by Wickedtemp » Sun Feb 19, 2017 1:49 pm
You could argue that since the initial scan did not belong to the doctor, that he is effectively stealing an individual's identity. It isn't their body to inhabit, the scan belongs to somebody else. This could be treated and handled as a breach of privacy since you'd likely learn quite a few things about someone if you were put into their physical body. Lot's of private, personal things. Not to mention literal identity theft, which would already be a crime in the first place... I'm fairly sure that someone who's done this would find themselves being given a warning, or potentially even a temporary Medical ban for that character.
My single concern over this, however, is the fact that resleeving doesn't require anybody to die. Which means the whole argument behind why you can't just default to cloning patients every time no longer holds up. You couldn't rely entirely on cloning because it required that you purposefully neglect a patient and allow them to die in order to go through with cloning. This is obviously concerning behavior for characters who are meant to be doctors. However, with resleeving, death is removed from the equation. It's just a quick "We put your mind into a new, uninjured body, because why the hell should I bother with fixing multiple fractures and internal bleeding and pulling out shrapnel when I can just do this instead?"
And ICly, there's... no reason not to. The patient doesn't die, and it's probably faster -and less painful for the patient- to resleeve instead, as well as being less risky. ICly, there's no reason to not do this every single time a patient comes in with more than mild injuries. Biomass doesn't even matter, not when it can be mass produced as easily as it can be, and even bodies were changed to cost more, it wouldn't change this. Putting in mechanical 'safeguards' to prevent this could potentially end up shafting regular 'resleeving' patients who just ended up digested.
I personally think that putting a note in either Medical's SOP or the Wiki would be the best option -they're going to need a pretty much mandatory update when this is added in anyways, it replaces the most frequently used equipment in Medbay, so just add the note in when that's done. "Resleeving is to be utilized only when no other option exists, such as death, or if the patient is injured in such a way it cannot be fixed by any other means, including medicinal chemicals and surgery. Immediately resorting to resleeving when the patient can be healed with standard medical care is bad practice.", or something along those lines.
I like how this provides Medical with ways to fix patients who had their skin color turned to neon pink and ended up with a taur body they didn't have previously, as a result of DNA-changing artifacts. I also like how this reduces the amount of running back and forth between the lobby and the scanner, which is inconveniently placed at the other end of the department. I like how this can provide a means of obtaining organ donors, should the need ever arise, and I like how this allows bodies to be printed that could be utilized for surgical practice. The above issue is pretty much my sole concern over this, and I believe it'd be a quick and easy fix.
Edit: Just for clarification... The reason why I see this as such a huge issue is because it has the potential to negate the job of Medical entirely. All Chemistry would have to do is make Cryox, Clonex and Ryetalyn. All doctors would have to do is resleeve and keep the pods full of biomass. The only reason I even play SS13 is because I enjoy the Medical system. I only play Medical, for every server I've ever played, with the exception of CM, where I decided to main Military Police for a while, to help cut down on the shitty MP's who used to storm Medbay when I was working in Medical and stun patients for the lulz. And after that, I went back to Medical... It's really the only job I have fun with, and I probably wouldn't bother playing on a server where it's worthless and unused with the exception of cloning and identical mechanics. So... yeah, it's one of those things where it wouldn't be important for other players, but it is for me, because this is the only part of the game I enjoy.