In the laser simulation when pumping photons into a two-state system, you could adjust the lifetime of how long an excited atom stays excited before it releases its energy in the form of a photon. if you decrease the lifetime of the excited state, what happens?

there won't be enough atoms that are excited around to undergo stimulated emmision

Explanation:

Stimulated Emission is the process used in laser operations to produce photons.

In stimulated emission a passer-by photon stimulates the atom to emit a photon, identical to the passer-by photon, immediately. The con to this is that the same passer-by photon could instead get absorbed by a de-excited atom.  Therefore, aside of atom excitation we need to use witty ways to insure that there are more excited atoms that could use the passer-by photon for stimulated emission than there are de-excited atoms.

Photons produced by this stimulation have the same wavelength which enables efficiency as all photons are emitted into the same node.