[1 Dismissal] Remove cloning, episode III

[Scheveningen]

Remove cloning.

 

• The guarantee of cloning for station-loyal individuals or roles cheapens the concept of risking your life because you can just be revived within 10 minutes. When death is cheap and fixable, surviving the round doesn't matter.
• A respawn timer of 30 minutes already exists to assist other people to back into the round as another character that they wish to play, in addition to the multitude of other minor responsibility roles such as drone, mouse or doona noomphs. The respawn timer can be kicked down to 20 minutes to compensate.
  
• Ramboing against someone using lethals will 9 times out of 10 lead to the death of the crewmember, not the antagonist being cheesed by stun mechanics.
  
• A lack of a revival option will allow antagonists to pursue assassination objectives with more confidence.

 

Antagonists abide by these accepted unsaid standards:

1.) If you die, you're done playing as that character without any other special circumstances.

2.) You are disposable. You living drives the story of the round, you dying also drives the story of the round in the same breath.

3.) If you wanted to live you should've made more of an invested attempt in staying alive by packing sustain to fix damage dealt to you in hazardous situations.

Why shouldn't non-antagonists? Why do crew get the exception?

[sonicgotnuked]

I agree 100% with all these points above. Cloning is something that came from lower RP.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

-1 this argument surfaces every now and then and every time it fails to properly justify how removing cloning would provide better roleplay. If you are an antagonist who does not wish to see your target cloned then you are able to sabotage the cloning bay, or decapitate the target. There are many ways to render a target unclonable which are very easy. Interestingly, administration gets upset with you if you render your target unclonable and antags are more often than not expected to leave a body in such a state that it can be cloned so the player can resume playing.

Permanent death is not going to improve roleplay and give people more pause and tactical thought. It will just make people unable to continue playing a round as the character they want to play. We are in an inherently deadly location and already many people are dying from falling into disposals, suffering decompression, falling down a hole, or getting a nasty infection or virus.

The logical extreme of this suggestion is that when a character dies their character slot itself should be permanently deleted, and that this would make people more thoughtful before throwing themselves into dangerous situations. This suggestion similarly fails to realize that dangerous situations more than often come to the character, not the other way around.

[keinto]

+1 again. We have never tried a round without cloning, so no one really knows how it would affect the way people take care of themselves in the long term.

Moreover, cloning in its current form doesn't justify its use on a research station. Until the cloning procedure requires medical to remove the brain of the original body to be put in the new one, clones should not be allowed to return to work due to the many ethical issues and mental breakdowns we have had in the past-i.e having to hide the truth from the clone, or the depression that follows after the patient has been informed of their death following the change in policy.

[Scheveningen]

-1 this argument surfaces every now and then and every time it fails to properly justify how removing cloning would provide better roleplay. If you are an antagonist who does not wish to see your target cloned then you are able to sabotage the cloning bay, or decapitate the target. There are many ways to render a target unclonable which are very easy. Interestingly, administration gets upset with you if you render your target unclonable and antags are more often than not expected to leave a body in such a state that it can be cloned so the player can resume playing.

 

Is it not important to keep design philosophy and enforcement of roleplay guidelines consistent with one another? If anyone can be able to be killed in any method possible without having to worry about them returning in the round later and thus making your attempt at assassinating them without sabotaging the station or cutting their head off, thereby disallowing any subtle methods of execution and making it possible to kill people in more discrete methods such as poisoning or pinning the death on natural causes, wouldn't this make for more interesting ways of killing people? You no longer have to tip-toe around specifics in order to properly remove a certain character from coming back in the round and rendering any of your attempts of antagonizing pointless because you didn't saw off their head, throw them into space or hide the body while taking off their jumpsuit. This removes the gymnastics required to properly kill someone. Is that not a plus?

 

Permanent death is not going to improve roleplay and give people more pause and tactical thought. It will just make people unable to continue playing a round as the character they want to play. We are in an inherently deadly location and already many people are dying from falling into disposals, suffering decompression, falling down a hole, or getting a nasty infection or virus.

 

These two things are tangentially unrelated and not relevant to the discussion.

 

The logical extreme of this suggestion is that when a character dies their character slot itself should be permanently deleted, and that this would make people more thoughtful before throwing themselves into dangerous situations. This suggestion similarly fails to realize that dangerous situations more than often come to the character, not the other way around.

 

Stop before you go further. You are putting words into my mouth, I never made this implication nor did I ever make the stretch to imply the extreme as a possible resolution.

I did not once say that all characters upon death should be wiped from the database. I have characters I treasure and play with every amount of investment in me. I said to remove cloning. I did not say to remove characters.

The danger random events place to other characters is unfortunate but largely not my concern. Dying is a part of the game and a critical part of what makes the game fun, right behind antagonists and the enjoyment they provide in making things happen.

"If X is implemented, the extreme Z will inevitably happen" is a false assertion to make and you've nothing to provide that would suggest otherwise. This is nonsense.

[Doc]

-1 this argument surfaces every now and then and every time it fails to properly justify how removing cloning would provide better roleplay. If you are an antagonist who does not wish to see your target cloned then you are able to sabotage the cloning bay, or decapitate the target. There are many ways to render a target unclonable which are very easy. Interestingly, administration gets upset with you if you render your target unclonable and antags are more often than not expected to leave a body in such a state that it can be cloned so the player can resume playing.

 

I'll get to the first sentence after I address the rest of the paragraph first.

By and large, I think the focus on antagonists in relation to cloning is misplaced. Yes, the method by which medical treats and revives people that antagonists may have killed or need to kill has a heavy bearing on the round and how antagonists will act, sure- but, as you've said, that's their problem. Just as they have to deal with cloning, they have to deal with literally anything medical is going to do to keep another player alive or revive them, cloning or not. Having said that, a majority of the individuals that would be cloned during a round die as a result of antagonists. That's an issue that needs to be addressed. If cloning is removed, are players just expected to be left out of the round? Well, if we left it at that, maybe, but I think there are several ways that the medical system could be changed or added onto in order to ensure that, even with a complete lack of cloning, medical will have the reasonable ability to keep players in the round. Unfortunately, the scope of the OP of this thread doesn't particularly encompass that, so despite it's relevance I'm not sure I should continue with that line.

Now, 'how removing cloning would provide better roleplay.' The simple fact is, it would provide roleplay at all.

Yes, yes, "clone memory disorder," "your character should be distraught and disturbed by the fact that they are a 'different them'," "death shouldn't be taken lightly ICly." That's all very nice from an IC perspective, and a theoretical one, but the simple fact is that it is a very small minority of cloned players. So much so, in fact, that I have personally never seen it happen in my memory. That doesn't particularly mean much in itself, but this is supposed to be a very standard thing, and yet I see it neglected round, after round, after round. Once again theoretically, this is something that should be addressed and fixed by staff OOCly, but in my experience as a member recently I can simply say that it's unreasonable to expect that to happen to any effective degree.

If it is only IC by choice, and a vast majority of player simply choose to shrug off the effects, and, additionally, cannot be effectively regulated OOCly, what other reasonable course is there but to make some sort of change to how the system works in the first place?

Important to note is I said change. I don't believe removing cloning and calling it a day is the best solution here, but I definitely think removing cloning and replacing it with a less cheesy system would absolutely add to roleplaying in that serious medical cases will have actual repercussions they will have to RP out. (I guess I'm basically asking for permission to add to this suggestion? It's very difficult to work here when the entire support for removing cloning relies on additional suggestions that would be against the forum rules to add.)

 

Permanent death is not going to improve roleplay and give people more pause and tactical thought. It will just make people unable to continue playing a round as the character they want to play. We are in an inherently deadly location and already many people are dying from falling into disposals, suffering decompression, falling down a hole, or getting a nasty infection or virus.

 

This is partially true, yes. The Aurora has many natural hazards to begin with, not even accounting for random events and, of course, antagonists. However, the fact that 'the station is dangerous' should not be an automatic dismissal of this suggestion. Cloning can be removed while still giving medical the capability of keeping players in the round, there just has to be some additional changes.

As for permanent death not giving people more pause or tactical thought- in my opinion, how wouldn't it? If dying begins to mean that you are no longer able to play the round, would it not be logical to think that a majority of players would begin avoiding death more actively in order to remain in the round? If you legitimately believe that people will continue to throw themselves at danger despite knowing it can very well completely remove them from the round, I can't definitively say you're wrong, but neither can you say you're right. I just believe that it would be a reasonable line of thinking that some sort of change like that would occur in the playerbase's actions once a change like this came into effect.

 

The logical extreme of this suggestion is that when a character dies their character slot itself should be permanently deleted, and that this would make people more thoughtful before throwing themselves into dangerous situations. This suggestion similarly fails to realize that dangerous situations more than often come to the character, not the other way around.

 

I'm sorry, but I have to say that this is just silly. This is not a logical extreme. At all. It's actually very illogical. A majority of the player base is, I'm fairly sure, aware of 'canonicity,' especially regarding antagonists. When the round ends, certain things cease to have happened. A great deal of the time this includes character deaths. This input is really just irrelevant.

Edited October 2, 2017 by Guest

[Pacmandevil]

-1 this argument surfaces every now and then and every time it fails to properly justify how removing cloning would provide better roleplay.

 

Think of it as removing a tumor, you're not doing anything to make the thing you're removing it from better, but you're infact removing something toxic and cancerous. that's an exaggeration

 

There are many ways to render a target unclonable which are very easy. Interestingly, administration gets upset with you if you render your target unclonable and antags are more often than not expected to leave a body in such a state that it can be cloned so the player can resume playing.

We have respawns for a reason. if you die, sucks to suck.

Permanent death is not going to improve roleplay and give people more pause and tactical thought. It will just make people unable to continue playing a round as the character they want to play. We are in an inherently deadly location and already many people are dying from falling into disposals, suffering decompression, falling down a hole, or getting a nasty infection or virus.

Get good and don't die. it's very easy to survive if you know what you're doing, unless someone has their sights on you. the obvious solution wouldn't be to not have any way to come back to life. that's a horrible Idea. just make it require more effort than "Magical clone machine that requires 0 effort"

[Conspiir]

Get good and don't die. it's very easy to survive if you know what you're doing

 

There are times, when some of us have to consider, "If I go with this person, I am almost certainly going to die". Now you can make up an excuse and leave, or you can go with them and see how it furthers the roleplay.

There are times, when a hall is randomly vented and your lung gets ruptured and there's no surgeon that isn't SSD. Now you struggle to medbay, coughing up your own blood because of some freak accident while you were minding your own business, and then you die.

There are times, when players new to the server fall in a hole on the asteroid. They die, they are retrieved, and cloned. Except... no more cloning?

Dying is a large part of the game, let's be honest. But people sometimes have hope of being cloned and stick around. What you're suggesting is everyone play Vaurca (who, as we all know, are pretty resigned whenever they die to not getting cloned, and it feels pretty sad every time). No one gets a second chance. The job slot their old character had is filled. It's not a matter of "git gud" it's a matter of inclusiveness.

[Doc]

Get good and don't die. it's very easy to survive if you know what you're doing

 

There are times, when some of us have to consider, "If I go with this person, I am almost certainly going to die". Now you can make up an excuse and leave, or you can go with them and see how it furthers the roleplay.

There are times, when a hall is randomly vented and your lung gets ruptured and there's no surgeon that isn't SSD. Now you struggle to medbay, coughing up your own blood because of some freak accident while you were minding your own business, and then you die.

There are times, when players new to the server fall in a hole on the asteroid. They die, they are retrieved, and cloned. Except... no more cloning?

Dying is a large part of the game, let's be honest. But people sometimes have hope of being cloned and stick around. What you're suggesting is everyone play Vaurca (who, as we all know, are pretty resigned whenever they die to not getting cloned, and it feels pretty sad every time). No one gets a second chance. The job slot their old character had is filled. It's not a matter of "git gud" it's a matter of inclusiveness.

 

Everyone already gets a second chance even if they're not cloned. There is a 30 minute respawn timer, in which you can play new character. The thread has already included a suggestion to knock that down to 20.

Additionally, cloning can easily (by which I mean, in regards to the cohesiveness of the medical system, not necessarily ease of coding) be replaced with more roleplay oriented methods of resuscitation that would avoid this issue altogether.

Your concerns are valid, yes- but they're very easily fixed, and I still believe that this suggestion has far more merits than it does issues, especially when those issues can be solved in other ways besides denying this suggestion.

[CommanderXor]

I have to give this a -1.

The server is far too dangerous to warrant removing this vital mechanic. Cult goes loud? You'll die, if you're not security/armed. Then you're stuck out of the round unless you want to be forced to play a annoying murderboning machine.

Merc/Heister? Unless they're going for hostages(Which to be honest always end up horribly bad or 'organ harvested' on the ship/executed. Speaking from past experiences on this one. One time surrendered to mercs and they cut my head off either way.)

Malf AI? Yeah, you're going to get vented/borg'd by the AI/rogue borg.

Changeling? Vampire? Both game modes involve harm, and in the ling's case, actual death.

Not to mention all the random events, getting boned by space bears or spiders? What about blobs? There are far too many things dedicated to death, or cause death easily, to justify removing the only way to get back in normally and unchanged.

[Mofo1995]

Maybe I'm just a filthy casual, but I never really take part in combat because I don't really play security characters. So, anytime anything goes down, I die. Armed with meta-knowledge, the last thing I want to do is hop in round 30 minutes later as someone else. In general, my intention in a round is to play a specific character so switching up 30 minutes after death is usually I'd rather have the chance to be cloned and play through the memory loss effects. The fact that I know cloning is a possibility, if anything, is incentive to cooperate with obvious antagonists and their gimmicks. They get their free victim, I get a little bit of excitement, I maybe get to join later and resume play as the person I wanted to interact in the round with. Without cloning, the incentive is in the other direction to instead be unreasonably uncooperative to stay in the round longer. Getting sucked to death by a vampire in the first 20 minutes is no biggie if I just get cloned, but without cloning following that stranger to a dark place for an OOCly obvious trap is as good as going cryo. It discourages good RP in favor of staying alive to get actual playtime.

[Zundy]

I'm all for this. Coupled with a reduced spawn timer and a more roleplay intensive alternative to cloning (the ol'defib) I'm all for this. I think death is cheap on this server as players act fast and loose with their characters lives (rushing a heavily armed antag with a crowbar, ";help at me" spoken with a gun to their throat). Knowing your character may be out for the count should encourage players to respect their characters lives. I am concerned that this may lead to a rise in "ninja nurses" though, who'll justify their valid hunting behavor with not wanting their character to be knocked out of the round with much huffing and puffing. There will be teething problems if this is implemented to be sure.

Regarding metaknowledge, you still have this when being cloned. I'm not sure why respawning in as a different character suddenly makes this metaknowledge more potent.

Regarding antags being kill happy. Well of course they are, the character can currently just get cloned and anecdotally many players make it very difficult for their characters to not be killed.

[Arrow768]

We talked about this a bit in the dev channel.

Cloning will not be removed right out.

We are looking into changing the medical system to brainmed.

It should be noted that there will be a few changes to it, maybe even the option to revive braindead personell with extensive treatment.

And possibly some tweaks to certain chemicals. (So that the rescue borg is not completely useless.)

But until that is implemented I am voting for dismissal of (yet another incarnation) of that suggestion.

[Scheveningen]

We talked about this a bit in the dev channel.

Cloning will not be removed right out.

We are looking into changing the medical system to brainmed.

It should be noted that there will be a few changes to it, maybe even the option to revive braindead personell with extensive treatment.

And possibly some tweaks to certain chemicals. (So that the rescue borg is not completely useless.)

But until that is implemented I am voting for dismissal of (yet another incarnation) of that suggestion.

 

Brainmed is supplemented by Baystation not mapping in a cloning facility at all. There's no point to adding brainmed if doctors can forego effort to save someone by just throwing them into a tube and pressing two buttons. It is easier to clone someone than it is to save someone with heavy injuries and bleedout from death.

[Arrow768]

[...]

It should be noted that there will be a few changes to it, maybe even the option to revive braindead personell with extensive treatment.

[...]

[...]There's no point to adding brainmed if doctors can forego effort to save someone by just throwing them into a tube and pressing two buttons.[...]

Please dont do the same thing you accused Jackboot of: Putting words into my mouth that I have never said.

To make it clear:

If cloning is readded, then it will be require multiple steps and there will be sideeffects to it (that a good medical team is able to treat with some effort)

But it wont be: Corse in tube. Press button. Wait for treatment to finish

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

If you just throw a corpse in there, that will be a very unhappy clone. It is already finicky to clone multiple people.

You need:

1) Power for the cloning bay.

2) Synthmeat.

3) Alkyskine.

4) Trained medical staff.

5) An intact corpse.

[Pacmandevil]

You need:

1) Power for the cloning bay.

2) Synthmeat.

3) Alkyskine.

4) Trained medical staff.

5) An intact corpse.

 

That's barely a requirement, I've never seen medical run out of Synthmeat, and even if they do, they can just ring up the Botanist.

Alkyskine is only needed to treat a the few downsides of cloning, and can be negated pretty well completely if the cloner's upgraded.

the only ACTUAL requirement there is having an intact corpse, which you can negate by just pulling someone else's body out of the mourge and doing brain surgery.

[N8-Toe]

I am fully in support of this. I feel like death is to cheap. if someone dies no one bats an eye, no one mourns as they can be brought back within minutes. this heavily hurts the stakes in conflict where there are no real stakes. as well as traitors can not really "remove" people that may oppose them from the round. while yes they could "destroy cloning" but for a single traitor to do that ON TOP of their other goal is to much. having no cloning would give actions weight, hostage situations stakes, and make space a much more lethal place which I think is for the best.

[UnknownMurder]

I have looked at the suggestion before I started to spare my time playing this game. I used to be in a support of this suggestion until I gave plentiful amount of time playing this, I am not in support of this suggestion. Cloning is essential and is part of space station 13 tradition, I could call people out for being a hypocrite for not agreeing with suggestion involving red shirt for assistants to be as a reference to Star Trek because space station 13 tradition. Unfortunately, you cannot use the excuse to cover up the cloning because people can respawn, it doesn't work like that; cloning has been with us for many years and so has the respawns. We're in 2459, everyone as been cloned before and is harder to retcon; we have the knowledge to change genetic codes, change DNA and RNA, etc. We (the skrells) have strong knowledge and capabilities to do many things. Knowledge is power.

If you truly desire to "remove" a character from the round then you should put some thinking and your back into it, do some effort to finish the job. I can relate with you that it is not easy to "remove" the character completely from the round. However, players cannot "remove" players out of the round and ensures it stays that well (unless you bomb everything and resort to pissing people off). I guarantee you, the players who play on the server without looking at the forum will be utterly disappointed that cloning has been removed and will not try to give the server a chance to play with cloning.

I will have to agree with [mention]Senpai Jackboot[/mention], people are dying much faster than you think; why hasn't this suggestion been dismissed yet? Removing cloning helps to kill roleplay. Like Rainbow Six: Siege or any other video game titles with one respawn per match, people will resort to using more tactical thinking for the duration of the round including trust issues. Variety of people already has enough OOC and IC trust issues counting myself as one of them.

At the moment, I am interested in Arrow's project. Arrow's projects have never failed to surprise us.

-1

[LordFowl]

Voting for dismissal. Cloning will be here to stay unless we radically overthrow the administration. Binning.