Undo virology changes

[tostah]

Virology is in a weird state. It's as if it was removed, but not fully removed.

Bring back virology the way it was. I don't believe there was anything wrong with it.

[Roadto3k]

There were more than one change over the last year, if you consider sentient disease remove, the job remove, and natural curing. Do you dislike all of these?

[bingusdingus]

I always thought more jobs should get the virology treatment. Merge genetics and robotics into science so anyone in that role can do them when they want/need to. Make coroner a generic medical job too. Departments like science already have a wide variety of disparate things to do that people can choose from. I don't get why a few select ones are gated behind certain titles, especially when it makes it hard to do that job when nobody is signed up and it's needed.

Alternatively, go the completely opposite direction, and have every department granularized into different jobs for maximum immersion. You could have great RP moments like "Sorry, we can't reattach your arm because the surgeon isn't here today".

[RedBaronFlyer]

ehhhhh I'm honestly fine with genetics and robotics being separate from regular sci, same with coroner being separate from medbay doctor. To me the first two are separate enough from the regular stuff of sci that you'd get guys who just want to do genetics being screamed at to do research or someone who wants to do TTV research being screamed at to upgrade the silicons and make the AI a shell. To me that would be like making chef, barkeep, and botanist the same job because they are all in the same department, are involved in a close job loop with eachother, and all roughly do the same thing if you squint hard enough.

Coroner is admittedly a bit of an RP job and is essentially just a sidegrade to medical doctors but it's fine imo, I don't see that much of an issue with it existing.

I somewhat understood why they didn't want virology sitting in their goon cave making "super covid anthrax spicy curry vomit commit fart blast flesh searing mega coof" for the tenth billionth time, but it did feel a bit like a protest PR since MSO blocked virology being removed wholesale. (something I feel super torn about, virology being removed, not MSO blocking it) I feel like I've seen way less diseases, both positive and negative, being made as a result of the virologist job being removed. I don't have the stats to prove it but it kind of feels like the only times virology is used now is if there's a randomly spawned disease.

[Imitates-The-Lizards]

If you ask me, the problem with virology wasn't even virology - it was Chemistry.

Every time megadeathaids came out and infected half the crew, they would rush to pharmacy, and the chemists sit around taking 18 years to make the cure, or, more like, 70% of the time in my subjective experience not making the cure at all.

Which is caused by Chemistry having high barriers to entry, due to the ph system and the impossibility of anyone memorizing 500000 recipes for chemicals, especially the higher tier ones used to cure diseases like anacea or whatever.

megadeathaids viruses made for good RP as it caused actual pandemic situations and allowed for bad actors to spread it intentionally, good actors to help cure, allowed people to isolate, really shook up the round, etc.

To be blunt, virology died for chemistry's sins, and the coders took the easy way out of the issue by soft-removing virology instead of fixing the issue of people not knowing how to make the cures.

[RedBaronFlyer]

In my experience of megadeathaids at it's peak (or at least before sentient diseases were removed) in terms of gameplay was either sitting in the medbay lobby being gay baby jailed unable to even move because someone ran into your department coughing their head off (because the crew doesn't self isolate because they're dumb) or sitting alone by yourself in some room by yourself or with one or two other people for 15 minutes waiting out the infection, both of which suck for their own separate reasons. I can count the times I quarantined with someone else on a single hand that held a grenade with its pin pulled too long.

I have a love hate relationship with diseases because I like the concept but I hate it because it shuts the whole game down and leaves it to the few people who know how to do chemistry and disease stuff while everyone else just sits there and I find that boring as crap, even as someone who is perfectly fine with slower paced rounds. I feel like it actively discourages social interaction in a game that greatly benefits from the stuff the crew gets up to and therefore encourages you afking in a locker somewhere. It was to the point that some rounds I'd walk back to the janitorial closet, get up from my desk, and make tea or whatever.

[tostah]

There were more than one change over the last year, if you consider sentient disease remove, the job remove, and natural curing. Do you dislike all of these?

Specifically, the virology nerf where getting 6 symptoms (or even 5) is more difficult, or near impossible. Also, I would love for sentient disease to come back.

I've always loved virology. It sucks that good diseases got a pretty hard nerf.

IMO, the best way to combat virology, is virology. You can ALWAYS make a simple disease with a ton of resistance/transmission with symptoms that don't do anything, either overwriting the current pandemic or stopping others from getting infected.

[tostah]

I have a love hate relationship with diseases because I like the concept but I hate it because it shuts the whole game down and leaves it to the few people who know how to do chemistry and disease stuff while everyone else just sits there and I find that boring as crap, even as someone who is perfectly fine with slower paced rounds. I feel like it actively discourages social interaction in a game that greatly benefits from the stuff the crew gets up to and therefore encourages you afking in a locker somewhere. It was to the point that some rounds I'd walk back to the janitorial closet, get up from my desk, and make tea or whatever.

This is a really fair assessment. A good way around it is to provide the typical crew member a way of dealing with the disease or at least counteracting its symptoms.

Like, for example, spaceacillin and sleep could cure the disease temporarily. However, you can catch it again, so it's not cured fully until you get the cure from Medbay. I feel like this would encourage quarantine RP, as you aren't just at medbays mercy when you get infected.

[Jacquerel]

There's basically 0 chance of sentient disease coming back except in the form of "a different thing with the same name", it sucked and everyone knew it sucked. When polled it was our least popular antagonist by a significant margin both in terms of playing it and playing against it.

[RedBaronFlyer]

There's basically 0 chance of sentient disease coming back except in the form of "a different thing with the same name", it sucked and everyone knew it sucked. When polled it was our least popular antagonist by a significant margin both in terms of playing it and playing against it.

Do you happen to have the poll where I could see what antags were most and least popular to play as and against? I love looking at stuff like that.

I always felt horrid for those sentient diseases that either got instantly caught and cured (because a lot of people tend to head to medbay the moment they have a symptom) or they spawned on some dude who went SSD in a locker over in some godforsaken corner of tram maints.

[Jacquerel]

I was going to link to the polls but for some reason the pages don't include what the question was, just the results, so it's maybe easier to just link you to the poll archive:
https://tgstation13.org/tgdb/irvpolltally.php

The relevant one is "Which midround is your favourite to play <b>against</b>?" and "Which midround is your favourite to play as?" although they're both next to a roundstart poll you might also find interesting.
It turns out I remembered wrong and revenant was slightly less popular to play against, but much more popular to play as.