TLDR: Keep our medical system, make changes to it, instead of going to Bay's system and making changes to it. Everything listed in the 'pros' of the initial post can be done here, with our system. Those aren't unique bay-specific exclusives.
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To add on to my post before:
Even with the changes, I don't think this is the best idea. Polaris doesn't have much of a population as it stands, and while changing medical systems may cause a temporary increase in players giving it a try just because it's new, they'll likely go back to their preferred roles within a few weeks, and the medical mains run the risk of disliking the system and simply stopping altogether, lowering overall population even more. Another thing to consider is that this change will head downstream to Child servers of Polaris. I know, "Why should we give a shit about servers that aren't us?", the answer is "Because it's the not-dickhead thing to do.", simply put, so I've been attempting to get a few of them to voice their opinions on this as well since it'll end up affecting them.
I know that one persistent argument for the change is "But muh realism", but to be honest, I don't care about realism. If I cared about realism, I wouldn't be playing a sci-fi game. Realism works decently enough for things like roleplaying, which ties in to the RP aspect of the game, such as Regulations, SOP, procedure, Command, etc, but it tends to step on a few toes when it's shoehorned into game mechanics. Virgo's change to syringes to make them cause infections after one use is one such example - I personally enjoy it, but others were so irritated by it that they decided to play other departmlemts instead.
As for why I don't like the medical system directly? I don't think it fixes much. We'll be trading one set of flaws - which are the reason for the change to start with - for another. The fact that we're having to cherry-pick from this system is evidence enough. I personally don't think that crew deaths are an absolute necessity - if Medical's on the ball, people don't die and the ones that do are more likely to be back in the game. A system that's more surgery intensive means more staring at black screens and going AFK while the surgeon works on you, and while some people only spend around twenty seconds per surgery, all it takes is a few fractures for that to add up to 80 seconds at the minimum, add on time if the surgeon isn't absolutely amazing at the role. Which, to be honest, would be most players. There tends to be maybe one, two or three characters per departmlemt that are actually really, really good, a fair percentage being 'mostly okay', with the rest either in or hovering around 'might want to skim the wiki a few more times.' I'm especially not a fan of the useless suit sensors. Bay's sensors are effectively Binary. Set to max, it's Binary with Location. It isn't as useful, it's a general downgrade to something we already have and have had for years, and it turns "Someone is injured" into "Somebody has a slightly higher-than-average pulse, which could mean they're hurt, or maybe they're just exercising", because from an IC standpoint, the Medical team isn't expecting to actually handle anything more than the uncommon workplace injury. They're not going to think anything of a slightly elevated pulse because it's far more likely Joe McCargo is just lifting a heavy crate.
Bicaridine and Tricord mend incisions, which is stupidly irritating. Toxins being related to organ failure is neat, but having it solely
be organ failure takes away a lot of the fun you can do currently with poisons. It's more surgery intensive, which sounds great on paper until you realize that surgery is the most boring thing a player could go through. The system is generally more complex from a gameplay perspective which can be a turn-off to newer players seeking to learn the department. People get turned off from medical with OUR system because "Wow it's too much". Switching to a more complex system would only result in this happening more frequently. On the flip side, our medical system is why I play here and other downstream servers. It's generally easy to pick up, but there's a difficulty curve. Being "mostly decent" doesn't take too much effort, which I consider to be an overall benefit in a game with 20+ roles, but being "super robust" takes a little more dedication. It allows a player to be overall good, to be helpful and ultimately have fun in the role, without having to endlessly study the wiki.
I'm all for making brain damage more lethal, giving it more of an influence in general, but I like our system because it makes sense from a "This is a video game" perspective. Human mobs have 200hp. If they get 200 damage spread among five damage types, they die. And in practice, that's how it works. Yes, it's centralized around chemistry, because chemistry is the primary means of lowering damage types. You can't lower toxin or oxy to without chems, and you can't heal brute/burn that's at 53 or above per limb without chems. It's an issue, people have complained about it, and yet at the same time, suggestions to fix it got nowhere. The surgical option for brute/burn? The forum thread died, the general opinion was "that's neat, but we don't feel like coding it", GG RIP. I personally don't think it's that big of a problem to start with, chems could use a slight nerf, I already have something in mind to help balance everything out, and I've suggested that before as well, but like before, it never picked up interest.
And going back to the wiki, I know you guys are saying that you'll have it sorted out, but Polaris has been a server for a couple years or so now, and this is what we currently have for our general medical section, having had more than a year to work on it.
Guide to Medicine:
https://doku.ss13polaris.com/doku.php?i ... es:medical
The wiki has nearly thirty links that are empty. Nonexistant. From guides to job descriptions, our wiki is absolute trash, so forgive me for saying that I really don't think that it's going to be kept track of when the medical changes come through. Even the job descriptions that ARE there are mediocre, many of them are one to two sentences in length with no real information about the role. Even some of the forum links to the wiki are out of date and don't exist, I really think that if we DO go through with this, regardless of what's
said, the wiki's going to fall behind again.
I really don't think this change is going to go well, I think that whatever you want it to accomplish can be accomplished through other means, and I really don't think I'd bother with this server anymore if it's added... After all, if I wanted to play Baymed, I'd...be on Bay instead.
... also as far as chemistry not being fun, I do personally think it's fun. It's the main job I play. I love it.
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EDIT: Apparently, the link in the "Useful Links" bit in the forums is the wrong wiki. This is the right wiki for Medical:
https://wiki.ss13polaris.com/index.php? ... #Diagnosis
Which looks great, until you read it. Nearly the entire thing needs to be re-done because there are errors in every single section, ranging from "No, that chemical doesn't do that", "No, that thing you listed doesn't even exist in the game", "No, 'L' is not a blood type", and "No, you can't defib someone with a total amount of 358 damage split between brute/burn." and many, many more. I posted them all in the "pages in need of review" section in the forums. The state of the wiki still only reinforces my opinion that this server wouldn't be ready for a change in medical system, given that we've had over a year to get a medical wiki up and done, and it's... still the absolute worst medical wiki for this entire codebase across every server that uses this medical system.
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EDIT EDIT: It seems shining a spotlight on the horrible wiki resulted in a fast, decent fix! It's no longer absolute trash, which is great. The initial point, however, still stands. It took over a year for this to get done, after being done incorrectly time and time again. That's worrying.