be a cop-out. But, I feel like Space Adaptation would lose a lot of its functionality (and considering the downward spiral of Genetics in terms of general use, that's not something that sits entirely well with me) if you're forced to occupy a hand slot with a large oxygen tank for all eternity if you don't want to suffocate after five minutes in space. Again, my opinion, I can see why people would find Self-Resp unlikable.

[datorangebottle]

RE: Station advancement:
Arguably, they can also do implants; they get access to cybernetics at their medical protolathe, but everybody goes to bother the roboticist for implants for some reason. Possibly because medical is usually very busy repairing damaged people, which is a very important job. Plus, those fancy surgeries could stand to be a little more well-known, because I forgot about them until you brought them up. Of those, they've got a lot of mutual exclusivity and all of the power seems to be in the nerves one, which either gives you insuls or makes stuns practically worthless against you- and genetics can do both of those with a lot less hassle. They could stand to have more of these surgeries given how rarely they're used, how long they take to implement, the required research, and the need to have another person do the surgery for you.

You don't need self-resp for space adaptation to be good. In fact, space adapt on its own is amazing given how often the station gets randomly breached. If you're going to go space exploring, wear a suit that can hold your emergency tank(hazard vests), put it on your belt(put the belt in your backpack and right click it in-bag to open it), or put it in your pockets? You can put multiple e-tanks in your backpack box and swap them out when one runs out of air. Or yes, occupy your hand slot with a hefty tank.

Some of the most memorable rounds I've ever had in SS13 included a virus throwing a wrench into the order of things.

The huddled masses of crewmembers pounding at the medbay doors while doctors try to cook up a cure
The feeling of paranoia when you start to cough after biting into a burger
The chaos of people running out of their departments to get cured, only to spread the virus further in the process
The feeling of sinister glee as you give a patient infected medicine, while he's blissfully unaware that he'll shortly become patient zero.
The rare, but exciting shifts where a virus is actually deadly, forcing everyone to treat their fellow crewmembers as life-threatening disease vectors

A virus isn't supposed to be the star of the show. It's supposed to shake things up, which it excels at. In short: Virology Good

You've probably thrown all the potentially good rounds that got ruined by a virologist accidentally releasing their stupid bullshit haha you cough five million times while burning to death virus. You're also evoking a lot of colorful imagery that I just don't agree with. I don't know if i'm alone in this, but bad viruses just make me roll my eyes, groan, and afk in medbay for the however many minutes it takes for a cure to happen. Perhaps this is a manuel vs sybil moment, but on LRP viruses are just obnoxious and nothing else. They don't make me feel paranoid, or panicked. They do cause a bunch of chaos, though, which is part of the problem in getting a cure out quickly- assholes getting impatient and breaking into chemistry end up just disrupting things and causing more problems.

[Jonathan Gupta]

RE: Station advancement:
Arguably, they can also do implants; they get access to cybernetics at their medical protolathe, but everybody goes to bother the roboticist for implants for some reason. Possibly because medical is usually very busy repairing damaged people, which is a very important job. Plus, those fancy surgeries could stand to be a little more well-known, because I forgot about them until you brought them up. Of those, they've got a lot of mutual exclusivity and all of the power seems to be in the nerves one, which either gives you insuls or makes stuns practically worthless against you- and genetics can do both of those with a lot less hassle. They could stand to have more of these surgeries given how rarely they're used, how long they take to implement, the required research, and the need to have another person do the surgery for you.

You don't need self-resp for space adaptation to be good. In fact, space adapt on its own is amazing given how often the station gets randomly breached. If you're going to go space exploring, wear a suit that can hold your emergency tank(hazard vests), put it on your belt(put the belt in your backpack and right click it in-bag to open it), or put it in your pockets? You can put multiple e-tanks in your backpack box and swap them out when one runs out of air. Or yes, occupy your hand slot with a hefty tank.

Some of the most memorable rounds I've ever had in SS13 included a virus throwing a wrench into the order of things.

The huddled masses of crewmembers pounding at the medbay doors while doctors try to cook up a cure
The feeling of paranoia when you start to cough after biting into a burger
The chaos of people running out of their departments to get cured, only to spread the virus further in the process
The feeling of sinister glee as you give a patient infected medicine, while he's blissfully unaware that he'll shortly become patient zero.
The rare, but exciting shifts where a virus is actually deadly, forcing everyone to treat their fellow crewmembers as life-threatening disease vectors

A virus isn't supposed to be the star of the show. It's supposed to shake things up, which it excels at. In short: Virology Good

You've probably thrown all the potentially good rounds that got ruined by a virologist accidentally releasing their stupid bullshit haha you cough five million times while burning to death virus. You're also evoking a lot of colorful imagery that I just don't agree with. I don't know if i'm alone in this, but bad viruses just make me roll my eyes, groan, and afk in medbay for the however many minutes it takes for a cure to happen. Perhaps this is a manuel vs sybil moment, but on LRP viruses are just obnoxious and nothing else. They don't make me feel paranoid, or panicked. They do cause a bunch of chaos, though, which is part of the problem in getting a cure out quickly- assholes getting impatient and breaking into chemistry end up just disrupting things and causing more problems.

Nah, I just laugh then cry then I fucking Break into virology and make a chem machine, then I just make the cure.

[Valorium]

RE: Station advancement:
Arguably, they can also do implants; they get access to cybernetics at their medical protolathe, but everybody goes to bother the roboticist for implants for some reason. Possibly because medical is usually very busy repairing damaged people, which is a very important job. Plus, those fancy surgeries could stand to be a little more well-known, because I forgot about them until you brought them up. Of those, they've got a lot of mutual exclusivity and all of the power seems to be in the nerves one, which either gives you insuls or makes stuns practically worthless against you- and genetics can do both of those with a lot less hassle. They could stand to have more of these surgeries given how rarely they're used, how long they take to implement, the required research, and the need to have another person do the surgery for you.

You don't need self-resp for space adaptation to be good. In fact, space adapt on its own is amazing given how often the station gets randomly breached. If you're going to go space exploring, wear a suit that can hold your emergency tank(hazard vests), put it on your belt(put the belt in your backpack and right click it in-bag to open it), or put it in your pockets? You can put multiple e-tanks in your backpack box and swap them out when one runs out of air. Or yes, occupy your hand slot with a hefty tank.

Fair enough about the surgeries and implants. If there was a way to make implants or surgeries more accessible, that would probably help alleviate the Station Advancement (TM) problem - maybe if we ported some implants to be just injected like mindshields or tracking implants?

In response to the Self-Resp angle, emergency tanks run out pretty quickly, so having to stuff your bag full of blue tanks and making the crew take a mad dash for the oxygen lockers or Engineering every time the oxygen goes out seems inadvisable to me.

I do agree that surgeries or implants being more accessible is important just because they're not a very visible aspect of Medical such that a lot of people aren't even aware they exist. Do you have any proposals as to how that could be facilitated (being perfectly genuine here, not trying to clap back or anything because I literally have no ideas as to how to make fancy surgeries better/more obvious)?

[datorangebottle]

Fair enough about the surgeries and implants. If there was a way to make implants or surgeries more accessible, that would probably help alleviate the Station Advancement (TM) problem - maybe if we ported some implants to be just injected like mindshields or tracking implants?

I do agree that surgeries or implants being more accessible is important just because they're not a very visible aspect of Medical such that a lot of people aren't even aware they exist. Do you have any proposals as to how that could be facilitated (being perfectly genuine here, not trying to clap back or anything because I literally have no ideas as to how to make fancy surgeries better/more obvious)?

Some implants, like the nutriment pump or breathing tube, are weak enough that they could stand to just use the implanter system, yeah, but that'd just lead to people tiding and implanting themselves. I think that making updates to the system, adding more of the surgeries, etc could help with players knowing about them, too- this puts them in the changelog, making them more visible. I don't think we've seen any updates to experimental surgery in a long time.

Another idea would be to remove implants from the exosuit fabricator, leaving them solely in the hands of medbay. Robotics already has a ton of station advancement between implants, mechs, circuits, bots, and borgs. In fact, the entire job is station advancement. Mechanical implants on otherwise biological beings doesn't seem very "robotic" compared to the rest of their repertoire. You may be wondering, "How does this improve the visibility of those special surgeries?" and the answer is, "people may elect to undergo advanced surgery while they're getting implanted and have to go under the knife anyway."

I had a third idea while writing this post- a tablet or computer or something in the medical lobby/surgical room similar to the cargo requests console, that lets you request to have any available optional surgeries/implants done, picked from a list. This could be tied to the medical HUDs or it could print out a piece of paper that you hand to the doctor. It expedites the process and lets the patient know what has been researched and is doable. it also allows for some cheeky traitor manipulation in that you can kill someone, remove their brain, then forge a note on their corpse that they elected to have their brain removed and just stick them in the morgue.

In response to the Self-Resp angle, emergency tanks run out pretty quickly, so having to stuff your bag full of blue tanks and making the crew take a mad dash for the oxygen lockers or Engineering every time the oxygen goes out seems inadvisable to me.

Those emergency closets exist for a reason. Getting rid of self-resp gives us room to do things like raise or lower the number of emergency tanks / closets that are on a map, where before that number would be irrelevant because after twenty or thirty minutes nobody needs to breathe anymore.

[Learner]

ngl i dont think anyone has ever said "that super aids virus last round was really fun"

I’ve had a round where the station blew up the golem ship and Lavaland Syndicates all in one clean move, brought back one of the ‘survivors’, and that man went on to unleash one of his pure death bio-weapons onto the station when the medical crew tried to play games with him. Thanks to that, I live on the supportive side of Virology, especially since it was a cathartic release watching the dumb crew playing stupid games suffering. Idiots even went off blowing their shuttle with the self-destruct later.

It’s not perfect, it needs work, but in terms of pure carnage, chaos, and confusion, it works better then any other mechanic in the game. Only zombies, spiders, and xenos are as chaotic as a dangerous virus, except the virus can be a lot less lethal.

You just sometimes end up with someone who likes to set up the same dangerous situation too often that people vocally complain about it.

[Cosmodeus]

What I read is, "Highly skilled virologists keep making viruses that other virologists could never make before the round ends. Please completely remove an entire feature from the game because I don't like getting owned by something I could have drank table salt to cure."

I've been in rounds with extremely cancerous viruses and the cure couldn't be made on time to stop it from killing almost every single crew member. When the cure was made, which was by me, I was the only one immune to it. I didn't owe everybody else a cure, but I still made vaccines. Needless to say, everybody was dead and most people didn't want to be revived so I had the shuttle called. The round only lasted thirty minutes. The virus was made by an administrator. The virus killed most infected players within five minutes of having it.

TL;DR

Learn virology. Simple as.

[EuSouAFazenda]

The round only lasted thirty minutes. The virus was made by an administrator. The virus killed most infected players within five minutes of having it./quote]

I'm on the against virology side but this scenario is clearly not the mechanic's fault and just fucking shitty admemery

[cacogen]

What's that shit where you cough like five times in one second? Because that's annoying and it breaks my immersion and it's probably a symptom of virology being shit.

[Noodlecat]

I for one like vg virology more, the antigen and antibody stuff makes the virologist be the person who cures the virus instead of chemistry

[datorangebottle]

"Highly skilled virologists keep making viruses that other virologists could never make before the round ends. Please completely remove an entire feature from the game because I don't like getting owned by something I could have drank table salt to cure."

?
if it were always as easy as drinking table salt, this would be a thread about buffing virology because it's irrelevant. most of the time the cure is harder than that, and you end up with 2-10 people crowding up chemistry, shoving eachother around while dying, while the rest of the crew overcrowds an already stressed-out medbay while also dying. this is not a fun scenario.

when there's a bomb on the station, there's excitement and drama. will the engineer/suicidal assistant reach the bomb to disarm it in time? will they cut the correct wire? or will they accidentally pulse the detonator and blow a huge hole in the station? will the traitor come back to defend their bomb from the bomb squad?

virology doesn't have this. mainly because most people understand the threat of an unskilled person trying to disarm a bomb and don't want to be gibbed to pieces, so they avoid it. Even if you go out of your way to avoid going into public areas because of a disease, nine times out of ten some stupid fuck will break into your workplace just to cough on you and make sure you die of omega AIDS.

also your story is essentially equivalent to an admin rolling their face over the event buttons to try and kill everyone. that isn't a "highly skilled virologist", that's literally god saying "okay spacemen, today you face the great plague that wiped out an entire ancient civilization."

[Jonathan Gupta]

Viro needs a rework, there are to few virus mutations and combinations as it currently stands if you have a stealth virus that has confusion and you take away the virus board its basically impossible to cure.

[Addust]

We literally cant go 1 round without a cancer virus that hardstuns you every 5 seconds or makes you completely unable to move anywhere forcing you to suicide. Its seriously making me want to quit the game at this point, virology is easily the worst content in this game, theres absolutely nothing fun about it, the "gameplay" it adds is standing outside of chemistry waiting for someone to make a cure while your skin melts off. Unironically remove it from the game entirely, im literally begging you.

s k i l l i s s u e

[Mothblocks]

been a while since I've seen a real viro kill the station

[Cobby]

even the murderboners are tired of viro thats how bad it is :smug:

[cacogen]

i was in a round earlier today where a virologist racked up a sizeable kill count from the ol narrow windpipe