[OPEN LOW] Patients attending reception are seen in pretedermined order, grossly inefficient

It seems that when patients spawn on the map, they have already determined whether or not they wish to attend reception - and not only that - but the order in which they will be seen is also predetermined. The problem is that they invariably arrive at the reception counter in a different order than which they will be seen. This frequently causes unnecessary queuing, where the first person to arrive at the reception desk will stand around waiting for sometimes as many as five other people to show up and be served before they talk to the receptionist.

Not only is this inefficient, it's confusing to look at. Patients that are locked up in this waiting state have their patient card completely greyed out and cannot be interacted with whilst standing around the reception desk doing nothing.

Waiting areas currently work very strangely in general. I don't think they actually do anything except tell patients where to stand. Patients queue up for their appointments immediately and interacting with them at all in  this state has a high chance to break their AI and get them softlocked in a permanent waiting state (changing the department will almost always do this). This isn't a problem with hospitalized patients because those get moved by nurses only once they reach first position in queue.

(it also causes some very bad behavior in how patients pick which waiting area to use if there are multiple in one department I made a separate thread about this.)

Hi, thanks for the report, the reception queuing could be of course improved, let me keep this open.

cTrix wrote:Waiting areas currently work very strangely in general. I don't think they actually do anything except tell patients where to stand. Patients queue up for their appointments immediately and interacting with them at all in  this state has a high chance to break their AI and get them softlocked in a permanent waiting state (changing the department will almost always do this). This isn't a problem with hospitalized patients because those get moved by nurses only once they reach first position in queue.

(it also causes some very bad behavior in how patients pick which waiting area to use if  there are multiple in one department I made a separate thread about this.)

There are actually quite a few rules, I'll try to find the second report and reply there - I'd also love to get my hands on one of the cases of softlocked patients, I don't think I've seen this after changing departments, so this could be a pretty important one to investigate.

jan.oxymoron wrote:Hi, thanks for the report, the reception queuing could be of course improved, let me keep this open.

cTrix wrote:Waiting areas currently work very strangely in general. I don't think they actually do anything except tell patients where to stand. Patients queue up for their appointments immediately and interacting with them at all in  this state has a high chance to break their AI and get them softlocked in a permanent waiting state (changing the department will almost always do this). This isn't a problem with hospitalized patients because those get moved by nurses only once they reach first position in queue.

(it also causes some very bad behavior in how patients pick which waiting area to use if  there are multiple in one department I made a separate thread about this.)

There are actually quite a few rules, I'll try to find the second report and reply there - I'd also love to get my hands on one of the cases of softlocked patients, I don't think I've seen this after changing departments, so this could be a pretty important one to investigate.

To get a patient to softlock, just sent them to X-Ray and then change their department while they're "walking to seat". The X-Ray tech will never call them.
Alternatively, pick any waiting patient and change them to a department and then back while they're "walking to seat". They will end up never being called by any doctor a lot of the time.
Basically any patient that isn't sitting will break very easily if you mess with them. Patient is walking to X-Ray seat and you cancel his X-Ray he will break, etc.
This doesn't happen with hospital patients cus they don't walk anywhere and during transport by nurses their department changes are locked, and the nurse will only pick them up when their diagnostic rooms are already reserved so canceling the procedure will just mean the nurse puts them on the table and then picks them back up again, or the procedure can't be canceled at all as soon as the nurse goes to get a stretcher. No such protection for clinic patients.