Nanotrasen Healthcare (RP heavy suggestion)

Aetherscald · September 12, 2015

See, everyone is treating this like i'm saying "Let's get rid of cloning because muh realism and shitters ruin the game."

I'm literally suggesting limiting who has access to cloning. A scientist would have access to cloning healthcare because they are IMPORTANT to Nanotrasen's goals. An engineer would have healthcare because their job is hazardous and needed to keep the platform, for which Nanotrasen's goals may continue to be explored, afloat. A Librarian is NOT important enough to be cloned because we all know why. This is a very simple idea i'm putting forth and it's being treated as straight up removal of a mechanic which I very much agree is integral to the overall game.

This suggestion is exemplifying the fact that there's no way in hell a corporation like Nanotrasen, which is set up as very corrupt and vicious, would give every assistant, every chef, every friggin botanist cloning and healthcare that lets them shuffle into this mortal coil time and time again.

This suggestion was made to appeal to the Heavy RP sensibilities of the Aurora server. And I feel like it'd never really be true heavy roleplay if some greyshirt climbs into disposals and comes back because everyone miraculously has the same healthcare plan.

Besides, respawn is a feature, so it's not like you're out for the whole round either. Just come back as some other character you made and go from there. It could serve to make things interesting if you're committed to the round, which if you're here for Heavy RP, you should be.

Most if not all civilian jobs should have no business being exposed to the instant death mechanics that permeate the game if they're doing their job and roleplaying within their parameters. Death will likely only be the cause of an antag for these individuals. If you're a Chaplain who wants to play hero and rescue someone from a hazardous environment or situation, then you knew the risks roleplaying that way.

GhostInSpace · September 13, 2015

I'm literally suggesting limiting who has access to cloning.

I have some concerns with this, and I'll outline them now:

This suggestion is exemplifying the fact that there's no way in hell a corporation like Nanotrasen, which is set up as very corrupt and vicious

Sorry to interject here, but...

First: I don't picture NanoTrasen as "corrupt and vicious." I would say that the Nanotrasen corporation is utterly and totally amoral, and driven largely by the goal of ensuring both the success of their various projects and a very high bottom-line profit at the end of every fiscal year. Of course, this profit-driven total amorality means that sometimes the decisions made by the company and N.T. Central Command may appear as heartless, vicious, and corrupt.

However: NanoTrasen is also the biggest and most powerful megacorporation in known space. In all of known space. On the galactic stage, even among highly advanced species like the Skrell, the corporation is literally peerless and dominates a number of different markets from plasma research and refinement to interstellar warpgate travel. Being a Terran company, they probably have public and private, hidden ties to the Sol Alliance and are likely a major contributor to Sol's Military-Industrial Complex. Unless there is another heretofore unknown private corporate entity being run somewhere else in the universe, NanoTrasen is (within the setting of the game and the server's setting) the biggest and the best.

Corporations that have succeeded in achieving huge amounts of wealth, influence, and power— And I am talking about actually massive corporations and real power, not Walmart building big box stores in small towns and forcing out mom and pop toolshops and grocery stores, but the kind of really powerful corporations that can exert influence on a global scale, are actually wildly successful and typically offer very appealing jobs due to the benefits that they offer their employees. Health care benefits are typically one of the things that they offer their employees.

Corporations value loyalty and service. In real life, every corporation I've worked for (and actually in every job I've worked for) the general rule has been this: after you have contributed X amount of service hours, you are entitled to X benefits regardless of your position within the company. Corporations want to ensure that their employees are productive. A happy employee is a productive employee. For employees to be happy, corporations will typically offer anything that is realistically feasible to ensure a safe and fun working environment, and to eliminate stresses in an employee's personal life. There is little a corporation can offer an employee in regards to their personal life besides:

a) Paying them money so that they can maintain a comfortable standard of living

and

b) Ensure that they are always in good health, and have access to good healthcare providers in the event that their health fails for any reason.

You have the same healthcare plan as your coworkers, and your supervisors, and your supervisor's supervisors, and their coworkers, presumably all the way up to the company's CEO. It will probably cover things like dental, eye care, mechanical prosthesis repairs and maintenance and, in the event of a work-related accident, access to treatment for serious life threatening injuries— and, in 2457, where cloning is a relatively easy process to perform if you're a trained geneticist, a guarantee that you will be cloned by the corporation if you die on the job.

This plan will probably not cover things like Rejuvanate treatments to ensure you are beautiful and young throughout your whole life, or cover the surgery to transplant your brain into a Tajaran IPC shell simply because you feel more like a Tajaran than a Terran, nor will your health care plan provide access to cloning facilities if you are say for example murdered in a dispute over space drugs in a bar on Mendell City, or shot in the head by an Unathi thug hulking out on Hyperzine while you're getting credits from an ATM. If your character has access to these sorts of things, you probably have a very well-paid, highly successful character who has access to private healthcare options not offered to all employees as part of their employment contract.

A final note on the fictional NanoTrasen healthcare plan: the medical facilities on station are in fact NanoTrasen owned and operated. There is no reason that they would not offer on-site cloning services to all employees in the event of any workplace death.

Now, you were saying something about death... Right!

would give every assistant, every chef, every friggin botanist cloning and healthcare that lets them shuffle into this mortal coil time and time again.

You're implying here that every chef, botanist, assistant, medical doctor, surgeon, scientist, lab assistant, nursing intern, librarian, etc, routinely faces and encounters death on a regular round to round basis. This is actually not the case, and from an IC perspective character death should always be a very serious concern for your character, because when your character is actually facing death the last thing on their mind should be "Oh well, they'll just clone me later so it's all good." If your character is in a life or death situation, they should probably be thinking "OMFG I DONT WANT TO DIE." and if your thoughts are otherwise you're probably not taking the situation or your character very seriously.

This suggestion was made to appeal to the Heavy RP sensibilities of the Aurora server. And I feel like it'd never really be true heavy roleplay if some greyshirt climbs into disposals and comes back because everyone miraculously has the same healthcare plan.

Aurora is a Heavy RP server. The server actually has a very clear rule which I'll reference now:

Try to perform your job to a satisfactory standard ... (NT would probably not hire your character if they were completely unable to do their job).

What this means to me is that if your character is habitually climbing or "falling" into disposal units, you are probably playing a character that is too incompetent to have succeeded in getting themselves a job with the biggest and most powerful and most successful corporation in the whole known galaxy, regardless of whether you're a greyshirt, a security cadet, a geneticist or the C.E. (all examples of people I've seen end up in the disposals IC).

Note: I am going to point out that it is impossible to "accidentally" fall into a disposal unit. The game specifies when you interact with one that your character is attempting to climb into the disposal unit. The action that you, the player, have to perform is a click and drag from yourself to the disposal. It is always intentional and never an accident, and therefore if you end up in disposals while I'm working Cargo Bay, don't be surprised if my character "accidentally" (totally intentionally) mass drives your character's dumb ass into space. Now, that is called being vicious and corrupt.

What I am trying to say in regards to this disposals business is this: Players who routinely are having their characters climb into a mechanical apparatus designed for transporting garbage and other material around the station, players (and characters) who are fully aware that climbing into a disposal unit will have their character violently ground up by the workings of said machine, are either playing psychotic or insane characters, which is against the rules, or they are playing incompetent characters not performing their job to a satisfactory standard, characters that probably would've been fired a long time ago or, more likely, wouldn't have even been hired.

Either way, it's not Heavy RPing at all.

Besides, respawn is a feature, so it's not like you're out for the whole round either. Just come back as some other character you made and go from there. It could serve to make things interesting if you're committed to the round, which if you're here for Heavy RP, you should be.

There's a difference to being committed to the round and being committed to your character's involvement in the round. Different characters have different jobs, skillsets, and relationships. It is easy enough to say "just jump back into the round as a new character and join in again!" but often not as easy in execution. Plus, if you are respawning into a round with a new character that character should have no knowledge of what's going on on station before they arrived— even though you, as a player, clearly would —so you would have to tread particularly carefully to avoid metagaming and using knowledge of the situation outside what your character would have. Additionally, this may not even always be feasible if you are waiting thirty minutes for a respawn and the round is already two hours in and people are calling for a crew transfer vote.

Most if not all civilian jobs should have no business being exposed to the instant death mechanics that permeate the game if they're doing their job and roleplaying within their parameters. Death will likely only be the cause of an antag for these individuals. If you're a Chaplain who wants to play hero and rescue someone from a hazardous environment or situation, then you knew the risks roleplaying that way.

Well, as I understand it, the Chaplain role actually has a pretty crucial part to play in certain round types like Cult and Vampire, so having them be able to be permanently removed from the round could give OOC advantages to antags and open the door for all kinds of dumb shit. But that's an OOC perspective on game mechanics. Not really pertinent.

As I said before, employees in the civilian sector are not exposed to death as frequently as other departments but in some circumstances and situations they do end up getting killed or dying, and it isn't always because they are throwing themselves in harm's way. Cutting out cloning for the civilian sector only serves to remove RP potential for both characters in the civilian sector and the medics that handle cloning, which is why I think it's a bad idea.

As it stands though, any good Geneticist will know to prioritize cloning of certain individuals over other individuals based on rank and importance to the events at hand. Is the station undergoing an engineering emergency? A good geneticist should know to clone the dead Engineer before the dead Assistant or the dead Warden or the dead Chef.

If any limitation is going to be placed on cloning in game due to certain characters / jobs being "more important" than others, it should be limited ONLY to the Chiefs of Staff: Captain, Head of Personnel, Research Director, Chief Engineer, Chief Medical Officer and the Head of Security, and nobody else.

Out of curiosity, is this suggestion a thinly veiled attempt to get the server to discuss permanent character death as a rule?

GhostInSpace · September 13, 2015

I'm literally suggesting limiting who has access to cloning.

I have some concerns with this, and I'll outline them now:

This suggestion is exemplifying the fact that there's no way in hell a corporation like Nanotrasen, which is set up as very corrupt and vicious

Sorry to interject here, but...

First: I don't picture NanoTrasen as "corrupt and vicious." I would say that the Nanotrasen corporation is utterly and totally amoral, and driven largely by the goal of ensuring both the success of their various projects and a very high bottom-line profit at the end of every fiscal year. Of course, this profit-driven total amorality means that sometimes the decisions made by the company and N.T. Central Command may appear as heartless, vicious, and corrupt.

However: NanoTrasen is also the biggest and most powerful megacorporation in known space. In all of known space. On the galactic stage, even among highly advanced species like the Skrell, the corporation is literally peerless and dominates a number of different markets from plasma research and refinement to interstellar warpgate travel. Being a Terran company, they probably have public and private, hidden ties to the Sol Alliance and are likely a major contributor to Sol's Military-Industrial Complex. Unless there is another heretofore unknown private corporate entity being run somewhere else in the universe, NanoTrasen is (within the setting of the game and the server's setting) the biggest and the best.

Corporations that have succeeded in achieving huge amounts of wealth, influence, and power— And I am talking about actually massive corporations and real power, not Walmart building big box stores in small towns and forcing out mom and pop toolshops and grocery stores, but the kind of really powerful corporations that can exert influence on a global scale, are actually wildly successful and typically offer very appealing jobs due to the benefits that they offer their employees. Health care benefits are typically one of the things that they offer their employees.

Corporations value loyalty and service. In real life, every corporation I've worked for (and actually in every job I've worked for) the general rule has been this: after you have contributed X amount of service hours, you are entitled to X benefits regardless of your position within the company. Corporations want to ensure that their employees are productive. A happy employee is a productive employee. For employees to be happy, corporations will typically offer anything that is realistically feasible to ensure a safe and fun working environment, and to eliminate stresses in an employee's personal life. There is little a corporation can offer an employee in regards to their personal life besides:

a) Paying them money so that they can maintain a comfortable standard of living

and

b) Ensure that they are always in good health, and have access to good healthcare providers in the event that their health fails for any reason.

You have the same healthcare plan as your coworkers, and your supervisors, and your supervisor's supervisors, and their coworkers, presumably all the way up to the company's CEO. It will probably cover things like dental, eye care, mechanical prosthesis repairs and maintenance and, in the event of a work-related accident, access to treatment for serious life threatening injuries— and, in 2457, where cloning is a relatively easy process to perform if you're a trained geneticist, a guarantee that you will be cloned by the corporation if you die on the job.

This plan will probably not cover things like Rejuvanate treatments to ensure you are beautiful and young throughout your whole life, or cover the surgery to transplant your brain into a Tajaran IPC shell simply because you feel more like a Tajaran than a Terran, nor will your health care plan provide access to cloning facilities if you are say for example murdered in a dispute over space drugs in a bar on Mendell City, or shot in the head by an Unathi thug hulking out on Hyperzine while you're getting credits from an ATM. If your character has access to these sorts of things, you probably have a very well-paid, highly successful character who has access to private healthcare options not offered to all employees as part of their employment contract.

A final note on the fictional NanoTrasen healthcare plan: the medical facilities on station are in fact NanoTrasen owned and operated. There is no reason that they would not offer on-site cloning services to all employees in the event of any workplace death.

Now, you were saying something about death... Right!

would give every assistant, every chef, every friggin botanist cloning and healthcare that lets them shuffle into this mortal coil time and time again.

You're implying here that every chef, botanist, assistant, medical doctor, surgeon, scientist, lab assistant, nursing intern, librarian, etc, routinely faces and encounters death on a regular round to round basis. This is actually not the case, and from an IC perspective character death should always be a very serious concern for your character, because when your character is actually facing death the last thing on their mind should be "Oh well, they'll just clone me later so it's all good." If your character is in a life or death situation, they should probably be thinking "OMFG I DONT WANT TO DIE." and if your thoughts are otherwise you're probably not taking the situation or your character very seriously.

This suggestion was made to appeal to the Heavy RP sensibilities of the Aurora server. And I feel like it'd never really be true heavy roleplay if some greyshirt climbs into disposals and comes back because everyone miraculously has the same healthcare plan.

Aurora is a Heavy RP server. The server actually has a very clear rule which I'll reference now:

Try to perform your job to a satisfactory standard ... (NT would probably not hire your character if they were completely unable to do their job).

What this means to me is that if your character is habitually climbing or "falling" into disposal units, you are probably playing a character that is too incompetent to have succeeded in getting themselves a job with the biggest and most powerful and most successful corporation in the whole known galaxy, regardless of whether you're a greyshirt, a security cadet, a geneticist or the C.E. (all examples of people I've seen end up in the disposals IC).

Note: I am going to point out that it is impossible to "accidentally" fall into a disposal unit. The game specifies when you interact with one that your character is attempting to climb into the disposal unit. The action that you, the player, have to perform is a click and drag from yourself to the disposal. It is always intentional and never an accident, and therefore if you end up in disposals while I'm working Cargo Bay, don't be surprised if my character "accidentally" (totally intentionally) mass drives your character's dumb ass into space. Now, that is called being vicious and corrupt.

What I am trying to say in regards to this disposals business is this: Players who routinely are having their characters climb into a mechanical apparatus designed for transporting garbage and other material around the station, players (and characters) who are fully aware that climbing into a disposal unit will have their character violently ground up by the workings of said machine, are either playing psychotic or insane characters, which is against the rules, or they are playing incompetent characters not performing their job to a satisfactory standard, characters that probably would've been fired a long time ago or, more likely, wouldn't have even been hired.

Either way, it's not Heavy RPing at all.

Besides, respawn is a feature, so it's not like you're out for the whole round either. Just come back as some other character you made and go from there. It could serve to make things interesting if you're committed to the round, which if you're here for Heavy RP, you should be.

There's a difference to being committed to the round and being committed to your character's involvement in the round. Different characters have different jobs, skillsets, and relationships. It is easy enough to say "just jump back into the round as a new character and join in again!" but often not as easy in execution. Plus, if you are respawning into a round with a new character that character should have no knowledge of what's going on on station before they arrived— even though you, as a player, clearly would —so you would have to tread particularly carefully to avoid metagaming and using knowledge of the situation outside what your character would have. Additionally, this may not even always be feasible if you are waiting thirty minutes for a respawn and the round is already two hours in and people are calling for a crew transfer vote.

Most if not all civilian jobs should have no business being exposed to the instant death mechanics that permeate the game if they're doing their job and roleplaying within their parameters. Death will likely only be the cause of an antag for these individuals. If you're a Chaplain who wants to play hero and rescue someone from a hazardous environment or situation, then you knew the risks roleplaying that way.

Well, as I understand it, the Chaplain role actually has a pretty crucial part to play in certain round types like Cult and Vampire, so having them be able to be permanently removed from the round could give OOC advantages to antags and open the door for all kinds of dumb shit. But that's an OOC perspective on game mechanics. Not really pertinent.

As I said before, employees in the civilian sector are not exposed to death as frequently as other departments but in some circumstances and situations they do end up getting killed or dying, and it isn't always because they are throwing themselves in harm's way. Cutting out cloning for the civilian sector only serves to remove RP potential for both characters in the civilian sector and the medics that handle cloning, which is why I think it's a bad idea.

As it stands though, any good Geneticist will know to prioritize cloning of certain individuals over other individuals based on rank and importance to the events at hand. Is the station undergoing an engineering emergency? A good geneticist should know to clone the dead Engineer before the dead Assistant or the dead Warden or the dead Chef.

If any limitation is going to be placed on cloning in game due to certain characters / jobs being "more important" than others, it should be limited ONLY to the Chiefs of Staff: Captain, Head of Personnel, Research Director, Chief Engineer, Chief Medical Officer and the Head of Security, and nobody else.

Out of curiosity, is this suggestion a thinly veiled attempt to get the server to discuss permanent character death as a rule?

Aetherscald · September 13, 2015

I'm dogshit with proper forum interface and don't really know how to quote and counter argue specific points, but each counter point I make is top to bottom and responds paragraph to paragraph for you Ghost.

Don't be sorry at all, while I don't find it fun to argue about videogames, I understand that people have their own opinions and viewpoints regarding the mechanics and delivery of said games that differ from others, particularly games that have constantly changing mechanics like SS13.

Regarding Nanotrasen's ideals, this excerpt I read from the Baystation12 wiki was interpreted by me as Nanotrasen being corrupt and vicious, etc, etc.

"NanoTrasen is characterized by its aggression and questionable ethics, which, combined with the high emphasis they put on new, untested and dangerous technology, means their installations are often considered unsafe and hazardous. "

As well as: "NanoTrasen was effective at patenting methods that lead to more cost effective coverage plans for business use, primarily through aggressive business tactics than personal research brilliance- Many minor bio/med research facilities ended up on the unpleasant end of Xavier Trasen's desire to make a name for himself and sharklike approach, and were bought out and taken apart for his company's capitalization. By the end of the decade, NanoTrasen became a trans-stellar entity. "

This came off to me as a corporation that takes shortcuts regarding the health of its employees, but i'll relent my viewpoint seeing how it's really ambiguous when it comes to how shitty or good Nanotrasen actually is.

Regarding civilian employees and their implied "dying all the time" that was really meant as rhetoric. I agree that they shouldn't be dying at every turn.

The disposals thing is also rhetoric and was just used as an anecdote for actual workplace mishaps. I don't actually expect the disposals thing to come up that often, nor do I utilize them as a form of transport (except for that first and last time when I didn't know it'd kill me)

Sorry to make you focus a large part of your words on that bit.

I agree with the character committing point, though I would argue that a briefing mechanic be introduced to players who arrive late in the round. Things like "This shift has seen 4 deaths, and 2 breaches,etc." or a rule that allows a player to respawn with some intrinsic knowledge of what has occurred so far that might reach ears outside the station. But I also agree that it isn't feasible at all times, so i'll just drop this part of the argument altogether.

Chaplain was the wrong anecdotal device for this example. I should've said botanist or librarian or literally anyone else who doesn't serve a situationally important role.

This suggestion is not that because I have no interest in actual permadeath. As I stated in my other post, cloning is a mechanic I wholeheartedly support and believe is integral to the game, I would simply like to see realistic restrictions in place for it.

Aetherscald · September 13, 2015