I think it could add another dynamic to the game that could give alchemists another reason to practice there craft and look for cures the certain diseases.

In RL, most diseases are got from other people. Town and cities were great sources of disease, partly because of poor sanitation practices, and partly because population density increased the transmission rate of communicable diseases. Increasing disease transmission in towns and cities would be nasty in-game, but it would be realistic.

Additionally, rural people were historically more susceptible to infection by communicable diseases because they had not encountered them as children. The transmission model suggested by the OP would work well for modeling that, characters born or brought up in towns could be presumed to have acquired some immunity prior to becoming player characters.

Overdoing this, however, could be game-breaking. Also, there is not really a good way to model disease lethality, because it would be permadeath, either immediately or by way of repeated soul-walks. Perhaps debuffing is the only tolerable way to represent the effects.

In truth, I'd rather there be persistent penalties to death by disease. You don't want a person to be able to walk into a plaguelands biome, contract everything under the sun, and then be able to explore that biome at leisure after dying and recovering. But that doesn't mean that death to a disease has to be consequence-free; rather than allowing them to keep killing a person, complete recovery could be made impossible for a player who experiences soft-death to a disease. For the rest of that life (or at least, for an extended period), the character could be subjected to an effect unique to the disease, such as lowered strength or temperature tolerance.

Alternately, repeatedly dying to a disease would still make sense in the context of the sort-of-mortality that CoE's characters will experience. If nothing else, they should still be contagious. It's hard to properly play out a plague when the dead just... get back up, in a non-zombie sort of fashion, none the worse for wear.

While in theory this is great to contemplate, the difficulty comes in, coding wise, with tempering the effect so it isn't too overdone. This sort of mechanic, while brilliant if done correctly is accessible to overdo and can take months to diagnose properly as being overdone, and potentially longer if a change is closer to where it needs to be but not quite on the mark. Additionally, if underdone you may potentially never see the results. So while I agree that this would be a fantastic mechanic, even as a medical professional in-game as I will be and would absolutely love such a mechanic to exist, to me, it is simply too easy for it to get out of hand.

I like it!

We already know there will be diseases, some quite bad like the searing plague.

@Aodhen,

I think there are probably good enough simple models of disease lethality versus transmissibility for some plausible limits to be applied to the game that still allow for local near-extermination events. TSP is perhaps a good model for a worst-case scenario, because some small settlements suffered 100% mortality. How 100% mortality applies to player characters is one of the conundrums that SBS will be required to address.

we already have diseases, so i could see this happening. part of the reason i'll always be wearing a mask is to help make sure my guy doesn't get sick. the last thing i need is to be bedridden. i'd sneeze all my money away

Posted By Pieoflords at 09:26 AM - Sun Apr 21 2019

we already have diseases, so i could see this happening. part of the reason i'll always be wearing a mask is to help make sure my guy doesn't get sick. the last thing i need is to be bedridden. i'd sneeze all my money away

Why would your guy wear a mask, if he did not have a notion of disease communicability through the air? He might wear a mask for airborne contaminants he can sense, but he probably would not think to do so for anything he could not sense, like microscopic particles unaccompanied by dust or odor.

while disease is going to be a thing in game, and it should be.....I don't think it should be as intense or common. Like every time I take dmg I don't think I should get sick and soulwalk from a different illness

Posted By Poldano at 03:02 AM - Mon Apr 22 2019

Posted By Pieoflords at 09:26 AM - Sun Apr 21 2019

we already have diseases, so i could see this happening. part of the reason i'll always be wearing a mask is to help make sure my guy doesn't get sick. the last thing i need is to be bedridden. i'd sneeze all my money away

Why would your guy wear a mask, if he did not have a notion of disease communicability through the air? He might wear a mask for airborne contaminants he can sense, but he probably would not think to do so for anything he could not sense, like microscopic particles unaccompanied by dust or odor.

In the real world people wore masks because they thought the smell was what made you sick. So they put some herbs and flowers in the mask to combat the smell. They sometimes worked a little, but mostly because it could form a small barrier to bacteria, and some of the herbs had slight antibiotic properties. Mostly a coincidence.

Posted By Viktoriusiii at

So I've just learned about the accidental plague in WoW. /watch?v=sbqKeFy8k

And this made me think that such a thing would be absolutely invaluable for this game, as it is very VERY easy to code in, while on the other hand gives a player driven narrative, that is not bound by "events" which often feel scripted and not really player influenced.

I know about the black death event (which is where I got my starter package), but I have pretty much read all devjournals and alls those other entries and don't think I have read all that much about disease. (yes certain races are more disease resistant, but there is a difference between disease and a temporary personal debuff)

The concept could be super simple: While in nature, you can randomly catch "super weak" diseases, which don't spread easily (only a 1/x0000 chance per player per second, while developing a temporary immunity is a 1/x000 chance), which will give the player an immunity for that disease for 1-2 ingame years. *

When beeing wounded and walking and working in dirt, you can get harder infections. **

When beeing bitten by "disease animals" like rats rabit wolves or whathaveyou, you get serious infections.

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When you encounter things like demons, bosses or by really REALLY bad luck when doing on of the previous, you can get a "plague-like" illness.

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*easy disease are easy to cure, develop immunity quickly and spread relatively rarely, while only debuffing stats by small amounts

**medium diseases could come in two forms: -high spread low impact or -low spread high impact

a low spread high impact disease is recommended to see a doctor, while a high spread low impact disease might be forced by law to get checked out by a doc

*disease carrying animals are the bane of every city, which is why there should always be some people looking out for rats to kill High spread, long carrying time which can lead to death

** those diseases are like the plague in the video or in RL. Evacuating the city or setting up healing camps in front of the city to heal those effected while checking newcomers is recommended. These things often look harmless in the first period, maybe even look like another disease, spreads and after breakout leads to massive penalties and eventual death if no cure is known or at least basic medicine isn't used to prolong the disease spreading.

I could fantasize a lot more, but I will keep it brief:

Diseases show symptoms (depending on stage and severity) Disease are spreading within 5-10 meters with a certain chance of spreading every second Your body is not a weakling and can fight back most diseases (some with basic treatments), but some need a special cure. Animals can also carry some diseases, but are not as likely as humans to catch it Also dead bodies (obviously) are perfect transmitters.

Any word on something like this beeing in the game? Because if not... it seems to me like not much work (only balancing work), just implement debuffs that check the surrounding and roll the dice if it is transmitted... and the benefits of such a system are immeasuable. Wars can impact this There are more jobs (even low wage ones like catching/killing rats) It can completely change the day to day playstyle if a huge city is effected by one of those diseases, breathing life into a "stale" everyday game.

Any thoughts?

Two things. First, and I speak as a primary source here, there was nothing "accidental" about the spread of what I'm assuming is the boiling blood plague (link is dead). That was intentional and the bots in the AH got what was coming to them.

Second: I don't know about the specific mechanics but a heartily endorse the idea of disease spread being tied to some type of weakness especially as it pertains to a siege. Lack of food leading to weakness leading to greater sickness rates... I think that would be an excellent analog between healthy and starving to death.