/tg/Station 13

The topic of revives, medical, and round removals is a pretty controversial issue around here, but its clear that lots of people aren't happy with the current state of it. Therefore in this rambling manifesto I propose that defibrillator revives be limited to only five minutes after death. This is a pretty extreme take, but I think it's worth discussing and could lead to some good conversation. Below I am going to go over what are, in my opinion, the problems with revives, the pros of the five minute system, and the inevitable cons.

Problems with Revival:
The Solution:
The Pros:
The Cons:
Conclusion:

I wouldn't mind if this change was implemented.

didn't we already have this when cloning was removed but the defib timer wasn't? and it was extremely unfun?

Revival surgery still worked so it is different

If you could make timed-out brains MMI-viable but not body-viable that might be cool and let people who really want to come back do so with compromises.

I am EXTREMELY into the idea of encouraging suboptimal alternatives by making the defib less of a catch-all, as long as we get more of those alternatives.

Oh good, lets put shit loads of pressure on medics to do their job perfectly and first time or their patient is round removed. Already a fairly thankless job now you can expect 5x the bitching for taking too long to do your job (usually by people who never had jobs and never did them).

Sounds horrible. I don't know who's really winning in this change.

Edit: Oh yeah, medical's usually a shit show of grief and people fighting each other which medics also have to deal with while being medics. Also ignoring dead bodies is an issue.

iprice wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 12:31 am Edit: Oh yeah, medical's usually a shit show of grief and people fighting each other which medics also have to deal with while being medics. Also ignoring dead bodies is an issue.

i wonder who's job it is to stop that griefing

iamgoofball wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 2:24 am

iprice wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 12:31 am Edit: Oh yeah, medical's usually a shit show of grief and people fighting each other which medics also have to deal with while being medics. Also ignoring dead bodies is an issue.

i wonder who's job it is to stop that griefing

Ah yes, I'll just press the "Disable Griefing" at startup.

Also a lot of it is just escalation and stuff brought into the medical room so isn't necessarily something administrative either.

I was talking more from my perspective as a CMO actually, and I'm not admining while playing so.

Useful input though, nice.

iprice wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 2:30 am I was talking more from my perspective as a CMO actually, and I'm not admining while playing so.

have you tried adminhelping when the grief occurs?

Ah yes because ahelping and having to write up a story in the middle of the round would definitely help when I have a limited amount of time to begin with to revive the patient.
Literally just space the body or incinerate if you really want a person gone.
And this timer makes players MORE angry, not less. It doesn't do anything to encourage ghost roles, it just punishes the dead player for something they have no control over.
I have literally been left in medbay central without being revived a few times and this does not solve the problem with medbay leaving dead bodies untreated.
Essentially you are punishing the player for dying to get medbay to revive.

EDIT: I want to note that encouraging ghost roles through hardcoding timed revivals is a terrible idea. Ghost roles are by their very nature different from station crew to begin with and setting a revival timer so that Dead McCorpse will be "encouraged" to play Ash-Lig or Stuck DeCharlie is not encouragement.

Alphanerdd wrote: ↑Thu Mar 10, 2022 7:18 pm 6. No More Corpse Piles!
The bane of any medical doctor. A pile of corpses, all with severe organ decay, and waiting to be revived. Doctors often have to chose between treating the corpse pile, which is always a losing battle, or just treating newer patients. Usually newer patients take priority over old ones, and they just end up forgotten. So ultimately we would be better off making corpses unrevivable after some time. Finally doctors can just put max organ decay bodies in the morgue without feeling guilty, and actually treat patients who can be saved.

I feel like you are sort of glancing over the fact that these corpse piles still exist, they are all just permanently round removed.

Let's limit revival to 5 minutes, to be brought back via cloning.

Making stasis bed not stop decay would remove their purpose, Stasis bags could work with that 5 minutes brain dead thingy

iamgoofball wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 2:34 am

iprice wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 2:30 am I was talking more from my perspective as a CMO actually, and I'm not admining while playing so.

have you tried adminhelping when the grief occurs?

Your perspective is beyond oversimplified. Both of them.

The word is more flexible than meaning a strict rule break. Also admins are not actually preventative ; our existence doesn't hugely /prevent/ grief or issues, we're more reactionary and spend several minutes after something happens talking to people and investigating ; the issue still remains.

And besides, my point really was just about how many things will end up contributing to revival delays, which can now be round removal.
Person spends too long carrying the corpse to medical?
MD is inexperienced, maybe stabs the patient a couple of times while trying to fix em?
Maybe gets distracted?
Maybe two people working on the same corpse would have gotten it revived faster?
Maybe I shouldn't have gone for a sneaky piss during that tend wounds?
God help you if you're a husked miner heh.
Arguments about 'why even start trying' when a husked body turns up with 4 minutes on their clock. You ignore them because there's other people to fix, they get round removed.

So much OOC anger and salt will pour down from some people on any and every poor choice anyone made which lead to them being round removed. And a lot of that will land on the MDs. The few people in this game who do a job SOLELY for someone elses benefit, practically unlike any other job. (As in literally can't even fix themselves, meanwhile most departments fail inter-department relationships because they only do what benefits them directly in their goals)

This is what the gist of my point it, how shitty it will be for the round removed players and the MDs who get the flak from this change. Also maybe something about simply removing medical content because it'll be super short-and-bursty now.

Also make suit sensors report this stuff, it's already almost guaranteed that if you go space/lavaland hunting to revive someone they'll probably have DNRed even if you got there in 5 minutes after they died, just because they expect to not be recovered. Knowing that most of these will have lapsed their timer or be "on the edge of failing" just means there's likely no point even trying to recover these depending on the timer, which if you don't know you'll just assume the worst. Space tends to husk people too which even more guarantees they can't be fixed in time.


Just doesn't seem positive in most of its outcomes, as a player or as an MD. Administratively there isn't much to say to this though its inevitable someone will ahelp because it took someone longer than it should to have gotten their corpse to medbay, or they stayed to finish a fight rather than instantly getting the corpse to medbay. But whatever, bus will rule on these things if/when necessary.

Response times are typically 10-15 minutes before even being discovered, and that's WITH suit sensors. Nevermind if you die in a hard-to-reach location. Seems like the go-to would be to carve out the brain, MMI, and then fix the body.

Death should be more impactful. Of that I agree. But a hard round removal time limit should not be the way to go about it. Traumas, losing max HP, damage modifiers/multipliers should come as the result of death. Not ones that can be fixed/fixed without consequence by medical either.

NoxVS wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 7:24 am

Alphanerdd wrote: ↑Thu Mar 10, 2022 7:18 pm 6. No More Corpse Piles!
The bane of any medical doctor. A pile of corpses, all with severe organ decay, and waiting to be revived. Doctors often have to chose between treating the corpse pile, which is always a losing battle, or just treating newer patients. Usually newer patients take priority over old ones, and they just end up forgotten. So ultimately we would be better off making corpses unrevivable after some time. Finally doctors can just put max organ decay bodies in the morgue without feeling guilty, and actually treat patients who can be saved.

I feel like you are sort of glancing over the fact that these corpse piles still exist, they are all just permanently round removed.

Typically when you have huge piles of corpses in medical, they are effectively round removed already. 9 times out of 10 medical doesn't have the staff, resources, or time to replace all of those organs and get those people walking again. If medical does have the capability to revive that many people, usually its because the station is in good condition, and there wouldn't be a huge pile of corpses to begin with. Whether or not the corpses are actually round removed or not doesn't change the outcome that much. The only difference is all the ghost players feel the need to stick around, and the doctors have more items on their to-do list.

iprice wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 12:31 am Oh good, lets put shit loads of pressure on medics to do their job perfectly and first time or their patient is round removed. Already a fairly thankless job now you can expect 5x the bitching for taking too long to do your job (usually by people who never had jobs and never did them).

I think you're overestimating how long it takes for someone to get revived. From my experience in medical the "meta" is to stasis bed, fix most of the damage, then revive. However, if you prioritize reviving first, you can actually get someone alive fairly quickly. Combine that with formaldehyde, which there's always plenty of, and you've got a pretty lenient amount of time to revive someone.

Although if the 5-10 minutes ends up too unforgiving, I think having formaldehyde pause the timer entirely while its in the corpse would also work. It would basically give unlimited time as long as the medical staff is paying attention.

iprice wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 12:31 am Edit: Oh yeah, medical's usually a shit show of grief and people fighting each other which medics also have to deal with while being medics. Also ignoring dead bodies is an issue.

The whole point is to make ignoring dead bodies (after a certain point) not an issue, and something expected. This lets medics spend their time doing other things, including handling griefers and people fighting each other.

Unoki wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 8:27 am Making stasis bed not stop decay would remove their purpose, Stasis bags could work with that 5 minutes brain dead thingy

Yeah I'm still not 100% sure on this one. On one hand stasis beds not stopping decay would feel weird, but on the other hand i think it would be a bit too easy if they did. It would be a way to infinitely extend the timer with no resource cost. I think mechanically formaldehyde is a better solution, but to be honest I could go either way.

iprice wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 1:21 pm And besides, my point really was just about how many things will end up contributing to revival delays, which can now be round removal.
Person spends too long carrying the corpse to medical?
MD is inexperienced, maybe stabs the patient a couple of times while trying to fix em?
Maybe gets distracted?
Maybe two people working on the same corpse would have gotten it revived faster?
Maybe I shouldn't have gone for a sneaky piss during that tend wounds?
God help you if you're a husked miner heh.
Arguments about 'why even start trying' when a husked body turns up with 4 minutes on their clock. You ignore them because there's other people to fix, they get round removed.

Lots of other jobs have high risk tasks that can easily result in mass death if they aren't handled properly.
What if an engineer goes for a sneaky piss while setting up SM and it delams?
What if a scientist is inexperienced and opens a plasma canister while doing toxins?
What if a sec officer lets a changeling escape because they decided to handle it solo?

In my opinion there's no reason that medical can't have situations with similar stakes. Round removal may be more common but I think it would result in more exciting gameplay (Then again I am biased, since personally I don't really care if I die/get removed). I think the best solution to RR via medical malpractice is to leave the dead / critical patients to the experienced medics who know how to handle it quickly, the same way you don't let a new engineer set up SM unsupervised.

And with 400 burn miner husks, should those even be getting revived? Like if it happens great, but I think most people playing shaft miner expect that death is basically round removal for them. Megafauna literally gib you on death. Mining has always been high risk high reward, and death on lavaland is 95% of the time permanent anyways.

iprice wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 1:21 pm So much OOC anger and salt will pour down from some people on any and every poor choice anyone made which lead to them being round removed. And a lot of that will land on the MDs. The few people in this game who do a job SOLELY for someone elses benefit, practically unlike any other job. (As in literally can't even fix themselves, meanwhile most departments fail inter-department relationships because they only do what benefits them directly in their goals)

This is what the gist of my point it, how shitty it will be for the round removed players and the MDs who get the flak from this change. Also maybe something about simply removing medical content because it'll be super short-and-bursty now.

This would probably be the initial reaction, but I think it would just take players time to get used to the new system. Right now if you're body gets to medical and a doctor begins treating it, its basically a guaranteed revive. The expectation is to get back 100% of the time, and if the doctor fucks up you just wait longer. With this change that wouldn't be the case, as now there's a decent chance that a player might not get revived. I know it sounds a bit idealistic, but hopefully the mentality would shift from "How did they not manage to revive???" to "I actually got revived???" Basically by removing the guarantee of revives, while still retaining the skill factor of all parties, getting revived will be viewed as a positive outcome as opposed to just what's expected.

Do I think that's what will happen? Maybe, who knows? It definitely won't happen immediately tho, and there will be some salt until it does.

iprice wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 1:21 pm Also make suit sensors report this stuff, it's already almost guaranteed that if you go space/lavaland hunting to revive someone they'll probably have DNRed even if you got there in 5 minutes after they died, just because they expect to not be recovered. Knowing that most of these will have lapsed their timer or be "on the edge of failing" just means there's likely no point even trying to recover these depending on the timer, which if you don't know you'll just assume the worst. Space tends to husk people too which even more guarantees they can't be fixed in time.

This is unironically a good idea. Even if none of this revival limit stuff happens suit sensors should still report DNR and disconnected. As for there being no point in recovering certain bodies, in some cases yeah, there won't be. If you get ejected in to space, you probably aren't coming back. For other situations where it might be possible, that's where the paramedic shines since they have the tools needed to both extend the timer and get the back to med fast.

Archie700 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 3:34 am Ah yes because ahelping and having to write up a story in the middle of the round would definitely help when I have a limited amount of time to begin with to revive the patient.
Literally just space the body or incinerate if you really want a person gone.
And this timer makes players MORE angry, not less. It doesn't do anything to encourage ghost roles, it just punishes the dead player for something they have no control over.
I have literally been left in medbay central without being revived a few times and this does not solve the problem with medbay leaving dead bodies untreated.
Essentially you are punishing the player for dying to get medbay to revive.

EDIT: I want to note that encouraging ghost roles through hardcoding timed revivals is a terrible idea. Ghost roles are by their very nature different from station crew to begin with and setting a revival timer so that Dead McCorpse will be "encouraged" to play Ash-Lig or Stuck DeCharlie is not encouragement.

The goal isn't to encourage ghost roles. Whether or not that actually happens isn't the point. If it does (and I think this change would) that's just an added bonus. Personally, I would be way more likely to try ghost roles if I didn't have the chance of reviving. But if other people don't have the same attitude that's fine, it's not really the point.

I'll be honest i don't get what you mean by "punishing players for dying." Yeah, it does. That's the point, make death more impactful.
No more "lol i killed my liver in the bar but its okay because medical will fix me." If you're going to drink yourself to death, commit to the bit.
If medical can't revive you that's how it is, shouldn't have died, skill issue.

You aren't entitled to a revive the moment you go sideways, but right now reviving is so easy most fresh corpses in medical will get revived. Some players are so used to getting back up that they treat it as a given, and if they aren't revived they go full pissbaby.

And as I've said, the change is supposed to make untreated dead bodies not an issue. Medbay usually doesn't revive them anyway, and now they aren't expected to.

BrianBackslide wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 4:13 pm Response times are typically 10-15 minutes before even being discovered, and that's WITH suit sensors. Nevermind if you die in a hard-to-reach location. Seems like the go-to would be to carve out the brain, MMI, and then fix the body.

Death should be more impactful. Of that I agree. But a hard round removal time limit should not be the way to go about it. Traumas, losing max HP, damage modifiers/multipliers should come as the result of death. Not ones that can be fixed/fixed without consequence by medical either.

Response times are so long right now in part because response time isn't that important. With these changes players would have to adapt if they want to successfully revive people. They already have the tools, and there's already an entire job for it. It's just up to the department to actually use what they have.

Throwing the brain into an MMI seems like a pretty creative solution, although i doubt it would become too widespread considering it is often just easier to revive normally. If it did actually become a meta thing then it would probably need to be addressed.

I don't think penalties for being revived are the way to go. Stuff like max hp and damage modifiers would just make you die quicker the next time, and no one enjoys floating in and out of medical forever. Eventually either you would become so fragile that you might as well DNR, or medical will just get tired of reviving you and let you rot. Traumas are better, but still not great. I think having them be impossible to remove would be pretty unfun, and as those stack up it would start to get unplayable.

The idea of having the timer is to make death a risk. It is entirely possible to get revived and go about your shift, but every time you go ghost there is a non zero chance that you won't come back from this one, and that uncertainty is what would give it impact.

Pandarsenic wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 12:26 am If you could make timed-out brains MMI-viable but not body-viable that might be cool and let people who really want to come back do so with compromises.

I am EXTREMELY into the idea of encouraging suboptimal alternatives by making the defib less of a catch-all, as long as we get more of those alternatives.

I like this idea. I wanted to have MMI's pause the timer since having roboticists lose brains would kind of suck, but at the same time that allows it to be abused.

This seems like a good balance

i read this thread while sleep deprived and for some reason my brain parsed the intent as "once someone dies they are unrevivable until 5 minutes have passed" and i was so confused

nianjiilical wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 5:18 pm i read this thread while sleep deprived and for some reason my brain parsed the intent as "once someone dies they are unrevivable until 5 minutes have passed" and i was so confused

I wrote it while sleep deprived so I understand the confusion

I recall a round where I was killed by a traitor, got brought to medical and put on a statsis bed as captain. I was never revived for the rest of the round and the round ended without anyone even taking a look at my body.

I was the only body for half the round in medbay.

Imagine how pissed off people will be if you put a hard revive timer on top of that. A mechanic that basically punishes dead players for the incompetence of medbay will not be obvious to doctors, especially new ones. And we have the problem of having to replace heads and the time it actually takes to find and retrieve a dead body, especially in lavaland if people actually care about saving miners. And the possible issue of having to treat and revive multiple dead people after a murderboning traitor or heretic.

This isn't even mentioning the adminstrative nightmare that is handling ahelps regarding people being allowed to expire because of metagrudging or, even worse deliberately bullying medbay with greytiding to prevent someone from being revived as a nonantag.

If people aren't reviving you quickly in medbay, they aren't doing it because it's not an urgent matter. They doing it because either

1) There are a lot of bodies to revive and they're trying to prioritize.
2) They're BAD.

Your idea would just put more unnecessary pressure on 1) and just punish other people for having 2).

iamgoofball wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 2:24 am

iprice wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 12:31 am Edit: Oh yeah, medical's usually a shit show of grief and people fighting each other which medics also have to deal with while being medics. Also ignoring dead bodies is an issue.

i wonder who's job it is to stop that griefing

Thank you so much for reminding us of how we can rewind time! I truly forgot about it. We are like Thanos with all the infinity stones. With a snap of fingers, we can go back in time and stop the grief!!
Now seriously, we cannot stop the grief that happened from happening. We punish it. We can also try to help fixing the side effects, but, as far as I know, it would be really bad if I spawned myself in with a wand of resurrection because some griefer decided to show up and throw an MD into a wall repeatedly. The player who was in the stasis bed is now round removed because the Medical Doctor couldn't help them in time and had to stop the tider in the meantime.
Your comment just came off as dumb. You're acting like admins can get into tiders' minds and stop them.

This would be really fun but the average medical department is too incompetent to handle it

the idea is fine but all of your takes are heinous

corpse piles that can be revived but arent = bad
corpse piles that can't be revived period = good?

Kel wrote: ↑Sat Mar 12, 2022 8:21 pm corpse piles that can be revived but arent = bad
corpse piles that can't be revived period = good?

I think, generally, the current system is fine where the body becomes progressively more obnoxious to treat the longer it stays away from medical up to a point (organ damage). I think it is also conflicting to say death is trivial but then a few lines down explain the work involved is extensive and obnoxious.

I thought the defib time was dumb and arbitrary tbh, and thought tying it to organ damage was more immersive and tangible.

The kicker imo is that surgery itself isnt very fun. Inventory Tetris, click, pop up youtube is not a fun system. Frankly I'd rather just scrap all the tools, have a generic surgery kit (we can prob have upgrades that make it easier to win the minigame), then you run a minigame instead. Even better would be a system where the patient can help so they can speed up the process as well if they engage with the game.

What if we had like organ zuma or something and if you have a player patient they can shoot the balls on the other side to help clear it faster lol. Your surgery kit can store like the little boosts a la candy crush microtransactions that make clearing faster.

5. Organ Decay Sucks.
I don't think it's really a hot take to say that organ decay is unfun. Nothing feels worse than having a pile of corpses with nonfunctioning organs that you somehow need to get walking again. Printing a full set of mechanical organs is very expensive, and unless you've been on the organ farming grindset, you wont have enough squishy organs to meet demands. It's also time consuming as fuck to revive someone with a chest cavity full of sludge. Not to mention brain traumas which require even more surgery to get rid off. Organ decay also is a big reason why operating tables almost never get used, since decay is such a pain to deal with. With the way organ decay works now, it feels intentionally designed to discourage revives after long periods of time, and push doctors towards treating the more recently deceased or injured. However, by having these corpses be revivable at all, people are going to try, and it results in no fun for everyone involved.

This is absolutely correct and your suggested solution of throwing the entire possibility of revival out the window because of it is completely the wrong way to go.

Cobby wrote: ↑Sat Mar 12, 2022 9:04 pm I think, generally, the current system is fine where the body becomes progressively more obnoxious to treat the longer it stays away from medical up to a point (organ damage). I think it is also conflicting to say death is trivial but then a few lines down explain the work involved is extensive and obnoxious.

Nothing should be obnoxious as a method of balance. What the OP is suggesting, just taking the choice out of players' hands completely, is a far more empathetic way to go about it because it actually takes into consideration players' time and effort and what they want to do even if it's miserable. But we should be making it less miserable on them instead of making death suck even more.

Not sure if this is the best implementation, but I am all for permadeath.

Lots of other jobs have high risk tasks that can easily result in mass death if they aren't handled properly.
What if an engineer goes for a sneaky piss while setting up SM and it delams?
What if a scientist is inexperienced and opens a plasma canister while doing toxins?
What if a sec officer lets a changeling escape because they decided to handle it solo?

an engineer doesn't take a piss while setting up the sm unless they are pissing themselves.
a scientist dies a lot while opening plasma cans thats just toxins sometimes.
oh well thats the game not death.

Itseasytosee2me wrote: ↑Fri Mar 18, 2022 2:13 pmNot sure if this is the best implementation, but I am all for permadeath.

Good luck dying in space or on mining, almost all examples offered cover the station but need to acknowledge there won't be accessible rule 12 violating fallbacks like mass-scale podpeople blood-farms to speed or bypass prolonged retrieval times including shuttle-trips from lavaland, obstacles (enormous space holes, greytide, airlocks, antagonists) and other circumstances.

Archie700 is completely correct, it takes very little effort to hide a body and many rounds players can/have lay in a mundane place like a welded box, stasis bed (past my time compared to the cryotube, or flipped down sleeper), or even a inner wall cavity.

FantasticFwoosh wrote: ↑Fri Mar 18, 2022 3:55 pm

Itseasytosee2me wrote: ↑Fri Mar 18, 2022 2:13 pmNot sure if this is the best implementation, but I am all for permadeath.

Good luck dying in space or on mining, almost all examples offered cover the station but need to acknowledge there won't be accessible rule 12 violating fallbacks like mass-scale podpeople blood-farms to speed or bypass prolonged retrieval times including shuttle-trips from lavaland, obstacles (enormous space holes, greytide, airlocks, antagonists) and other circumstances.

Archie700 is completely correct, it takes very little effort to hide a body and many rounds players can/have lay in a mundane place like a welded box, stasis bed (past my time compared to the cryotube, or flipped down sleeper), or even a inner wall cavity.

What

Edit: I don't comprehend what you are trying to tell me, and I am unsure of how it relates to my statement.

In short, if you had to watch a player do as it was back in the day easily ignore your trapped corpse for a hour even when you can be instantaneously revived and returned into the round (using podpeople as a more current substitute for cloning), you'd easily be jaded into potentially changing that outlook of a 5 minute perma-deathspan. There's some more explanations of my points in the spoiler.

cacogen wrote: ↑Sun Mar 13, 2022 5:31 am Nothing should be obnoxious as a method of balance. What the OP is suggesting, just taking the choice out of players' hands completely, is a far more empathetic way to go about it because it actually takes into consideration players' time and effort and what they want to do even if it's miserable. But we should be making it less miserable on them instead of making death suck even more.

ok how about "I think, generally, the current system is fine where it takes a proportional amount of time to treat equal to the longer it stays away from medical up to a point (organ damage)". It is only "obnoxious" in the sense that surgery itself is obnoxious because youre not DOING anything and theres no real skill involved beyond "do you know the next step", in which case I think the solution isnt about making it faster; surgery should just be refitted to be enjoyable as an activity.

Id also like surgery to optionally involve the patient even if it doesnt make sense from a realistic pov, in which case the individual could play a role in speeding up their own revival.

Please don't add a minigame for surgery. Just don't require people to be in their body for longer than say two minutes of crit and add a proper TGUI window for it similar to the strip window so the state of the patient is self-evident and surgery requires less pixel hunting.

FantasticFwoosh wrote: ↑Fri Mar 18, 2022 5:36 pm In short, if you had to watch a player do as it was back in the day easily ignore your trapped corpse for a hour even when you can be instantaneously revived and returned into the round (using podpeople as a more current substitute for cloning), you'd easily be jaded into potentially changing that outlook of a 5 minute perma-deathspan. There's some more explanations of my points in the spoiler.

Gotcha

Why don't we limit the time players have to spend in crit to 2 minutes? After that, they could just ghost without being separated from their bodies. Crit used to be 20 seconds without the peephole, then it was extended to five minutes (which is already asking a lot from players for a chance at avoiding death) and the peephole was added to make it suck less.

Now because of stasis beds, crit can last potentially infinitely. By allowing players to ghost freely during it, it would make being revived on a stasis bed less shit, and would disincentivise players from succumbing during revivals that are taking too long.

Consider this: Death shouldn't just be trivial or not trivial. If you get into a scuffle, you should be able to have a very trivial death and revival. If you are specifically targeted by a well equipped syndicate assassin, you should have a non trivial death. What if we made death as it is a bit more trivial by pulling back on organ decay, but then also added a way to make death more permanent if done in a specific way, perhaps by, say, gibbing? Think about it

Itseasytosee2me wrote: ↑Fri Mar 18, 2022 2:13 pm Not sure if this is the best implementation, but I am all for permadeath.

Excellent take by Itseasytosee yet again. I am so sick of people complaining about round removal... at this stage, honestly, all deaths should just be round removals to get people to stop complaining. (yes they'd complain more but they'd have no grounds to any longer is what I mean)

Bawhoppennn wrote: ↑Sun Mar 27, 2022 1:49 pm

Itseasytosee2me wrote: ↑Fri Mar 18, 2022 2:13 pm Not sure if this is the best implementation, but I am all for permadeath.

Excellent take by Itseasytosee yet again. I am so sick of people complaining about round removal... at this stage, honestly, all deaths should just be round removals to get people to stop complaining. (yes they'd complain more but they'd have no grounds to any longer is what I mean)

Honestly, what else could be better for increasing paranoia?

Maybe then you wouldn't have antags (both on LRP and MRP) who just openly tell people they're antags with no consequences.

Alphanerdd wrote: ↑Thu Mar 10, 2022 7:18 pm The topic of revives, medical, and round removals is a pretty controversial issue around here, but its clear that lots of people aren't happy with the current state of it. Therefore in this rambling manifesto I propose that defibrillator revives be limited to only five minutes after death. This is a pretty extreme take, but I think it's worth discussing and could lead to some good conversation. Below I am going to go over what are, in my opinion, the problems with revives, the pros of the five minute system, and the inevitable cons.

Problems with Revival:

► Show Spoiler

1. It Trivializes Death.
This is one of the most common arguments against revives, that being it makes death pretty insignificant. Depending on the situation, actually dying is just an inconvenience at worst. Drink yourself to death in the bar? No worries! Medical will fix you up in no time. Myself and many others are of the opinion that this feels kind of weird. Death should matter, and being able to cha-cha slide across the mortal coil as many times as you want can get a bit stupid. If you get in a fight with someone and actually kill them it should be meaningful, not just a field trip to medical. At it's worse death can feel like it lowers the tension of a high stakes situation. Trying to keep a friend stable while waiting for medical assistance can be pretty exciting and difficult, depending on the injuries. However if that person dies, you no longer need to do anything. Medical can take as much time as they need, since they already need to be revived, and at that point why rush?

2. The Paramedic is Kinda Useless.
The purpose of the paramed is to respond to health emergencies outside of med quickly, but as is, that's entirely unnecessary. If a body is found, you can pretty much just drag them back to medical at your leisure. Sure organ decay is a thing, but either the body is fresh enough where you can take your time, or the organs are already so decayed it really doesn't matter how long you take anymore. The same goes for anyone who is found in critical condition and on the verge of death. If an engineer gets blasted by an emitter and goes in to hard crit, there's no need for paramedics. The engineers can just epi and drag their friend to med. If they die on the way it's no big deal, since they can just be defibbed back up. As is, everyone on the station has the tools to deal with the dead or dying, therefor nobody needs a paramedic with a stretcher bed and 30u of formaldehyde. This is why parameds often just help out in medical, and why there are lots of rounds where you just won't have any parameds, because it is just worse doctor at the moment.

3. Assassinations are Weird and Boring.
As controversial as round removal is, there are situations where it is called for. Unfortunately, if you ever need to take someone out, this basically necessitates either kidnapping, stealing the body, or hard round removal. Attempts have been made to fix this, with features such as prog traitors calling card, or heretic sacrifices doing whatever the fuck heretic sacrifices do now. These attempts (again my opinion) feel pretty awkward and mechanical. Where before assassinations could be attempted however you wanted, it now has to be in a way that leaves a calling card. However the same issue still existed for the old version. Any assassination attempt also required following up with the body, but instead of planting a calling card you had to hide/destroy it. All of these attempts fail to address the primary reason murder objectives necessitate strategies like this, which is because of the ease of revives. Any kill that doesn't involve stealing the body is liable to be nullified by medical reviving the target. Overall it discourages unoptimal gameplay by making anything that isn't sleepy pen into shuttlegib way riskier, as all of your hard work can be undone by anyone with a defib.

4. Midround Roles and Ghost Spawners are Discouraged.
It isn't uncommon for off station ghost spawners in a round to go completely unused, even if there are plenty of ghosts online. Same goes for on station ghost roles like positronic brains, minebots, pAI's etc, or even some antag stuff like cult shades or certain midrounds. It would be disingenuous to say that the actual roles don't have anything to do with this. I for one wouldn't be caught dead accepting a slime ghost spawn, mainly because it's boring as fuck. However, I think a lot of players opt out of ghost spawns due to the possibility of being revived. Unless the spawn is something really rare or fun, like a blob revenant or space ninja, most players would prefer being a normal crew member. Therefore if there is any chance of revival, however slim, some players will wait for 30+ minutes as their corpse decays in maintenance somewhere. Instead of re-entering the round or even just closing the game and doing something else, players will just float around as a ghost, occasionally jumping back into their body to check if its been found yet.

5. Organ Decay Sucks.
I don't think it's really a hot take to say that organ decay is unfun. Nothing feels worse than having a pile of corpses with nonfunctioning organs that you somehow need to get walking again. Printing a full set of mechanical organs is very expensive, and unless you've been on the organ farming grindset, you wont have enough squishy organs to meet demands. It's also time consuming as fuck to revive someone with a chest cavity full of sludge. Not to mention brain traumas which require even more surgery to get rid off. Organ decay also is a big reason why operating tables almost never get used, since decay is such a pain to deal with. With the way organ decay works now, it feels intentionally designed to discourage revives after long periods of time, and push doctors towards treating the more recently deceased or injured. However, by having these corpses be revivable at all, people are going to try, and it results in no fun for everyone involved.

The Solution:

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So with all the listed problems with the standard defib revive listed above, what's the solution? I personally believe that a five minute timer on death would fix many of the issues with the current system. Ideally the system would work as follows:

• On death, a timer starts. While not directly visible, this timer can be observed by examining the corpse, giving different messages depending on how much time has elapsed, letting responders know how quickly to act.
• This timer would be connected to the brain. If you were to take a brain out of a dead body the timer still counts down until the brain is either revived in a body or put in an MMI.
• The timer would reset on revival, and there would be no penalties for repeated revives. This is mainly to not punish medical players for accidently letting a corpse die on them mid treatment, but also to allow greater flexibility with mechanics surrounding brain removal and death.
• If the timer reaches zero, total brain death occurs and the patient is lost. After this point both traditional revives and MMIs will not work.
  • Revival may still be possible through methods like pod cloning. For balance purposes other methods may be added, but these would have to either be difficult to achieve and limited in quantity, therefor it is only used on important crew members like heads of staff, or those with valuable information.
• Stasis beds would not pause the timer, and if the timer reaches zero brain death will still occur, even in a stasis bed.
  • To be honest I'm not entirely sure about this point. I think it has interesting gameplay implications if it stays unpaused, but I'd be open to hear arguments otherwise.
• Formaldehyde may be used to extend, but not permanently delay the timer. While the brain is in a body with formaldehyde in its system, the timer will tick down at half speed, giving a maximum of 10 minutes dead.

The above points are what I think would be the essential features to make a system like this work, although these would likely be subject to change with discussion. But why should any of this be implemented at all?

The Pros:

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1. Death has Impact.
With the timer system, someone dying is no longer a "deal with it whenever" situation, but instead a "oh shit we have to do something fast" situation. To save someone who has died requires immediate action. The moment they deathrattle the clock is ticking, and you have five minutes to get their ass to medical and get them breathing. This would lead to all sorts of interesting gameplay situations. For example if there is no time to get to medical the revival surgery may be attempted using ghetto tools and a stun baton. There's no reason to use that with the current revival system, but with a time limit those split second decisions may be life or death.

2. Paramedics are Actually Useful!
You've got a corpse that needs to get to medical fast? Does all hope of revival seem lost? Do not despair humble crewmember! A knight in shining navy blue is on their way with a syringe full of formaldehyde and a stretcher bed for maximum speed! With the timer system, every second sent transporting the body is important. If it takes 90 seconds to get to medical, that leaves only 210 seconds to revive the patient. This is the area in which the paramedic would shine. By immediately applying formaldehyde on the scene they can extend the timer, and then get the corpse to medial significantly faster using the stretcher. This could give medical up to 9 whole minutes of revival time. Paramedic would go from a niche job completely overshadowed by the medical doctor, to an essential member of the department with significant and noticeable impact

3. Keeping Patients Alive becomes a Priority.
It's uncommon to see a doctor healing brute/burn damage on a dead patient in a stasis bed. I don't know if it bothers anyone else, but it always feels weird to be fixing cuts and bruises on a patient in cardiac arrest. This change will add a new layer of gameplay to treating patients, as you actively need to keep them alive while treating them. If a burned to death husk roles into medical, the number one priority is to treat as much burn damage as quickly as possible, and normal tend wounds surgery might not be fast enough. Suddenly surgeries that deal damage, such as brain surgery, are a risk, since the patient dying mid operation would complicate things. This is all reliant on the stasis bed not pausing the revive timer, which is why I think the pros outweigh the cons in that area. Surgeries have always had a chance to fail, but before it was just a waste of time. Now a surgery failing can be a huge deal. For example, coronary bypass surgery has a 90% chance to fail when attempted, and you can't defib with a nonfunctioning heart. With this system you can permanently lose a patient after botching an open heart surgery. That's some medical drama shit, and would be rad to see more on the station.

4. Funny Murder Methods are Viable.
Before, any assassination that didn't hide or destroy the body was vulnerable to being undone. Now with the new system anything that keeps the target down for five minutes is just as effective. Poison, bombs, hostile mobs, or whatever you can think of can work, as long as it keeps the target down for at least five minutes. This opens up way more options for interesting stories to be created. This obviously won't magically end the time honored tradition of desword and space, but it would encourage players to take more risks with their antag role, without having to worry about being outed by a revived target.

5. Ghostroles and Midrounds get Play .
With five minute timers, players will no longer feel obligated to stick around as a ghost, since the tiny chance they would have been revived is now gone. Players will either disconnect and go do something else for 30 minutes (the good ending), observe the round and hang out in dead chat, or actually take ghost roles. You might actually start to see roles like minebots or cult shades get picked, and ghost spawns that aren't ash lizard will see more consistent play. Babysitting a corpse hoping beyond hope your body is picked from the pile of 15 other players rotting in medical to be revived isn't fun, and by making revives impossible after a period of time, players will feel free to try other things while they wait for the next round.

6. No More Corpse Piles!
The bane of any medical doctor. A pile of corpses, all with severe organ decay, and waiting to be revived. Doctors often have to chose between treating the corpse pile, which is always a losing battle, or just treating newer patients. Usually newer patients take priority over old ones, and they just end up forgotten. So ultimately we would be better off making corpses unrevivable after some time. Finally doctors can just put max organ decay bodies in the morgue without feeling guilty, and actually treat patients who can be saved.

7. Alternative Revival Options.
With the defib requiring patients to be fixed up a bit before reviving, sometimes there may not be enough time to save them. This would mean that more doctors might opt to put unsaveble brains in MMIs and hand them off to robotics for borgification. Obviously being revived is preferable, but the time constraint will push players towards potentially suboptimal options, resulting in more varied gameplay, and typically more fun. Pod cloning would also become more popular, since now it actually has a use beyond corpses with no brains. Other limited or difficult to acquire revival methods could be added to provide more options for reviving important crewmembers. For example a one time brain revival shot, similar to the lazurus, that can be used to bring a dead brain back to life. Medical could even start with one or two of these in the CMO's office that are to be used at the CMO's discretion, with more being unlocked through tech or purchased through cargo. Overall by making traditional revives more difficult, this opens the door to weird and wacky alternatives in the future that may actually see play.

The Cons:

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Obviously this system would have its issue. Some of the most obvious are as follows.

1. Round Removal is Easier.
The big one. Probably the first thing some people thought when seeing the title. This would make round removal easier, and therefore mass grief and murderbone even more destructive. This obviously isn't great, however, i believe that it would not affect these rounds too much. When something really fucking bad happens and medical has twenty-something corpses lying around, do those typically get revived? In my experience no. Instead, usually the shuttle is called and everyone moves on to the next round. Regardless, with the new change just hiding a body will be the equivalent of round removal, which brings all sorts of consequences.

2. Admin Shit.
This is the most concerning point in my opinion. With a revival timer, death becomes far more risky, and round removal far more common. With that naturally comes ahelps and potential rule violations. If two players get in a fight, one dies, and the other isn't brought to med in time, is that round removal? People are going to be both accidently and purposefully round removing players by just denying treatment. Rulings around this will likely be messy for a while, but I think with time and precedent things would eventually level out.

3. Player Backlash.
People would be pissed if something like this got merged, no way around it. It would be another cloning situation as people declare it the death of /tg/. However, I honestly believe this, or something similar, would be an ultimately positive change. As mad as people were, now most agree that removing cloning was the right call. I think a decision like this would eventually reach a similar consensus also when has player backlash stopped coders before?

There would 100% be more problems with a system like this. But in my opinion these are the most immediate.

Conclusion:

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holy shit you're still reading this???

Do I think any of this is going to happen?
No

Do I think it should happen?
Yes, 100%

Medical and revives as a whole feel like they're in a weird place right now. To the patient death is often just an inconvenience, or at worst effective round removal with the smallest hope of revival. For medical doctors its just a time sink. No risk, no crunch, just waiting on progress bars and chem ticks. Overall I think these changes would both make death more impactful, and medical more engaging, while also generating more exciting and memorable stories.

TLDR:
Defib revives should only be possible within five minutes of death because:

• It makes death more impactful
• Makes the paramed useful
• Makes medical gameplay more engaging
• People don't have to hang out as a ghost, midrounds and ghost spawners get more play
• Makes alternatives like pod cloning and borging more viable
• No more corpse piles

And thus my insane ramblings come to an end. If you actually read all of this I'm sorry, but I don't regret it.

I don't understand the core motivation to push so hard for players NOT staying in the game. Death isn't really trivial as you're making it sound. You depend on the competency of the medbay staff currently present on station, as opposed to any player with any amount of playtime being taught to break into a room to push a button. That was trivial death, what we have now is a relatively good compromise between risk and the fact this is still a silly, social game. Keeping most people around usually ends up as a net positive. What do you gain when the MD fails to revive by 5 seconds that poor assistant that just wanted to redecorate the bar and chill, but arrived to a spaced arrivals and had to end up in the morgue because medbay was busy to retrieve his body on time?

What does anyone gain by putting a threshold of auto-round removal? Aside from "making death less trivial" as some sort of statement, how does this affect the game in a positive light? Do you want less people to remain in the round that much?

It shouldn't take longer than 5 minutes to revive someone : )

maybe you should all just leave it the fuck alone holy shit

You've never actually played Medical, or experienced a competent Medbay, have you?

why cant you check modsuit bags without full disabling the suit

annoying on station

deadly in space/breached area/on plasmamen

fikou fix plzzzz