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Hello! I play Medical. That's basically all I do here. I've played primarily on Bay12 (back when it was the NSS Exodus, before brainmed and Polaris), then played on Polaris when that split happened, and I've been playing here for about as long as I've been on Bay. We've gone through a lot of changes throughout that time. At first, we didn't even have defibrillators, and as soon as someone flatlined, that was that, and you had to clone. Then, eventually, AED-style defibrillators were added, and they were a tad bit OP in the sense that you could effectively bring someone back from nearly anything, as they forced the person back to life, if only for a single tick, so you could defib a patient while they were in cryo, let them heal for a tick before dying again, and just...keep doing it.
Then, our defibrillators were changed to the ones we see now, and while they were clunky to use at first, overall they're decent, and I quite like them. But, there's one thing that I've grown to be quite irritated at, and it's the timer. On other servers, this timer plays an important role. For example, on Polaris, cloning is a bigger deal. The vast majority of everybody does not get cloning scans at the start of each shift, so a non-decapitated body must be recovered in order for the cloning process to be attempted. Cloning attempts are more likely to fail due to a result of AFK players, whereas with our system, people who had disconnected (without leaving the round entirely via QuitTheRound button) are simply resleeved as being SSD and we throw them through a portal so they leave the round. Failed cloning attempts aren't handwaved as "oh well its no biggie, Central will use back-up data", and cloning is genuinely used as a last resort. The timer is important because there is an already present sense of urgency over a death of a crewmember, and this timer improves this urgency. It actively adds to the overal atmosphere and severity of the situation - someone is dead, and we don't have much time to save them, and if we fail, that's it, they're gone. A timer promotes good RP through this. Whether Medical succeeds or fails, there are plenty of roleplay opportunities and topics to bounce off and make use of.
...but here, it actively subtracts from the overall experience (futurewife helped me with the wording <3) because there is no real urgency in death. There can't be, due to the nature of the server. The most we can have is "oh, a nonconsensual death sucks I guess", and even that is suppressed for the sake of scenes and vore RP. And that isn't inherently bad. It just creates complications when death is trivialized and is quite literally made into nothing more than a minor and temporary inconvenience with our incredibly robust resleeving systems and OOC boundaries to prevent The Bad Feels from deaths that occur from scenes. Obviously very few people actually want that. But, in minimizing that, we've also minimized the impact of death as a whole. The worst that happens is "you feel ill for an hour", and that's it.
So, because there is very little urgency once a patient is dead, this timer has nothing to add to. Instead of creating any sense of urgency, it simply serves as an annoyance in most cases because now, in a server where there's usually very little for Medical to do, we can't even resuscitate a dead guy, and in some, actively prevents attempts at body recovery, because if someone's been dead for ten minutes, why bother trying? You already know it's pointless. We (medical players) can make our own urgency, but that becomes much, much harder when we know, as players, it really doesn't matter.
While the defib timer was removed (or at least increased to an absurdly lovely degree), I got to see, and participate in, actual rescue ops for explo and folks who were stuck in space or anywhere outside - and then we operated and resuscitated them(after asking in LOOC if they cared if they were resleeved or defibbed), and it was great fun for all. Medical got to do actual medical stuff and the dead person is back in the game. I'd like to think that's substantially better than... Medical got to hit the 'resleeve' button and nothing else, and the persons back in the game. The end result is just, simply put, more fun.
I know this is long, but hopefully it hits on the primary points. I'm sure folks will have issues with this in varying degrees, but I've thought about this a lot and I genuinely don't see any downsides. We have, after all, had this very same suggestion already in place, evidently, FOR LIKE A WHOLE YEAR, APPARENTLY.
Pupsalot07/27/2020
tfw defibs have been broken for like 5 months and nobody's noticed until now
wofl07/28/2020
everyone noticed defibs were broken just no one wanted to report because defibbing people is better gameplay than just resleeving them
So...yeah. We already know it works nicely.
