# Playtesting Comments

Some comments from zjdtmkhzt's forum post from the last pathology test:

zjdt, the coder who previously worked on pathology:

"It was really **hard to know how to protect yourself**, because most symptoms spread invisibly and the permeability system of which clothing protected you was rather complex.
In the new system, you should always be able to **see a clear cause for why you got infected**, for instance, most symptoms now generate a cloud or puddle of pathogen, or you are directly grabbed, disarmed, punched, hugged by an infected person." [1]

"**Curing pathogens often seemed an impossible task** for many people, because the CDC was often unreliable, and the pathology lab was often destroyed by the very person that released the pathogen." [2]

"**Not getting the samples you needed used to be very frustrating**, both because 8 different types of t1 symptoms were basically required, but also because virii were pretty much undisputedly the strongest microbody type." [3]

"[...]I got rid of pathogen mutations, they never caused any fun gameplay, ever." [4]

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Below are the headers to very concise/entertaining responses:

"Snapping symptom breaks my game" [5]

"Pathogens never benefit the station" [6]

"Pathology takes forever" [7]

"Bad pathogens always escape during research" [8]

I am including these quotes because the developer's work seems to have been reverted after the playtesting and need to be redone.

---

Constructive conversations and issue discussion from the comments section:

Leeanei: "So, pathogens from **poor hygiene on high pop RP** is...well, let's just say there's lots of room for illness to spread endlessly. **Miasma can reduce your hygiene so fast** you'll get a disease well before you can get to a shower. Not sure all the details but one person managed to contract a disease that stopped them from breathing and there was no pathologist that knew what they were doing. Very messy." [9]

ArdentSpark: "[...] the **low hygiene Pathogenic spread though is a killer** so I'm glad to hear you're removing the spread from low hygiene diseases. Is there any chance you could **implement a tag on the strain when you use a medical scanner, so we know it's not contagious**? There is a LOT of lockdowns going on to an uncontrollable level, where people are being locked down for a significant amount of time while their pathogens are being researched, **only for their low hygiene to keep spawning more**" [10]

Flourish: "Making it so **pathogens from poor hygiene don't spread** might be okay, but some of my concerns include:
The current code which rolls every onLife(), which basically guarantees multiple pathogens if you're low on hygiene [...]" [11]

rando212: "one big thing i feel path needs is more console right now on overflow we can have like 3-4 people in path all trying to do shit but its hard when the manipulator is a big part and there only 1 of them i definitely feel **1-2 more consoles and manipulators should be added**." [12]

Froggit_Dogget: "First of all, After about 10 minutes, on main, hallways are FULL of fartcloud disease smoke, and the disease liquid makes you slip everywhere. Another thing, the cloud blocks interaction with tiles, so it makes it so you cant use mechcomp for example, in many areas where you used to be able. **I feel like the fart cloud needs to be changed or removed. It just makes the game feel.. gross. Many players on main have expressed hatred towards it.**" [13]

Follow-up from zjdt: "Personally, I am not very attached to the visuals either, but **what do you think could replace them for airborne spread, in a way that is still clearly visible?**" [14]

nefarious6th: "i was thinking along the lines that a separate pathologist job could have an **RP-defined toggle for non-antag status** on it; whether that would end up being needed because of that universally-involving nature of pathology is certainly yet to be seen and nothing anyone has to make a firm decision on any time soon." [15]

Boxta: "There also seems to be a problem in curing because **not many people know how to cure a virus at all**. Perhaps **make it a bit easier to see where you need to go to get cured, and easier to make a cure**?" [16]

aft2001: "My biggest desire is for Pathology to ***make money***. By **coordinating with Cargo, viral samples can be requested, and by exporting cures/vaccines and maybe even reports on the pathogen, money can be made. This could very well be the primary gameplay loop of Pathology outside of outbreaks - order sample, perform actual research, synthesize drug/cure, maybe fill out form (maybe a special kind of paper object? idk),
and export for D O S H.**" [17]
...Can you tell I really like this idea?

aft2001: "That'd be *on top* of healing pathogens, of course. I think they're great, though I don't like just how infectious they seem to be. Could there be **publicly accessible methods of alleviating some annoying symptoms** like those farts or whatever?" [18]

aft2001: "And, lastly, how about an **Access Lock**? Specifically a Pathologist (assuming that is a planned job) can swipe their ID on a device or an access control panel for the doors to lock and unlock it, as can the MDir. An MDir's lock should also have higher priority - that is, a pathologist cannot override an MDir's lock, but an MDir can override a pathologist's lock." [19]

Froggit_Dogget: "I actually have a few ideas for this. First of all, instead of every pathogen being a musty green, the **contents of the pathogen should change its color. Just like how chems do it. If not, then make every pathogen have a random color associated with it, so that people can call out, "The purple pathogen is a healer".**" [20]
...I like this idea too.

BatElite: "My main concern is that the **vague hints + need to cross-reference the wiki** makes it rather easy to get mistaken about ." [21]

BatElite: "Maybe aside from beneficial symptoms we could also do with **more neutral stuff, so there's more wiggle room** to not accidentally worsen a round." [22]

BatElite: "With regards to your earlier wondering about how to combat escalating bad paths (akin to canbombs), maybe a **tally/indicator of how bad your pathogen is estimated to be** could be useful somewhere." [23]

Response from zjdt: "Yup, I have had plans to do something like **health analyzers giving an approximate guess of how dangerous or helpful a pathogen is**, I can definitely revisit them.
I've also thought that curing was pretty slow, I'd like to make it faster, yeah. It depends on the advance rate right now, which is pretty dumb lol.

As for **microscope hints**, you need to put the petri dish into a microscope and then use a dropper on the microscope. You are not the first person to have trouble with this, it **should really be clearer somehow...**

As for the difficulty, I think lots of jobs are sort of difficult at first, like toxins or engineering. I'd like to **keep Pathology one of the disciplines in which one needs a bit more experience**, new players can already have fun with genetics and stuff easily." [24]

CommaIndividual: "A thing that I personally dislike with pathology at the moment is the **pathogen puddles**. They are just incredibly annoying and I feel that it would be more fitting for them to be a gas when in this form." [25]

---

At this point, the playtesting week has passed and pathology is disabled.

Flourish: "**I would like to see interaction with other crewmembers as a key design principle.** On RP, it feels out of place when people working on a pathogen stay cooped up in pathology for the majority of the shift, and don't really roleplay with anyone else or even really say anything besides stuff like "I found a T4". I think someone made the analogy of genetics before the interactivity changes. Additionally, it'd be ideal if the **interactions that are designed for don't risk the spreading of dangerous pathogens**.

On the topic of RP; my experience has been kinda different from some of the other posters'. I've seen many rounds grind to a halt and many people's experiences soured because someone accidentally spread pathogens or whatever. I think some of the PRs Zjd made have addressed aspects of this, such as **reducing the spread of cloud based symptoms** and limiting it to one pathogen per person. Though, I'd still like it if the spreading of pathogens were more intentional, or if it were easier to track who was infected. Once a pathogen spreads to more than a handful of the crew, it's pretty difficult to instate a lockdown (and lockdowns in general get kinda old fast) or find and cure them all. Some possible half-formed ideas I had include: sec scanners also reporting infected people, **health implants displaying if someone has a pathogen (you can check those using MedTrak or the cloning computer)**, **anti-pathogenic fields** that you could buy from QM (like the ones that block atmos or fluids, but they block pathogens and people with pathogens)." [26]

TTerc: "So, after playing quite a few rounds over the past week, here are my thoughts on pathology and its impact on the rounds:

First of all: I was very happy to see that nerds that occupy the pathology lab usually make either beneficial viruses or beneficial viruses with some gimmicky symptoms such as bee sneezing. That means the **beneficial symptoms are now worth researching and are easy enough to research**, so you don't need to put too much effort into it. And if you don't like the gimmicky symptoms, you can very **easily cure yourself** via supressants.

Which also brings us to the next addressed issue: **pathogens were difficult to cure**, which is no longer the case. All you really need now is health analyzer to know what you need roughly to cure yourself, or, syringe + blood slide to know what you need exactly.

And as I mentioned in the earlier post, the manipulator UI is also much more user friendly and researching pathogens does not take a long time at all. I'm also really looking forward for the pathologist job PR to be merged and in my opinion, pathology might as well stay enabled.

However, I have an issue with one thing: the pathogen particles and other decals. I know one of the main goals of the whole pathology rework was to make pathogens visible. But, in my opinion, they might as well be removed. **The presence of the pathogens can be easily noticed by the symptoms** and if you don't have 100% viral protection, avoiding the particles still does not make you safe from them. And despite them spawning less frequently than before, **once a pathogen with fairly high spread gets released, they still contaminate the whole station.** Which also gives the station an uncomfortable, dirty feel. And even if the pathogen heals all your damage and revives you if you die, you still feel like the station shouts at you: Wear viral protection or you'll catch something nasty.

So here are my few suggestions that'd possibly address the issue:
**1. Remove the particles entirely
2. Make particles spawn only if the pathogen has patho farts/sneezing symptom
3. Make them visible only if you're wearing some specific googles**

To finish it in positive tone, I highly admire what was done to the whole pathology mechanic and I'm very much looking forward to it being enabled permamently. Great work Zjd!" [27]

zjdt: "They do **only spawn when a symptom with airborne transmission triggers.** (Farting, Sneezing, Coughing, ..)
And avoiding them should protect you even without viral resistance? They won't do anything to you if you don't touch them.
You can still catch things from the pathogen's other symptoms though, like sweating or hugs." [28]

Mordent: "I wholeheartedly and vehemently dislike pathology as a feature in general, predominantly because of it being too close to real-life right now. I think it's a poo time to re-add it, and have actively avoided playing this week because of it (so my take is second-hand). That said, I've had to deal with the administrative side of it so:

**The number of pathology-related adminhelps has been pretty darned high** (understandable), and they are somewhat of a chore to administrate because working out the "why" of a pathogen having escaped can take some time - we can get there, but it's not as simple as seeing "Joe McAssistant attacks Happy the Clown with the toolbox x48" in the logs.

**I'd like to see more logging added to be able to tell which strain of a pathogen is being spread around via the pathogen reagents, and the "X is infected by Y" logs should contain a specific location as well (XYZ and area).**" [29]

virvatuli: "preface: this only concerns RP because that's where I've parked my butt for the past couple of weeks, and it's my opinion, not other admin's

Pathology is suffering from the same thing that genetics suffers from, but worse. **By gameplay design, it promotes isolation from other players.** The patho-wizard goes into their ivory tower and studies their pestilent tomes of knowledge to grow more powerful, while interacting with nobody else. They emerge from their germ-ridden bunker to silently release a pathogen, good or bad, upon the population of the station.
For the entire test period, I have seen exactly one good roleplaying interaction between two people studying pathology, and that was them discussing the moral implications of a virus that forced people to stop harming one another. Every other instance has been: a few doctors pile into the lab, they minimally interact with each other while looking at their computers, grunting and farting being the only real noises outside of LOOC talk about how each different functions work.

This leads into my comparison with genetics, all I can think of is how everyone loves to poke fun at them for ignoring everything else going on around them. This is how pathology is, but even more true as **there's no gameplay incentive for a pathologist to enlist aid from/interact with the crew prior to their "endgame". If it were to become a permanent staple, I think there really should be something that guides players into crew interactions rather than just locking themselves in a room for the whole shift.**" [30]

Leeanei: "One big thing is **more beneficial symptoms**, another would be maybe **some sort of way to get a benefit from interacting with crew** like genetics?" [31]

Rilor: "Perhaps they should **need stuff from cargo in order to do stuff**? (like to run the incubator or to get anti-agents) and a **teleport pad**." [32]

TheMaskedMan2: "For improvements - **the interface is still kind of a mess.** I talked in discord about this so I am sure you already know, but the "known samples" area could really be streamlined if it's supposed to be your **little catalogue of symptoms** and things. At the very least have it mention if it's good/bad. It'd also be nice to be able to keep track of what symptom each sample causes. I still think the chart itself is a bit of a pain to navigate and **a whole interface change of maybe a flow chart or something else would be more appealing to look at** - but that's asking for a lot.

The disease gas/sweat looks so much nicer now that it isn't slippy liquid and is more like blood splatters and spore gas. I still think the individual sprites for those could be spruced up a bit but still, looks much better than it did before.

As for people saying it doesn't interact much, I'll say it isn't any more anti-social than genetics. Perhaps a way to speed up your research from volunteers or ordering things from cargo to get better samples. I don't think it should "rely" on any outside department in its current state. Even in an ideal situation of you locking yourself into your room **it can take forever to get an interesting disease and having to rely on John QM to constantly sample back crates or whatever would be a pain in the ass.**

**Also I gotta mention traitor stuff to make it more convenient. So maybe a few tiny ideas.**
**1. Traitor Disease Codex - (Big list of almost all the symptoms so you can make a custom disease without spending an hour searching, probably big cost.)
2. Disease Box - (Like random poison bottles, but instead it's diseases that are exclusively bad symptoms and go up to T4?)
3. Assassination Pathogen - (A very very deadly T5 Pathogen that can't be manipulated or spliced at all, it has zero spread so mostly used to give an unwitting person a bad disease.)**
" [33]

Oremir: "I suppose one thing i'd like is to see is, like someone mentioned earlier, m**aybe a visual indicator for "good" pathos or perhaps a way to name known Pathogens** using either the Pathogen Console or perhaps to **make an entry into Medtrack**? It already has a database for known Viruses like Beserker etc. Maybe **scanned pathos are added to a custom database where you can name them and add notes that are visible if people scan themselves**?" [34]