Some thoughts on disease

[Erasmus]

Hi all! I've been playing for a few days, and it looks like my welcome gift to the game was a big ol' case of disease. IC disease, that is. While I usually love it when bad things happen to my characters, this has been a little frustrating, and I'd like to make three suggestions that have occurred to me while dealing with it:

1) Maybe make cyans immune to disease. This could already be the case; I -was- briefly un-cyanned (long story) and might have gotten sick then? But if it's not the case, I think it'd be really nice to give new players some adjustment time before they have to worry about things like this.

2) Change the affect messages to be clearer, especially as it relates to progression of the disease. The first day or so I kind of shrugged it off because it just says "Erasmus feels nauseated", and I thought it was a random pvent style thing. After a little bit when it didn't go away, I realized I'd have to do something about it, only to find out from some very nice Physicians that my PC is probably in the third stage (?) of a disease. In the source of that scene I discovered my PC can't even eat right now to take the medication he was offered! I'd been RPing the condition as much more minor than that, because the aff hadn't changed at any point.

So maybe either tagging the affs with clearer hints for newer people- "Erasmus feels nauseated. He should see a physician."- and/or progressing them over time visibly. "Erasmus is feeling sicker. He can't stomach the thought of food."

3) Edit the helpfile to make it clear people can just randomly get disease from eating food. I've been racking my brains trying to figure out what I did wrong so I could NOT do it again! I had to ask on visnet to find out it can simply happen.

Thanks for reading!

[Lei]

I like all of these suggestions, especially the cyan protection if that isn't already the case.

[Temi]

I feel like cyans -should- already have protection from diseases, though I don't have the confirmation of that for sure, but it was intended as part of it. There are different stages of the disease messaging as well that escalate, up to three different stages, though the minor diseases self-cure after the second instead.

[Erasmus]

Hmm, I am almost certain I didn't see any messaging on the disease escalating - but if it was a one-time message and it happened when I was moving around or logging in, I could have missed it. It'd be really nice if the aff message, as the one that sticks around permanently, got the same escalation messaging.

[Temi]

The escalation would be after a few days to give it time to be handled at the first stage, instead of always escalating. So you probably didn't get to the next stage. The aff message is included in it.

[Erasmus]

Hmm, so it actually had been a few days before I finally did something about it. And it certainly seemed like it had escalated because my PC went from just having an aff message to not being able to eat. (Though maybe he couldn't eat from the start and I just didn't realize?) So I might be off base entirely here! But I think that lack of clarity still suggests a problem.