Revert Cloning, Remove Traumas [1 Dismissal]

[zyymurgy]

I'd heard people complaining that cloning had been rendered essentially obsolete, mainly by @Rosetango and I wanted to look into this myself before complaining.

My past round I asked to be cloned after dying. I soon realized my mistake.

It is not fun to lie around for a literal hour while the medbay tries to desperately figure out wtf is wrong with you, passing in and out of consciousness, seeing them in LOOC go "okay I'm going to try this. no? okay I'm going to try this. no? i have one last thing I could do. I have no idea what's wrong with you. This guide is useless. I don't know how to help you." And then to be operated on, and for them to still have no clue what's wrong.

I would have ghosted out and let my corpse stay dead if I had known that cloning had been, essentially, made so impossible to accomplish that it's essentially been removed from the game as either a viable mechanic or something that anyone in their right mind would want to roleplay. I had thought "maybe people are being dramatic" but no -- I realized quickly that it's just as bad as people are saying.

Multiple people have said that cloning is so inconvenient and un-fun that they just avoid it, and it seems like the essential position in medical now is "just don't clone".

If you want to remove a mechanic from the game, remove it. Please don't just nerf it to the point where nobody wants to deal with it.

So my request is either:
1) Revert cloning back to its normal state
2) Remove cloning completely
3) Adjust "traumas" so that they don't essentially remove someone from a round, rendering being cloned pointless

Edited January 22, 2019 by LordFowl

[wowzewow]

just revert it back. make psychologist an RP job again.

here's an analogy

imagine if all the vending machines got removed, and the only food you could get from the chef

but the chef isn't playing, and now you're walking around hungry and angry

you yell, "why isn't anyone playing chef?"

and then they respond "because when people aren't hungry, they don't RP with me"

now replace psychologist with chef, and food with removing mental traumas and you probably can see my point

both of them serve as RP jobs. the point of them is to make the mechanics better. it's a lot like whipped cream on ice cream.

but if you make them an integral part of the dish, like "oh no, i dont have whipped cream, therefore i can't eat the fucking ice cream" then problems happen.

+1.

[driecg36]

As much as I like traumas, and I want there to be serious consequences to death, I really do agree with the underlying motive of this post - being the victim of traumas is not fun.

I'd prefer to not remove the system entirely however, though. I'd like it if it was streamlined, better explained, and some of the more obnoxious traumas (IE narcolepsy) were removed. As it stands, traumas are probably the most complicated medical system and have the least amount of proper documentation on the wiki, which is a big issue. There are so many complicated chems and treatments that each treat a billion different things except what they have, and it always results in just brute forcing it with as many treatments you can get.

Definitely tone down the amount of different chems needed, remove some of the extraneous treatments like brain surgery and hypnosis, and remove narcolepsy.

Edited January 20, 2019 by driecg36

[Resilynn]

let me tell you about narcolepsy. Narcolepsy is not treatable by any medications. Narcolepsy removes someone from the round, knocking them unconscious at random, usually once or twice per minute. They can’t see most of the game, they can’t interact reliably with anyone. Especially if literally anything else is going on in round, very few people can devote all the time it takes to wake up this sleeping person when people are dying around them. You have every IC reason to shove the peacefully sleeping man into a corner while you tend to the critical condition security officers in front of you. And you have every OOC reason to rush to cure the narcolepsy, because it’s worse than death- no respawn, no d say, nothing to do at all. And you might get LOOC yelled at or, worse, handed an IR for neglecting a patient. 

So your immersion is broken while you run off to treat narcolepsy the first second you have without leaving anyone to die. You struggle to figure it out- the wiki is confusing and many traumas look like other traumas to people who haven’t seen them before (which pushes the new players away from the role).

 Now. Unless you are a cmo or psychiatrist, you do not have access to the tool you need to fix the trauma (hypnosis).  If you’re a doctor you have no reason to know how to use this tool. If you’re a cmo you barely have a reason to know how to use this tool. So again, you’re asked to meta game to cure it to avoid taking them out of the game, or to risk an IR.  But whatever, narcolepsy is okay, if you have a psychiatrist.

Except remember, new players don’t play psychiatrist, it’s a HARD job with a lot of pressure and a lot of scrutiny. Those who do end up looking like idiots. So, your average joe player looking for a new job is discouraged from playing, psychiatrist is a role for baldies. And your devoted, psych main characters, not that any are left, well, they’re put in a situation where the rp they joined the role for comes secondary to the quick mechanical mending, with all its guesswork, of repairing whoever was just cloned. Sometimes you don’t have the means to fix that trauma as a psychiatrist (blindness), and you end up paired with someone who doesn’t want to be there and is desperately hoping you can do what they absolutely perceive as your job (but it would be meta to be able to do surgery).

So no one plays the role. So you don’t have a psychiatrist. There are none left. You’re just stuck all round with some fucking guy with narcolepsy yelling at you in LOOC.

[Azande]

NO. As a psych player, I quite love traumas and the mechanics they add to the role.

[wowzewow]

6 minutes ago, Azande said:

NO. As a psych player, I quite love traumas and the mechanics they add to the role.

unfortunately it's a very delicate balance

if traumas are too hard to cure and annoying, then the entirety of medical and the patients are pissed off

if traumas are easier to cure and are less annoying, then only the psychs are mad

 

Edited January 20, 2019 by wowzewow

[Lady Fowl]

Make a list of trauma's that are disliked or generaly a annoyance to gameplay and I can take a look at them

[furrycactus]

I'm begging you, remove traumas and revert cloning to what it was. Failing that, just entirely fucking delete cloning and traumas both. They're fucking awful. I've never played with such an awful mechanic before. Not to mention the fact they bug out sometimes; treatments not working like they're meant to or some just not being curable at all. The information on the wiki about them is absolutely pitiful as well, and offers very little help to players, it only offers their names and how to cure them (which is also conflicting evidence between the Psychiatry, Chemistry, and Medicine pages). They're not fun to deal with as a doctor that can treat them, they're not fun to deal with as a doctor who can't, and they're especially fucking awful to deal with when you're the one suffering from them. Very few people like them. Please. God. Please.

[Chada1]

I really like Traumas, instead of being removed I'm supporting the notion of removing the most debilitating and leaving them in.

[DaTimeSmog]

I actually do enjoy Traumas as something that nerfs cloning, so that you actually need the crew members to deal with the traumas, Yes its annoying but so is the infinite crew member factory that can revive 10 people in a few minutes, ignoring the fact that you can upgrade the cloner as well.

I would also be supportive of removing cloning all together so people would be forced to actually play smart rather than throwing themselves into the antag.

[Sargentdsod]

Just remove one or both. I don't doubt that in concept traumas are very appealing, tantalizing features to breathe life into an otherwise overpowered mechanic or mechanically invalid role, but the execution is horrible and I have almost no expectation for them to be balanced. If it can be done then nice, fair enough but I have my doubts and at this point people are so balls to the walls willing to throw away their lives against antags that removing cloning seems appealing. Perhaps make like bay and throw down some defibs with some limitations.

[Dr. Farson]

Simply make it so that if a psychiatrist isn't on the manifest, you can't clone. As a psych, I don't think traumas should be removed, and a simple fix to it would be administering alkysine when the psych isn't online.

[Rosetango]

Cloning is not fun, and nobody gets cloned because of how difficult the traumas are to treat. Maybe they shouldn't be removed, but they shouldn't keep people out of the round. I once spent an hour in and out of consciousness after being cloned and by the time I got the proper treatment and was able to roleplay, the crew transfer was called. We have to think about what the code is capable of, versus what we'd like to see. We shouldn't punish the entire crew and player base for the few people who don't roleplay the trauma of being cloned properly.

In my experience, the traumas add nothing meaningful to roleplay. They are flavoring- except, the flavoring is now a critical and agonizing part of gameplay that nobody who plays medical even wants to handle. I cannot see how it's "fun" to treat traumas as a psychologist or psychiatrist, you're just forcing people to interact with you in an unpleasant manner. Most of the time the rounds are two hours or less, making it so that the actual quality of RP for each patient drops tremendously. I don't have an issue with traumas conceptually, I have an issue with how severe they are and how they take people out of the game permanently. 

A couple of solutions would be these (the ones bolded are the ones I agree with most):

• Remove traumas entirely.
• Remove the traumas that keep people from playing.
• Consider lack of or absence of roleplayed mental trauma or horror of being cloned or dying punishable, as it breaks these rules (preferably in combination with the above options):

Quote

You must maintain character at ALL TIMES. No suiciding to leave the round (ghost or use cryogenic storage), and no random grief at round end. Avoid chucklefucking. (Check the glossary for a definition.) Do not break the atmosphere of the game. Also known as "breaking immersion". For example, using slang terms for antagonists IC "traitor", "rev", "syndie", "wizard", "changeling", etc. Use of OOC game slang IC, "robust", "shitcurity", "emag", "esword". Understand the effects of Clone Memory Disorder. If your character has been cloned, they do not know they are a clone unless informed or they can figure it out on their own. Upon being cloned, your character cannot remember, at the very least, the last 15 minutes before their death. The other side-effects are up to player discretion, as long as well roleplayed out. Being informed of having your character cloned should generally be a traumatic experience for the character! Generally, avoid playing hero. There are certain opportunities every character can seize to overthrow an antagonist, but going rambo on syndicate ops as a frail, unarmed medical doctor constitutes a failure to roleplay and will likely end with you getting shot. Also, if you are unarmed, and being held at gunpoint, it is generally expected for you to comply with your captor, or risk suffering the consequences. Specifically concerning melee combat: knowing advanced close quarters combat moves requires legitimate training, having it as a hobby or some such for a character who then uses this knowledge to expertly dislocate limbs will not fly. Unless trained, you should restrict yourself to standard punches, kicks, shoving, and grabbing/throwing.

• Start the cloning machines upgraded, so that difficult traumas are minimized.

Why the hell have the option to rejoin the game as the character you joined to play in the first place if it's not even a real, viable option?

Edited January 21, 2019 by Rosetango

[Sytic]

There's many reasons Traumas are bad, let's do a lightning round. If someone wants to get M O R E    D I S C U S S I O N, I'll link the given bigthread that I constantly shittalked this update over below.

Prefacing this with: Not all Psychiatrists who do this (once upon a time, RP heavy) job do bad roleplay. Except, ever since the inclusion of the Traumas update, there's two major problems.

1: We justify the inclusion of absolutely terrible mechanics that do not fit the role or the environment. There's been much debate on this, but honestly, Hypnosis is how you fix Narcolepsy? Just saying that sounds bullshit.

2: By being necessary to interact with this equipment, the job is seen less as an RP role, and more as a occasionally necessary member of the Medical staff. By disentangling the role with the job description, you create a lot of unnecessarily odd scenarios. For example, why would you ever consider to see a Psychiatrist unless you had some inanely contrived reason, because in the lore of the universe YOUR CHARACTER lives in, you can sit in a magic chair and get your mental traumas resolved? Or hypnosis? Or goddamn Isolation? Yet, the Psychiatrist is at least believed to be still held up to the same roleplay standards as it was before, despite these gamey mechanics being attached to trite in-universe solutions.

"But Sytic, we need Traumas! If we don't have them, the state of the game in regards to Cloning will become unbalanced!"

Good question, we'll look at why that's stupid too:

1: IPC mains walk all over Cloning and Traumas anyways. Seriously, fix this shit.

2: Traumas don't just affect Cloning: They affect brain damage, are thus tied to oxyloss, and take effect IMMEDIATELY. This means that, with the right amount of brain damage, you can just instantly fall asleep. Or get paralyzed with fear. Or have actually debilitating issues that cause you to be unable to move. That's not exactly fun.

3: Brain Damage still exists, and is still a threat- or could become one. If you want to introduce a rather "gamey" mechanic, how about one that already exists and is much more of a "progressively degenerating mental state" mechanic than Traumas? Brain Damage is still a problem. Unable to interface with machines, gibbering, smashing your head into doors, etcetera. This could be made worse to suit the needs of "Give cloning a drawback."

4: The previous way to fix them was to always have a Surgeon. This isn't actually that bad. When the Surgeon handled these (and still does in fringe medical cases) the Surgeon would perform neurosurgery and fix the trauma through snips in your braincase. This doesn't break RP expectations if it's only stretching a Surgeon's capacity a little bit.

But what was the reason that Psychiatrists got handed all this? Why?

I'm glad you asked!

On 15/05/2018 at 18:05, Skull132 said:

[mention]Sytic[/mention] To answer your question. With traumas being mechanical in nature now, it does not make sense to keep Psychiatrist as a "purely RP" role. They need an ability to cure the traumas somehow, point one. Point two, the presence of these mechanics is not somehow subtracting from the roleplay of being a psychiatrist. It's simply giving a mechanical core to the role, around which you can do literally whatever type of roleplay you want.

This is why. The Psychiatrist needed an ability to cure Traumas, which, are already stupid for previously mentioned reasons. Except, as previously also discussed, it takes a sledgehammer to the in-universe roleplay of the role by adding these particularly game-y mechanics to the role. And thus, you'll rarely see an actually behaviourally accurate Psychiatrist, nor would you have a reason to actually see a Psychiatrist to talk out your problems when they have a literal magic chair.

I talk more about suggestions against this below, and other ways to introduce mechanics that could fit the role of being conductive to roleplay in the science fiction environment while retaining the game-y nature. It's here:

But, ah, what do the people who made the PR involved think? Should we judge their opinion as well and make sure to check? I'm glad you asked! Here was a PR relating to the update:

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/4888

Wow, it's almost like completely making a previously RP-heavy role necessary for the environment of sometimes low population stations due to now introduced hamfisted gamey mechanics that don't properly relate to the roleplay of the Science FIction environment causes problems! Who woulda thunked it.

Another thing. I was quite passionate about complaining about this update for quite some time, until it was revealed that a PR was constructed to try and fix the update in question, which made me stop:

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/4994

This, I love this, mostly because I was around for its initial inception into Fowl's insane mind of debauchery and h e l l .  Also, because it's a hell of a lot better for the Sci-Fi environment than magic Chakra chair. I decided to reply to this thread however, because it's been some time since anything about this update was mentioned, but I hold a brief hope it'll still be done.

Note: I don't think necessarily that Traumas are a bad concept. I just think they give more power to IPC meme robust men (like myself), have honestly piss-poor execution, were previously before this even easier to deal with, are much better dealt with using drugs, and finally are hamfisted in just such a way that they make no fucking sense whatsoever to a role that tries to provide some sense to a struggling mind.

In any case, if you want to read MORE of my rantings and relevant ravings on the update of Psychology and Psychiatry, go check out the thread linked above. Traumas bad, Psych bad, do fix, thanks Fowl the blessed Lord, he giveth, he taketh away again.

Edited January 21, 2019 by Sytic
Clarification, spelling error.

[LordFowl]

Re; the PR sytic linked, it is still on my to-do list, however I delayed it for sometime in order to make progress for map generation in the NBT, which now having done I intend to return to it (hence why I re-opened it). All I have to do so far is fix merge errors and test it.

Re; Cloning and brain traumas. Originally I intended brain traumas to result only from brain damage, and oxyloss would be the main source of brain damage. Traumas being more commonly associated with cloning is due to me misunderestimating the amount of brain damage cloning causes, hence why I supported Alberyk's PR that Sytic also linked.

I am, perhaps unsurprisingly, opposed to removing brain traumas, and do not think that cloning will ever be removed. I find any claims that brain traumas were designed as tactical nerf to cloning to be little more than an impolite joke, as if made by an unsuccessful street clown with a minor liquor problem. Voting for dismissal on these basiises.

[zyymurgy]

Last round I played, I got hit with a super special trauma that literally could not be cured, and removed me from the round with no ability to fix it no matter what the player helping me tried. I ahelped and the answer was "this sounds like a game mechanic, so I'm not healing you". So I'm bumping this with another, "please fix this". They had to kill me and clone me to remove it. It may have been a side effect of being enslaved by a Wizard, I don't know. Apparently I had 41 traumas.

I am begging you. I will pay money. Revert this. There is no reason for traumas to be THIS severe.

Edited January 25, 2019 by zyymurgy
left something out

[Resilynn]

On 21/01/2019 at 17:36, LordFowl said:

 I find any claims that brain traumas were designed as tactical nerf to cloning to be little more than an impolite joke, as if made by an unsuccessful street clown with a minor liquor problem. Voting for dismissal on these basiises.

Really?

Edited January 25, 2019 by Resilynn

[LordFowl]

Really.

[Resilynn]

If the developer who made the update tells us they've done this to slow the 'cloning factory', why are you insulting people who think the developer who made the update did so to prevent cloning?

[LordFowl]

I never said I did anything in order slow the clone factory, not even in that image of yours. In fact, I’ve explicitly said multiple times quite clearly (including just right up there above) that any impact on cloning was unintended. So when people persist in saying that traumas were a wilful tactical nuke to Saudi Clonia how can I do anything else but consider such a statement to be like the gaseous emissions of a lame and impotent donkey borne on a diet of potent (yet rich in protein and vitamins) beans?

[Scheveningen]

I will gladly accept $20 directly into my paypal to facilitate the removal of these traumas, given the topic of money for code contributions was mentioned. Free money for such a menial, pointless thing? Yes please! I definitely wish to be the receiving party of outright bribery to suit development agenda. Who cares about ethics when you got money, m8?

That hilarious thing to address aside, I've noticed that a majority of the criticisms against this system inherently stem from a lack of actual mechanical knowledge regarding how traumas work and how to comprehensively cure them.

This is perhaps due to the fact that literally no one in this thread plays or has played psychologist/psychiatrist since the trauma implementation, and only two people in this thread to my knowledge understand how the traumas work and how they manifest themselves, in addition to only two people here knowing how they are cured.

I highly recommend everyone who's participated in this thread so far to navigate through this directory linked here: https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/tree/33fb783d6b3b4190d3664e2125605666496a93a6/code/datums/brain_damage
and here: https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/blob/35ddde640274953f707849ceda2a773772e17655/code/game/objects/structures/therapy.dm

and give it a proper cursory look in trying to digest what content is included in the DM files. 

In all honesty, this is not at all that difficult to figure out, and I find it rather distasteful that one of our own medical regulars is opting to outright boycott the cloning of dead characters (read as: intentionally not try to bring people back into the round that were dead, despite how easy it is to die) because they don't have the patience to do the most basic parts of their occupation. It's a very weird example to the non-whitelisted medical players on top of that.

Traumas are really not that hard to figure out. I'm not going to spoonfeed any further here, but the methods in dealing with them are no different from any other step-by-step progress included in the game mechanics. Is it perhaps the fault of Fowl for not adding very exact spoonfeeding information in the in-game manuals that results in the community's ignorance? Maybe: but SS13 is still about discovery and learning. Never assume you have learned everything there is to offer in the game, and that you know all the best ways to do things. Chances are someone already knows better than you do and will immediately humble you with their knowledge. The point of SS13 is to learn something new after every round. So, why not go out of your way to learn how to deal with traumas, ey?

As many Dark Souls veterans have taught me in the past, "When in doubt, learn to get good", because that's the only actual advice that can be offered here. Y'all need to be the agents of your own change, and to be the examples you wish to see. Likewise, don't be the example you don't want to see.

Edited January 26, 2019 by Scheveningen

[GreenBoi]

Hmmmm. A nice post, with some good outlines of the problem but, there's one thing. Everything is specious.

 

As Schev said, traumas aren't really that hard to explain. We have a wikipage for it and once a non-psych main explained it to me when I was brainfarting and not re-reading the lines. I'm not turning this post into a guide because we already have a guide, on the wiki, and it's easily accessible from the Psychiatrist page too. Here's a basic rundown of the stuff you can do without a Psychiatrist: 99.8% of everything, 100% if you're a CMO and possess the skills/knowledge.

 

What do I mean by this? You have the Isolation Room. Not a hard concept to grasp, just get a person and plop them into the room, check after 5 minutes and they should be cured of the Split Personality or whatever. Any simpleton can yeet someone into a room and come back later to make sure they're not insane, it's not something only Psychiatrists can do. You just need the access to the room, which you can either ask the CMO to do, the AI, or a HoP, or a Captain, or an engineer approved by the CE when there's no HoP or Captain.

 

Speaking of access, there's another thing you can do. Chemistry. Chemistry stops a hell of a lot of these things. Just go into Guide to Chemistry, and ctrl+f "supresses" or the name of your symptomp and boom, there you go. The only thing only Psychs can do really is just Hypnosis and Crystal Therapy. Crystal Therapy requires precise knowledge of what all the gadgets and gizmos of the pod does, how to activate certain functions, and how to manipulate said functions.

Spoiler

Quick note, by the way. If a doctor uses Crystal Therapy and says you have Brain Abnormalities in the double-digits, don't fucking freak and yell "BUUUUUUUURGEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER" OR "FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWL!!!!" because, surprisingly, this is intended and is the norm. The number doesn't really matter, it's just a way to measure how long the session might last of asking the person what symptomps they feel and such.

And funfact, that dreaded Narcolepsy everyone hates...can be easily cured through Crystal Therapy. It's all on the wiki, guys: https://wiki.aurorastation.org/index.php?title=Psychologist#Mental_Trauma

[Resilynn]

4 hours ago, GreenBoi said:

Hmmmm. A nice post, with some good outlines of the problem but, there's one thing. Everything is specious.

 

As Schev said, traumas aren't really that hard to explain. We have a wikipage for it and once a non-psych main explained it to me when I was brainfarting and not re-reading the lines. I'm not turning this post into a guide because we already have a guide, on the wiki, and it's easily accessible from the Psychiatrist page too. Here's a basic rundown of the stuff you can do without a Psychiatrist: 99.8% of everything, 100% if you're a CMO and possess the skills/knowledge.

 

What do I mean by this? You have the Isolation Room. Not a hard concept to grasp, just get a person and plop them into the room, check after 5 minutes and they should be cured of the Split Personality or whatever. Any simpleton can yeet someone into a room and come back later to make sure they're not insane, it's not something only Psychiatrists can do. You just need the access to the room, which you can either ask the CMO to do, the AI, or a HoP, or a Captain, or an engineer approved by the CE when there's no HoP or Captain.

 

Speaking of access, there's another thing you can do. Chemistry. Chemistry stops a hell of a lot of these things. Just go into Guide to Chemistry, and ctrl+f "supresses" or the name of your symptomp and boom, there you go. The only thing only Psychs can do really is just Hypnosis and Crystal Therapy. Crystal Therapy requires precise knowledge of what all the gadgets and gizmos of the pod does, how to activate certain functions, and how to manipulate said functions.

  Reveal hidden contents

Quick note, by the way. If a doctor uses Crystal Therapy and says you have Brain Abnormalities in the double-digits, don't fucking freak and yell "BUUUUUUUURGEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER" OR "FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWL!!!!" because, surprisingly, this is intended and is the norm. The number doesn't really matter, it's just a way to measure how long the session might last of asking the person what symptomps they feel and such.

And funfact, that dreaded Narcolepsy everyone hates...can be easily cured through Crystal Therapy. It's all on the wiki, guys: https://wiki.aurorastation.org/index.php?title=Psychologist#Mental_Trauma

The wiki literally says only cured through hypnosis. 

[Arrow768]

To address a few things.

Monetizing PRs
We are running a purely non-profit community.
This also includes trying to post bounties for PRs or the removal of PRs.

While this position might change some day for feature PRs in the form of a bounty system, something like that will never happen for revert PRs.

At the current time, do not offer to pay money or try to accept money for a feature / revert PR.

Change Cloning to have no traumas
I do not want to argue if it was the intention of @LordFowl to nerf cloning with the brain trauma PR or if it was just a side effect.
Ultimately it does not matter.

I believe that the addition of brain traumas helped to bring a bit more of an impact to death in the game.
As its no longer as simple as "put patient into cloning. wait 2 minutes. put them into cryo. wait 1 minute. release them.", which was a common issue before.

As @LordFowl is working on further tweaks to the brain traumas and the interaction with cloning, I do not see a immediate need to change the way cloning works.

Edited January 26, 2019 by Arrow768
Fixed a missing not

[GreenBoi]

15 hours ago, Resilynn said:

The wiki literally says only cured through hypnosis. 

Oh, sorry then. Must've read the end to another sentence. My points for everything else still stand though.

Edited January 26, 2019 by GreenBoi
added extra tidbit