Doctor Archive
Thread: Fun proposal Viral infections
Page 1 of 2
Mirkwoods
Tue Jan 11, 2005 7:23 pm
#1
I am not a doctor, or medic, (In fact, I don't really know all the differences in the two things...) but I thought of something that I thought could be a cool thing for you guys in the game and actually make things new for a while. This would also affect everyone else in the game to different levels depending on the professions of the people.
The proposal is:
Viral Infections.
Here is the scenario. A character walks by something (for example, I'll say the blue glowey core of that one temple's center) and they are exposed to some sort of disease. He is not affected immediately by the virus {gestation period} but is a carrier. There will be no way for anyone to know wether or not people are arround are infected. When you go close to an infected character, you make a virtual dice roll and if you lose it, you get the infection. All virus work differently, so some characters may be immune due to things like their species, sex, or some other logic variable. Some people could be infected but not get the full on disease, and just be carriers. Females could carry a male disease, or Trandoshans could carry a wookie hair loss virus, etc. Some virus perhaps can only be caught by going into a certain area, and not be contagious at all.
When the virus becomes an infection, there would be a mark beside the person's name. maybe a v? Then you would know that you were infected. Over time, the viruse effects your ham bar, and your avatar's physical appearance. (For example, a character infected by the blue glowey core might start growing blue fuzz in their crevaces, and eventually perhaps a blue hair looking stuff.) Doctors/Medics could treat the physical maladies immediately with an innoculization drug that they can make. Image Designers can fix the physical changes, but they come back, faster if the virus has gone further on in it's life.
Eventually the virus would be cured, hopefully by the doctors in quests. (Some of these can include other players and job types) Then, an Imperial Medical Corps person (probably located in your major medical centers will give you the innoculant. If not cured for a long enough time, the virus might just cure itself, depending on the parameters put into the particular virus.
To prevent this being one use material (like the ill-fated monthly story arc)the viruses could continually mutate and others could come into existance. Then characters can be cured completely and either keep or change their new physical appearance. This could lead to some infections being purposefull. (Trandoshans could get a disease {originating from Barabels} That gives them a reall cool scale pattern and color combo that usually can't be gotten.)
Outbreak:
It starts as described above, but when it reaches some predetermined ammount of infected players, our load screen will announce an outbreak, or epidemic depending on the percentage. This will tell the doctors and medics where to go to begin quests looking for a cure to this disease.
Treatment:
Doctors and medics can craft a new machine called a innoculant component annalyzer. (A better name can certainly be came up with)Also, anInnoculant injector. With this, these can put a sample of the disease taken from an infected character, some water and a resource of one type or another. You then get an innoculant, which you can use to treat the analyzed character. It will tell you how good that resource and the water used treat that particular disease. You can then go to the Imperial Medical Corpse rep and he will pay you for your results. He will tell you that their people will get to work analyzing the component. The doctor could always tell a doctor asking him what resource is currently believed to be the best for treating the current virus. Master doctors and perhaps medics could cure your virus once the best resource has been found, but others cannot do it until the innoculation has been found.
Quests for medical people:
The Imperial Medical Corps rep. will send doctors on quests to find out things about the disease. Some should be simple enough for novice medics and others will be harder for master doctors. Some will be based towards group usage as well.
Cure:
The quests will be rated for so many points done for each level of quest and when a certain percentage of medical people have done them, (or perhaps just a pre-set number of people have done them) the Imperial Medical Corps will announce a cure and start spreading an innoculant for it to any medical player whom will pay them a fee. This can be used in the injector to cure the current virus. The innoculant will also cure all previous virus as well, as well as make you immune to infection. The lowest level doctors will be able to cure the virus at this stage.
Galactic Civil War:
He is an Imperial Medical Corps. Representative. Perhaps the Rebel alliance could have their own version in larger Rebel bases and it could be a race to see whom gets the cure first. Think how the Empire will lose face if the rebels get the cure first! There could be a factional perk of letting the side that found the cure getting to have it before everyone else gets access to it.
Resource: The one resource that is the best could be anything. Perhaps even some metals. I feel that fungus will be able to be used here. I also feel that the actual stats of a resource will be unimportant here, just it's affect on the virus in question. This will create a suddenly very valuable resource once it has been revealed.
Anger of infected players:
Some will be, but this is a way to keep people connected to the rest of the community. This will also make throwing in storylines pretty easy for each disease. (The Empire could actually have made one that only affects non-humans {and non-Zebraks} due to the Emporer's dislike of alien species. [I know this is a storyline from the X-Wing books]) Also,doctors at all levels should be able to treat the symptoms of the disease for a certain ammount of time. People could get these like they do buffs now, to get rid of the affects of their virus for hunting. The ammount of time will be determined by the level of the doctor and also how good the resource being used is.
I just thought that I'd put this out there and see what people actually in the field think about it. Thanks for reading it.
UnderQuake
Tue Jan 11, 2005 9:02 pm
#2
It's not a bad idea. It might be fun. I don't know how hard to 'code' a carrier, and gestation periods into the game. It might be impossible to code.
Also, my first thought when reading this was 'vaccines'. It might be interesting to allow doctors to create a vaccine to the outbreak of a disease. If the vaccine is successful, the patient would be protected from contracting the disease in the future.
Just a thought. Good post. Very creative.
e6alfa
Tue Jan 11, 2005 9:06 pm
#3
I like this idea. It would be fun, unless you get the virus, to do a large quest like this.
Mirkwoods
Tue Jan 11, 2005 11:58 pm
#4
I was just thinking that the infections and gestations, etc. would mostly just be a series of numbers, and variables. Shouldn't even be that hard to do with basic programming. The problem is having the game recognize that you are within a certain distance of another character so that the virus will try to infect them. Some stats may make the virus' infection harder for the person to get. (there could even be some sort of anti-bacterial stuff that people could take before going around large groups of people.)
And, of course, the 3-D artists would have to do the artwork for the disease making physical effectson characters.
Of course, I'm not a programmer either, so I'm only guessing.
I think that the work might be worth it for something like this though.
Obata
Wed Jan 12, 2005 12:12 am
#5
The big problem here is that it can force downtime on people. If you can get a condition by just walking past someone that will have a negative effect on your ability to play the game until you find a doctor who has completed the right quest to cure you, it just isn't fun. We, as docs, might enjoy the content. For everyone else though, it's even worse than catching an hour long disease from a vrelt. The potential negative effect on the victim's playtime is a huge drawback.
Mirkwoods
Wed Jan 12, 2005 6:29 am
#6
Of course, that's true. This was always in mind, and perhaps the virus could only affect an avatar's physical appearance, and not their ham bar.
It's hard to do something that won't make someone mad. I don't know, but this is a game, and I think that more things should be forced onto people. At least this would give Image Designers some return business with people wanting to get their look back.
This would be part of immersion. Many people don't like immersion I guess and they like to think that they can just go out to a planet and mine creatures' pelts to make money. Nothing would ever happen to them to prevent such poaching.
I still think that it would be better to let it affect the ham bar, but only a little at first. Only after the person has had something like this for a long, long time, would their play really be affected harshly. After initial outbreaks, people would be more careful and take the anti-bacterial stuff with them more.
You know, I'm starting to think that it's impossible to make everyone happy. I feel sorry for the DEVs.
Message Edited by Mirkwoods on 01-12-2005 05:31 AM
Obata
Wed Jan 12, 2005 10:48 am
#7
Mirkwoods wrote:
Of course, that's true. This was always in mind, and perhaps the virus could only affect an avatar's physical appearance, and not their ham bar.
It's hard to do something that won't make someone mad. I don't know, but this is a game, and I think that more things should be forced onto people. At least this would give Image Designers some return business with people wanting to get their look back.
This would be part of immersion. Many people don't like immersion I guess and they like to think that they can just go out to a planet and mine creatures' pelts to make money. Nothing would ever happen to them to prevent such poaching.
I still think that it would be better to let it affect the ham bar, but only a little at first. Only after the person has had something like this for a long, long time, would their play really be affected harshly. After initial outbreaks, people would be more careful and take the anti-bacterial stuff with them more.
You know, I'm starting to think that it's impossible to make everyone happy. I feel sorry for the DEVs.
Message Edited by Mirkwoods on 01-12-2005 05:31 AM
Just so you know, all the antibiotics (antibacterials) in the word won't prevent or cure even the most simple viral infection. I'm not trying to be difficult or anything, just a RL pharmaceutical chemist who couldn't resist. 
Nornerator
Wed Jan 12, 2005 3:55 pm
#8
Obata wrote:
Mirkwoods wrote:
Of course, that's true. This was always in mind, and perhaps the virus could only affect an avatar's physical appearance, and not their ham bar.
It's hard to do something that won't make someone mad. I don't know, but this is a game, and I think that more things should be forced onto people. At least this would give Image Designers some return business with people wanting to get their look back.
This would be part of immersion. Many people don't like immersion I guess and they like to think that they can just go out to a planet and mine creatures' pelts to make money. Nothing would ever happen to them to prevent such poaching.
I still think that it would be better to let it affect the ham bar, but only a little at first. Only after the person has had something like this for a long, long time, would their play really be affected harshly. After initial outbreaks, people would be more careful and take the anti-bacterial stuff with them more.
You know, I'm starting to think that it's impossible to make everyone happy. I feel sorry for the DEVs.
Message Edited by Mirkwoods on 01-12-2005 05:31 AM
Just so you know, all the antibiotics (antibacterials) in the word won't prevent or cure even the most simple viral infection. I'm not trying to be difficult or anything, just a RL pharmaceutical chemist who couldn't resist.
You don't happen to work for Pfizer do you?
Obata
Wed Jan 12, 2005 6:17 pm
#10
Nornerator wrote:
You don't happen to work for Pfizer do you?
Nope
_Zhade_
Wed Jan 12, 2005 9:54 pm
#11
That sounds interesting. But the blue crevice hair thing is a bit odd. =D
Mirkwoods
Wed Jan 12, 2005 11:10 pm
#12
Now you've gone and made it seem dirty.
But on another subject:
Antibacterial is the only thing that I could think of to put a positive spin on your infection role. Perhaps there is some better word that could be used, and if so, you could suggest it. I'm not in the medical field in life, or in the game.
I actually do know that there has never actually been a virus cured in the history on mankind on Earth. The only thing you can do is innoculate yourselfagainstthe virus. I like to think that in the Star Wars (strange, but popular) futuristic stuff in the past thing, they would maybe be able to cure some virus. They may also have something (like an antibacterial lotion {but not}) to protect you from unknown virus too. Perhaps, it could be called ummm, Innocucream, or something.
If you want to think about it logically, what are the chances that you can have like a million different spieces, traveling between hundreds of planets, including their deepest jungle like areas, and not have many virus being spread around. The Empire (the senate before) would have to have a very agressive anti-virus and germ, for that matter, policy. Perhaps there is some sort of wonder drug created from an alien plant (like bacta for healing) that agressively attacks virus. Perhaps it could be nano-technology.
You know, give suggestions.I'm just trying to think ofsomething fun for people to do.
Obata
Wed Jan 12, 2005 11:58 pm
#13
As for putting this into the game; I'm still against it. For one thing, what your talking about is a disease. Those are already in the game, they just can't be spread from player to player. To add that aspect would create a huge opportunity for griefing. I generally like adding things that make the game more immersive, but you have to watch that you don't create more forced downtime or griefing in the name of immersion. Downtime is my other big problem with it. As I said in another post, the forced downtime would be a very big issue for most players. Anything that can have detrimental effects over a long period will make the game less fun to play.
Mirkwoods wrote:
Now you've gone and made it seem dirty.
But on another subject:
Antibacterial is the only thing that I could think of to put a positive spin on your infection role. Perhaps there is some better word that could be used, and if so, you could suggest it. I'm not in the medical field in life, or in the game.
Nothing complicated here, they're called antivirals, and they actually do exist.
I actually do know that there has never actually been a virus cured in the history on mankind on Earth. The only thing you can do is innoculate yourselfagainstthe virus. I like to think that in the Star Wars (strange, but popular) futuristic stuff in the past thing, they would maybe be able to cure some virus. They may also have something (like an antibacterial lotion {but not}) to protect you from unknown virus too. Perhaps, it could be called ummm, Innocucream, or something.
Actually, as I said above, we do have antiviral drugs now that kill viruses just as antibiotics kill bateria. We don't have them for many viruses yet, but there are some.
If you want to think about it logically, what are the chances that you can have like a million different spieces, traveling between hundreds of planets, including their deepest jungle like areas, and not have many virus being spread around. The Empire (the senate before) would have to have a very agressive anti-virus and germ, for that matter, policy. Perhaps there is some sort of wonder drug created from an alien plant (like bacta for healing) that agressively attacks virus. Perhaps it could be nano-technology.
You know, give suggestions.I'm just trying to think ofsomething fun for people to do.
Page 1 of 2