Please remove cloning…

I think Baxtalo hit the nail on the head. Death has no meaning and no climax in the story when they’re just going to come back anyway.  Sure, returning from death can be a good twist, but when EVERYONE is guaranteed three lives… it becomes more like smash brothers melee and less like a star wars saga.

edit: Not to say that select people should have it either, that would just make the game unbalanced.

Hey everyone! I’m new to LOTJ (this era), but I’ve definitely been seeing how terrible some people have been at RPing their clones and how disruptive it is. I can also see how not having them would lead to major stagnation, especially when combined with the hidden systems mentioned by Ocerion.

My take: You can’t cure poor RP, but you can give players the tools to self-regulate it by allowing them to take care of someone else’s clones (at great expense) or taking advantage of the fact that people tend to cool off over time.

1. Clone Activation Timer
Real simple. Prevent a clone from being activated for a certain time period, representing the time it takes to age a clone to the appropriate age of the target or whatever. You guys can decide how long it takes, I’m thinking 2 weeks or something that gives people time to cool off OOCly, or possibly create an alt that they wind up enjoying playing more than they do bitching on comm zero with their clone two weeks later. If nothing else, killing the big bad evil guy will at least ensure the galaxy a couple weeks of peace and quiet and a chance to regroup, as well as preventing that character from being the center of attention because by the time it wakes up, their death is old news.

2. Limited Clone sabotage (multiple variants, new feats and stuff)

As a preface, since there isn’t a clear explanation ICly of how the cloning facility knows when to activate a clone, I’m going to take some liberty and explain how it would work in the context of the following suggestions: ICly, when someone dies, a sample of their DNA is sent to the cloning facility if there is a clone with a matching genetic sequence, it is ‘primed’ for activation. Note that ‘priming’ a clone means making that clone available for use. If a player is killed and their clone hasn’t been primed, they don’t get to access to it.

Implementation Options for Clone Sabotage
These options enable government executions and highly coordinated assassination attempts to bypass the clone system by preventing a given clone from priming for a short period of time. This would allow very bad men that everyone hates to be killed while allowing incidental run-ins or accidental deaths to still use clones.

BypassClone (New Slicer Feat) – Used at cloning facility, requires the target’s name and/or DNA sample. Prevents the target clone from being primed if target is killed during the next 30 minutes. High expense, high cool down. Alerts target if attempt fails and after the 30 minutes is up.
IC Explanation: The slicer hacks into the facility’s clone registry and deletes the target’s genetic code from the system index, creating a 30 minute gap before the system detects the missing clone and reinserts it into the index, alerting the subject that someone is trying to tamper with their clone.

ScrambleDNA (medical feat) – Used on target, does not require target’s name. Prevents the target’s clone from priming for the next 15 minutes.
IC Explanation: The doctor injects a biological agent which makes enough minor cosmetic changes to the target’s genetic code that the cloning facility will not be able to match it to the one on file for the given clone. Eventually these synthetic changes fade and the target’s normal genetic sequencing reappears.

BribeCloners (diplomacy feat) – Used at cloning facility, requires target’s name and/or DNA sample and money (depending on natural charisma and bribe skill), bribes the official to do the same thing as BypassClone, except that it does not alert the target if the attempt fails. Can be very expensive and very high cool down if the attempt fails.
IC Explanation: This feat represents an in-depth understanding of the Cloning facility’s organizational hierarchy and bureaucracy which, combined with the diplomat’s highly developed people skills, enables them to persuade, mislead, and bribe all of the right people to make sure a clone doesn’t wake up while simultaneously burying all evidence under a mountain of administrative paperwork.

I like Alyssa’s ideas a lot, especially the one regarding the cool down timer. Short of removing cloning, I’d love to see some of those ideas implemented. One I might also suggest is maybe make another ability that adds a 50% chance for the clone to fail if it is awakened during a certain period. Like if I sabotage a clone for the next 24 hours if they awaken they have a 50% chance to fail.

That was a fantastic post Alyssa, and equally fantastic ideas. The cloning timer makes a lot of sense and I’d love to get that implemented.

I think it’s pretty obvious that our current implementation of cloning has been bad at best, so I’m all for rethinking everything from the basic mechanics to more interactive features like Alyssa’s idea.

um… this is awesome.

Alyssa you have the talent to be a game designer 😉

I second that. Fantastic ideas.

Would it be alright if it was, along with other things, required to have sufficient think logs before you clone so you know exactly what your clone remembers/doesn’t. And then a record of your cloning goes right into your think logs just so you know exactly where to pick up again. Just my thoughts.

Not that I care or anything, but anything that makes the game less douche-fillef is an improvement; even if a small one.

Actually, zak, when you are cloned, it does place a think log with the date and time you were cloned. it was in the change log.

This issue is 100% tied in with hidden systems. Cloning is a reaction to people who hide, giving them a reason to find the nuts to come out of hiding, and be a bit more active, instead of running away from every conflict, and logging off on puff the magic planet. And your sole arguement against it appears to be little more than “Clones shouldn’t be there because then people have clones.”. These clones are SUPPOSED to come back, and do things. And YOU of all people have no right, now, or -EVER- complaining about someone’s clone picking up where the original left off, as you have gone well out of your way in game to -FORCE- such a thing to happen. Cloning is by no means a perfect solution, but removing cloning will just return us to the stagnant boring crap we’ve had to deal with for the last couple years, its bad now, but its far worse when EVERYONE is too scared to come out and fulfil their roles. At least now, a few chicken wusses manage to make it out of their clan bases once in a while and add to the RP of more than the two or three pals they have camping whichever room inside whichever base it was they occupied.

Hidden sectors have nothing to do with this.  They’re simply required for certain clans.   The end.

edit by walldo: this post is offtopic and doesn’t contribute to the thread

The issue is not 100% tied to hidden systems nor are they 100% unrelated.

There are very good points to be made that this current implementation of cloning is broken. Cloning is NOT a perfect solution, and that is the entire point of this thread. If we can please keep this thread about ways to improve cloning instead of another platform for angry rants about players or characters’ RP or IC things that happened this timeline that would be great!

Just thinking off the top of my head here is what I think is wrong with cloning:
-2 clones is too many
-The entry point to being able to clone effectively is too low. Sciences need to have a larger role, but how? Do we make it harder to complete a clone with no sciences then have them scale on top?
-The whole “haha I have a datapad (or I mailed myself) so I will be caught up to speed” stuff is shit. It’s a shame some players don’t want to relish in roleplay that is different than what they had been doing.
-Cloning and force

And what I think is right:
-Having multiple points to clone on different ends of the galaxy

What I think is right but I’m not 100% sold on:
-Knowing that your clone will work. Before the updates, there was a very good chance that your clone just wouldn’t activate at all. Is having it be 100% successful all the time a tack too far in the opposite direction?
I don’t think making cloning a thing regulated by clans/a clan will help at all. Cloning was in for the majority of the timeline before this, but it was such a closely guarded secret only 1 or 2 people were ever actually cloned. I think there are other barriers that could be put in place to regulate access to cloning.

For whatever it is worth I think the whole “clones rights” “different path than before stuff” makes for interesting roleplay but I hope to high heaven that that doesn’t become the norm for clone RP.

100% clone success rate is not a step in the right direction. It’s a step backwards. Ralen and I both made posts in a different thread about how to fix that. If you’re dead set on keeping it two clones and out, give the first one a 25% chance to fail and the second one a 40-50% chance to fail. That way, if someone is cloned, there is still a risk to be had with them dying. Right now, there is no risk to dying. If someone is cloned, they can act all the douchebag they want knowing that they’ll be able to come right back and start over again.

On the subject of cloning Forcers, I think it should be more difficult for a successful Forcer clone to be activated. If you look at The Force Unleashed II (God save me. I’m referencing a shithole of a game to make my point…), it took Vader hundreds, if not thousands, of failed clones of Starkiller before he got a pair of successful clones. That’s also not to mention how many failed clones Palpatine went through before he got a successful C’baoth clone, or C’baoth for Luke.

Long story short: Cloning is not a perfect science. It shouldn’t be instant perfection in the game either.

Kirash makes a strong, valid point. The 100% success is not something that should be happening.

Walldo, I disagree with your statement about having cloning in as a clanned option. Now that you know those issues exist, should it not be easy to have it be a requirement if someone develops cloning that this will become a service for the clan, one which either is going to be used over the course of the timeline, or taken back and given to people who will use it as the tool it is in a neutral way? It could be a great font for RP and give doctors a place to go, or incentive to even exist. When is the last time you have seen a medical main? A physician’s guild or something along those lines really could be an interesting idea, even if it was just an experiment next time around.

(Or, heck, what about how KDY and the Arkanian engineering clan were? Seemed to lean toward each side and provide services for them?) But forget I ever said this, because it is likely an awful idea.

Clone cost threshhold needs to be raised significantly. I cannot repeat it enough: it should cost more than your average cargo running ship to get a new lease on life!!