Virology almost never has real viruses to cure and is basically useless to the station, so the temptation to fuck around is inevitable.
Only since /tg/ went out of its way to nerf Virology in the ground because it made everyone too resilient if whiny baby traitors waited too long to do things. It used to be very much the opposite problem, too fast and too potent and too formulaic, but now it's highly variable, with tons of options and lots of fun math to do, for fucking
zero benefit.
The unfortunate thing is, they had a great idea! Add stat barriers to trait complexity & the more potent effects, add a few more tiers of traits to reduce clutter, so on. This idea was half-implemented at best.
Give people a decent reward for playing numbers games with all of these retarded traits. Every single option you have now is so conditional, pedantic, and uninteresting. Splitting the TC/TF combo into four random ass traits that do the job but dumber, or don't do the job at all, is not good or fun or useful. Why doesn't the night one grant night vision at some stage speed tier? Why won't resistance 10 starlight condensation let you shoot laser beams at the cost of some burn damage? Because /tg/ doesn't give a fuck. The goal was to make Virology irrelevant and then never touch it again.
Either revert all of that shit or start plugging away at making use of these cool new systems they totally squandered. I would honestly prefer the latter.
On that topic, the entirety of the new medical system (going back some years now, so "new") is fucking awful. Removing cloners was a mistake and making surgery the one-stop click and drag access point for magically printing living people isn't actually any more engaging than chucking someone in a tube. By requiring constant MD interaction, you deny them any chance of actually saving patients, as one or several members of medbay will always be stuck trying to resuscitate, then the patients they could have saved will die, requiring more resuscitation. Keeping the cloner operable was a one-stop dead guy destination (for midrange cases, low damage was always defibbed and husks already required transplanting), a team effort with Science, and actually viable. Trying to maintain a stat bed, maintain the parts printer, get a surgical bed, attain all the necessary tools get a working defib, etc, means inevitable dysfunction. You don't even have to do a decent bombing anymore, just fucking welding a few doors is enough to absolutely cripple medbay under the right conditions (for long enough that organs decay past viability, necessitating
even longer revival processes).
You also can't deliberately clone to remove radiation, you have to hit the pods. You also can't revive ghosts reliably- when they were in the cloning bed, you got a really easy signal that someone was trying to clone you, and people would naturally try a few times before opening the bay. Now they have to shock you multiple times and hope you're still hanging around. Most people don't hang around, that's more bodies on the floor or more chances to miss someone who
would be revived by cloning. Access to autocloning is entirely gone, even at the end of the tech tree, taking off another component that encourages sneaky or fast traitor play. Lategame murderboners don't even have to fuck up cloning before they go hard on the hallways, because there simply isn't a risk. Space every new corpse and roll on. To make things worse, what if you
do have incompetent medics? Given how the game has progressed, there's enough of a cliff to decent medical care that people simply vanish from the game under a wilting medbay.
Almost every facet of the game for nearly a decade was designed with revival of some kind in mind. Again, you can get away with it in a high RP environment, but the ultra-lethal gameplay of SS13 goes from endearing to boring and bad if you're lucky enough to get dragged to medbay... and then dropped on a line of other corpses they don't know how to revive. That actually happened on Kiwistation today, by the way. It wasn't some traitor's dastardly scheme, the poor bastards just couldn't get it up.
Rather than adding complexity, which the new chemistry system
does by adding alternative reagents with meaningfully different risks & challenges (I can't believe I'm praising nu/tg/ for anything honestly) this all boils down to everyone in medbay tripping over each-other to do a job that a single machine used to do, instead of the job they're supposed to be doing: keeping the rest of station's crew operable.
Much like the Virology changes, it all feels like someone who never played rounds with decent, or any, antags decided to put their head up their own ass and start "theorycrafting" features before asking what would make them fun or interesting. It basically isn't viable at all outside of a heavily moderated high-RP server. I say that like it's a hypothetical, but it was always pretty much just a coderbus pet project, particularly notorious retard fruit oranges. Honestly, revert anything he ever did just to be safe. Very little would be lost and a lot would be re-added. Separated chemicals has already been brought up in this thread, but it hasn't been pointed out who forced it through (oranges) or why (dumbass who hates fun). Same shit here.
Edit: Also, I wish I could blame it entirely on oranges, but they gutted NTSL from the game right before he took over. There was basically no good reason to do so, and both the markup for paper (this one was oranges) and NTSL just needed to be sanitized to avoid abuse. It wasn't even a hard fix, and StonedOne (and not much later Hippiestation) already had one working before it was "temporarily" (permanently) removed. New players will never know the joys of telecommunications shenanigans unless that shit's reverted. I also think they gutted Telesci, too, because, oh no, doing math to get cool shit is cheating, but consulting the wiki to make the exact same slimes every round for overpowered garbage is
totally fine. I haven't played any science to see if it's been re-added since, though.
