Announcing Beta Test - The Clinic!
Posted by Owner-Quinn on 9 May 2021, 12:51 pm
Hello my furry, scaly, and feathery friends!
I am pleased to announce that we will be running a beta test for a new feature in the Doctor career called “The Clinic”!
The Clinic Please note that yours truly coded this from scratch, with most the work being done a year ago, so the likelihood of significant bugs is EXTREMELY high.
Therefore, the primary purpose of this beta test is to seek out such bugs and also stress test the code. I have created a related forum where I ask you to report any discovered bugs or exploits!
That being said, let me explain what The Clinic is all about!
If you go to any of your villagers’ Doctor career profiles, you will see a link to their Clinic.
About once an hour an algorithm will populate the Clinic’s “Sick Ward” with patients who are ill. Each patient will have an illness and ask for a specific item as treatment. They will also show you what your payment will be for treating them. The payment can be one or more of an item, FC, or a combination of both.
So how do you claim payment? Well, once a patient is fully treated, they will go into your Doctor’s “Discharges” area. From there, you can click a button to send them home, and you will receive your payment.
On a Doctor’s clinic page, you will also see a log and a site-wide leaderboard to track the most productive of healers!
Okay, so let’s get to some specifics to understand how it is supposed to work:
Every villager that knows the Doctor career has their own Clinic.
Every hour a certain number of new patients will spawn, and all Doctors will be have the chance to treat them.
Each Doctor can only give one (x1) medicine to a particular patient.
Some patients will only require one treatment with a medicine, and thus be immediately healed.
Other patients will require more than one treatment with the same medicine, and will require the help of multiple doctors to be ready for discharge. Each doctor who treated the patient will receive the payment (even multiple doctors from the same player!)
Some patients are “first come, first serve”, meaning they will automatically disappear from ALL Sick Wards once they are healed. These will usually be patients that require multiple medications.
Other patients will appear in Sick Wards for a full hour, and disappear on the next hour. These patients will only require one medicine, but every doctor will have a chance to heal them during the hour.
A patient must be discharged to receive payment. Patients will remain in the discharge area indefinitely if you do not discharge them.
Some illnesses are based on the original site illnesses, and by default will require their corresponding medicine. These are the same medicines that your doctors are able to craft!
Other illnesses are “custom” illnesses. Their treatments are other items in the game.
For the beta test we have a small pool of test patients. More may be added during the beta test.
The beta test is tentatively scheduled to go for at least 2 weeks.
For now, the patients have been designed to be relatively cost-neutral, not asking for anything of high value, while paying out rewards of relatively the same value.
So why participate? Well, it’ll make me happy! But also it’s a necessary test to make sure the code works as intended, and gives me the chance to tease our what needs to be fixed and improved before we roll out the Clinic for real!
At the end of the beta test, the Clinics will no longer be available. But assuming all goes well and I am able to make the necessary fixes, it’d come back as a full site feature. *fingers crossed*
Oh! And remember the leader board? For your trouble I’ll give every player who has treated at least 50 patients total during the test a special user profile trophy as thanks!
So please, check out the Clinic and let me know all the juicy bugs you find! Remember, continuing to use any discovered exploits is against site rules!
I will also use that forum to post any coding updates.
Thank you all, and happy healing!
I've been having a lot of fun with this new challenge all night!
Yes patients can stay waiting in discharge indefinitely. And they have no effect on what new patients spawn. So you could certainly end up with the same patient in discharge multiple times. This will be more apparent during beta with such a small test pool of patients that could spawn.
Ok, looks like I answered my own questions!
Sheelah , I don’t read anywhere about “disappearing forever”? Since you are referring to forgetting to discharge a character and then disappearing, they do not.
“ Patients will remain in the discharge area indefinitely if you do not discharge them. ”
You can basically have multiples of the same character, meaning even if you do forget to discharge patients, they will still reappear as a new patient, and you will not lose your reward.
Reads this..is completely confused. I'm not sure I understood any of it. It was way too confusing, at least to me. Especially, the disappearing forever part, some players might not log back in to discharge your character. this part doesn't seem too good.
TFW you spend half an hour waiting for your doctor to craft a medicine only to have the clinic refresh with new patients who don't need your medicine. T_T Oh well, I'm sure someone else will need it later.
Thank you so much for the new feature! It's nice to have a use for the doctor career again :)
Do patients ever come back into the ward? And if so, if we do not discharge them after healing, are we unable to get them as a patient in the future?
(Asking mostly because I’m curious what would happen should I never discharge them; would I eventually not get patients anymore?)
!!!
ooh, better activate my doctor
THANK YOU!!!! <3 <3 <3
Oregoncoast no the patients that appear in the clinic are effectively NPCs from around Furvilla. Player villagers will never get ill again. We do not believe in penalizing game mechanics because they are not fun. (illness was my least favourite mechanic early on as well!)