That's an awfully long post for being so wrong. I'm convinced you haven't played medbay once on kiwi station. It's the only department on the server that is competent.
Fuck cloning.
Medbay is fun right now because everyone works as a team, and surgery is a good system, and chemicals are still extremely good. Just not when they are dead. If you are going to add back in cloning just remove medbay because there would be no point. Fuck it the server would be better without cryotubes too.
Medbay is the only department with a consistent player base, just leave it alone, and don't fuck it up cuz this guy is salty no-one wants to work to revive him cuz he's a dick.
Long post regarding three+ major fuckups (Virology nuke, Cloning nuke, oranges existing), cloning was only a part of it and you haven't addressed in any way all the parts of where changing cloning made the game worse for
everyone else, breaks major mechanics, etc..
While we're sharing baseless speculation ("People just don't want to revive you, it's not that you've spent several rounds watching medbay struggle to administer 1 single patch, replace an organ, and defib!") I'm pretty sure you've never played on a server with cloning, because if you had, it would be obvious how much nicer it is to be able to use surgery for surgery things and keep everyone and their mother out of medbay and in the station, playing the game. It might at least explain why new players joining Kiwi seem to think that having a single dangerous antagonist be the death knell for 2/3rds of the station is normal- because competent is a "stretch," to say the least.
Next time I watch the same bloody docs try to stasis bodies and spend twelve minutes scrambling for pills because they didn't stack treatments, make bottles, or fill the vendors, I aught to record it and set it to yakety sax for you. Some of them, even the CMOs, still have to consult the machines for surgery order. It's a mess.
Granted, it's not even medbay's fault medicine can be so involved. /tg/ has had an open conspiracy for roughly five years to gum down the game in every way possible until medium+ roleplay with heavy moderation is the only viable way to play the game, because everything else leads to dead shifts. It's the coderbus' boilerplate achievement. Kiwistation's playerbase is clearly in the vein of old /tg/, so obviously, old /tg/ features would fit better. God bless.
Finally, you may have missed the bit where I praised chemicals actually taking some thought now, though toxin damage boiling down to "just use penta lol" is really disappointing, and I agree with the notion of nuking cryotubes. Cryotubes have always been more of a problem and a crutch than sleepers or cloning, since they take people out of the game for an extended period of time to handle doctoral inadequacy, but the payoff is "you regenerated a bit," not re-entering the game entirely, like Cloning.
Friendly reminder that cloning still exists.
Yes, yes, pods, because Botany should be Medbay and Medbay should be Botany.
It's so easy, why don't you just set up pods every round?
In which case there was no reason to gut Cloning,
It takes more effort, Cloning should be harder to get, so fast antags can make more of a splash
In which case there was no reason to remove Cloning entirely, and it should have been made into tech tree recipes (as it already was). Locking cloning behind tech would be cool (/tg/ has been steadily gutting any and all science-medicine cross collaboration, making cloning T3-T4 tech would be fun) but just crimping replica pods and turning everyone into pod people is retarded. Mechanically, it works, and for some of the more intense rounds it's an option.
Reminder: Cloning was removed
entirely. I'm advocating a reversal of that particular change, not re-integrating cloning into the map. That would take some effort and shuffling things around, and I don't think that's as necessary. Giving Medicine a reason to bully Science into making and upgrading some hardware for them means that, at least in rounds going 40 or so minutes, Medbay will finally have access to the tools to get the job done in major catastrophes, which by that point (should) be piling up.
"but if it's so much harder to make than pods why bother?" which is why Cloning doesn't actually "still exist." Unlike pods, you don't need a body to clone people. You just need them to get scanned, which is an excellent way to protect high profile personnel and encourage adventurous behavior. Miners, engis on expeditions, the old gateway and boss fights, these are dangerous things that are fun to do but that can
cripple a station now. With Cloning, you just watch the monitors for any of them to die, and clone them back. Their shit is gone, but this is literally the reason the rec room just has a ton of jumpsuits and backpacks lying around, and it's well over half of the HoP's job. Clone, vet, ID, get back into the fight. "Why do the HoPs keep giving out AA?" It's not like they have anything else to do. It's a vestigial organ, because gutting cloning entirely wasn't clever or thorough. It was a hackjob forced through on /tg/ against popular support and despite popular outcry.
Now, yes, yes, if you're new to the game, cloning IS very potent. It's still very important in cases where you have lots of people going tits up- spend twenty minutes watching "competent" docs trying to piecemeal your blown up corpse, or have the foresight to scan yourself first and be back in the game within a few minutes. Even if you gib, you can be brought back, so long as that record is there. There are tons of checks and balances to this potency,
which already exist in the game, because (again) it was designed with cloning in mind for 9+ years.
