Thoughts on cooperative game modes

[Absolute Zero]

I seriously don't know how not to start this without sounding awkward. But yeah I have to confess that a few stuff about chillax and how disgusting people think it is, inspired me to make this thread. Sure, the plagiarism is an assholish move, but let's take that out of this thread, shall we?

At the hopes of possibly making this discussion meaningful for SNS events and mappers, the major point of this thread is to express your thoughts on cooperative game modes and what kind of situations were cool/fun for you. I will start. Yes it was in chillax, but don't judge me and the comment below was supposed to be in another topic, but I decided to create a new topic for it since it was potentially off-topic. So here is a direct copy/paste.

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Chillax tends to be tons of fun (for a niche, I guess) because people stop being utter retards aiming for kill counts and actually attempt to cooperate. Heck, I still remember an apparently boring map, starting in one big square room with four doors, you can't beat that shit if your attacks aren't planned unless there are an extremely high amount of players. In order to gain space, we (around six players I think) distributed our attacks in two corridors instead of all the four, every corridor had space for what, 3 players to go through at the same time? I think so. Then we cleaned the room invaded by monsters of the other two corridors we weren't attacking. That was one of the most fun and memorable coop game I have had, simply because we were forced to cooperate, and not a game full of speedrun/kill whores (note: very few maps have that). Attempt to speedrun there and you are a dead burned meat. Try to mindlessly run to a room first than your team mates because you want to be top monster killer and you will be cornered and raped the way you deserve. Attempt a badly planned crowd control in a room and you are cornered as well. Ignore "arch-vile towers" without cover and you are sniped and exploded mercilessly.

For reference, I'm talking about chillax v9.7.1, didn't try the newer ones yet.

I'm not saying that because it's chillax, think for a few seconds: what the heck is COOPERATIVE? Eternall is a good wad, for single-player, but it's boring as a cooperative map pack because the corridors are often too tight for at least two players work together. Alien vendetta is also a good wad, but I don't think it is supposed to be played with 10, 20, hell, 64 players. It ultimately sucks for high amount of players.

There are gameplay mods like complex doom and hard doom. sure they make a map awesomely hard, but with it does have quite a few monsters that are stupidly OP and often appears in extremely tight places (tl;dr i hate gameplay mods without their own map pack). I can't blame people for picking the wrong maps for said mods either.

[mifu]

I am personally a fan of cooperative games and this also goes for invasion.

I personally Hate chillax, but I like Drown in Blood and Invasion UAC the best if we are talking infinite ammo wads.

[Slim]

I really enjoy Survivals that aren't easy, I like them more difficult and need of teamwork, kinda like the Complex Doom servers. They require more thought compared to vanilla survival. More think first shoot second, that's just how I like it, but not like bullshit wads like Chillax vanilla. That's insane.

[Dark Mantis]

I prefer vanilla wads for 1 life (realistic) survival. Complex Doom is ok, but only if played with a bunch of players. It can be fun and frustating at the same time since most maps/wads have horrible traps and monster placement in them. Usually it's fun until you die.
For playing coop/survival with a handful of players I still prefer Nightmare coop/surv though (mainly the second one). It's been a while since I last played it :/

[Combinebobnt]

Try playing with friends instead of pub survival. You will see the rare beast "teamwork" more often that way.

[Laggy Blazko]

To me, coop (or "co-op", without life limit) is the gamemode where you screw around, kill fast and speedrun maps. Very funny, but it gets old quickly.
Survival actually requires some skill, so I prefer it over regular coop. I'm fine with 1 live survival, but I often play (and make) servers with 2 or 3 lives so I can use the first lives to do what I would usually do in coop and play a little more seriously on the last lives.
I don't play Chillax only because I'm not THAT skilled (plus, it lags a lot on my cheap laptop). I'm in a... "Hell Revealed 1" level.

(PS: I remember when I used to play coop in Quake. The frag counter was on and people would kill other players for fun. Good times, good times.)

[ARGENTVM]

Try playing with friends instead of pub survival. You will see the rare beast "teamwork" more often that way.

This (especially if the group is on TS3/Mumble/et cetera). Otherwise it's hard to coordinate survival with randoms, especially with people who will come in and take all of the items, then proceed to die from a zombieman about thirty seconds later and rage quit. This is more annoying though when item respawn is off, which I find to add more challenge to survival as long as some terrible pwad that makes monsters op isn't added on. At least with this you won't have to deal with them again next round, but I find that survival has a lot of rage quitting.

As for Item Respawn, I find it necessary to be on if the wad doesn't add multiplayer ammo/health (I find that many don't or that it varies from map to map), balance ammo/health based on number of players, or doesn't spam ammo enough to compensate for having 4+ players.

I only find cooperative useful for wad testing. I don't find having infinite lives to be fun as there's not much of a challenge in it.

[Cruduxy]

Are you playing a different game? I've never seen players fighting over kill counts except in that stupid chillax. And the teamwork you talk about is just a way to avoid getting enslaved to grind a few hours to kill monsters using a door\chokepoint. Even diablo is less grindy than chillax.

Tbh the reason major mappacks suck on multiplayer is that they are designed for singleplayer with multiplayer almost always designed for coop and killing a trillion monsters in it without fear of dying -or sometimes the maps almost always break online-. If anything only a map specifically designed for multiplayer would be good with vanilla multiplayer without needing ohko monsters and extra stuff.

[ARGENTVM]

Are you playing a different game? I've never seen players fighting over kill counts except in that stupid chillax.

Heh, do they actually go on a full on argument or is it just teasing like 'got more kills than you gg'?

And the teamwork you talk about is just a way to avoid getting enslaved to grind a few hours to kill monsters using a door\chokepoint. Even diablo is less grindy than chillax.

Not entirely. It's a better way to ensure that teammates don't die at critical points and it helps to make the map go along faster sometimes. I don't play chillax or diablo so I'm not familiar with standing at chokepoint standoffs for an hour or so.

Tbh the reason major mappacks suck on multiplayer is that they are designed for singleplayer with multiplayer almost always designed for coop and killing a trillion monsters in it without fear of dying -or sometimes the maps almost always break online-. If anything only a map specifically designed for multiplayer would be good with vanilla multiplayer without needing ohko monsters and extra stuff.

I find that the among the largest of problems is that most wads don't compensate ammo/health for extra players, but may gladly add monsters for multiplayer. It would also be nice to see ammo/health/monsters based off the number of players (even TNT did this in some maps). Sometimes extra pwads or decorate can also ruin survival, especially if there are extensive modifications that make the map very annoying to play (example: you can't snipe hitscanners via chaingun-tapping, etc. but they can snipe you).

Addendum: In addition, too many players can also cause survival to go bad on wads that won't support many players in multiplayer, especially if there is no item respawn.

[Catastrophe]

I dunno why we don't just play slaughter maps that have quality like Sunder.

[Absolute Zero]

I've never seen players fighting over kill counts except in that stupid chillax. And the teamwork you talk about is just a way to avoid getting enslaved to grind a few hours to kill monsters using a door\chokepoint.

Does that mean all other map packs are played by saints who doesn't attempt any form of competition (laugh all you want) in coop games? Usually, these "competitive" guys aims at least one of these things:

1 - Speedrun (I pressed the exit switch first 360quickyoloscoped!11)
2 - Kill counts (jajaja nab i killed moar monstars than j00, look mah l33t sk1llz)
3 - Total damage done

From the variables above, the first often kills the fun of those who doesn't know the map. Unless the consensus between players is that one has to reach the exit first, that way it shouldn't be an issue. I usually dislike speedrunners, unless I know a map pack and attempt to speedrun myself too. Chillax and other slaughter coop map packs literally hammer down every kind of asshole that attempts to speedrun. On events like SNS, speedrunning is a glaring, big no-no. It's not uncommon to see players lost there.

Now about the teamwork I described: even if the situation seemed pretty simple, team work happened there, regardless of the tactics or resources used.

[Slyfox]

I dunno why we don't just play slaughter maps that have quality like Sunder.

I remember my favorite slaughter maps back in the day were drown in blood and coopbuildm ( the only infinite ammo wads I can enjoy) they were 30x better than chilax and still are.

[Laggy Blazko]

I don't understand the hate to speedrunners (as long as they ask before exiting, heheh). Playing fast is funny. Getting more points seems like an interesting challenge, too.

[Medicris]

I don't understand the hate to speedrunners (as long as they ask before exiting, heheh). Playing fast is funny. Getting more points seems like an interesting challenge, too.

Because for a lot of people, hopping onto an shooting game online is usually with the intent of having fun shooting things.

Not so much having one dude run ahead, jump over everything, rocketjump into the window and hit the exit switch while everyone's enjoying themselves.

But hey, I guess that's what you get for playing on a server anyone can join. I'd take a controlled group on Survival over pub most of the time, especially over TS or something.

[Empyre]

I put features in my maps to try to thwart speed runners.

[Cruduxy]

Whenever I join SNS or complex there rarely if ever anyone who tries to speedrun and almost everyone doesn't know the maps and spend 20 minutes wandering around with hope someone who knows it join -And sometimes the map broke because someone died in a specific location.

And its funny you mention speedrunners because am sure the people who go out of their to skip half the maps in chillax with rocketjumps aren't similar. Or those who release a dreadfull 1000 caco because chillax is the easiest map pack in existance to ruin the game for everyone else.

[Hardbash]

The only time I truly cooperated with someone was on map13 of Chillax. IIRC, I didn't stick around for the end of the map. Outside life stuff (crazy ikr)! I would love to actually cooperate strategically with someone though.

[Zanieon]

I once tried be hardcore but for now i just keep going on Hunter's Moon which needs more balance and somethings to remake.

I always enjoyed cooperative since i started play Doom multiplayer in ZDaemon back on 2006, damn i played every day the so stupid Coopbuild with supergun2 and enjoyed alot that time, well, now i just find it extremely stupid, but if is to count who kills more still had some competition there.

Actually i play cooperative more to test my own skills against monsters, with or without lag, being newschool or not (well, vanilla monsters is kinda retard after 20 years fighting them), still i play in coop more because it's fun see others in the same map with you killing everyone around.

All mods i do, i always try focus in cooperative, be survival or not, i do because Doom is too strict to single-player yet, most maps u find around is desired for it (exception for Slaughterfest Wads).

[Untitled]

Well, this seems like an interesting discussion, so I'm gonna jump in.

Generally speaking, I find that most wads play fairly well with 1-4, maybe up to 8 players, but issues start arising past that, because, like some posters have mentioned, ammo starts becoming a problem.

The solution isn't necessarily to make maps that scale perfectly; while that'd be nice, that's not really possible given how most wads (remember, most of these survival wads are PrBoom survival wads) only have "Cooperative" and "Not Cooperative" as tools for scaling the difficulty.

I thought UAC Ultra MAP10 was pretty ingenious; it removes the BFG in multiplayer, iirc.

Typically? If you have lots and lots of players, the best solution is to play really really large maps; maps large enough for players to start wandering around. Turn on sv_doubleammo just for good measure (or sv_itemrespawn, if it's that unforgiving on pickups).

The reverse problem is that, if you're playing in survival, of course, and you die early in a map this large, you're gonna be stuck basically forever until the horde of players finish the map.

Screw Chillax.

I have to admit; I'm speaking from a very different perspective from everyone else, because I run Stronghold - well, SamsaraHold, but I'm pretty much the sole person keeping stronghold alive at this point - and in Stronghold, the game does scale ammo counts, heal-pack counts, monster counts, powerup counts, everything counts.

As insane as this sounds, this only works because literally 100% of pickups are given through ammo/health pads (and the ammo pads spawn things via ACS), so it's not something one could do conventionally.

And even then, stronghold's scaling wasn't perfect; there are several times where linearly scaling how many monsters teleport in doesn't actually give you a proper difficulty curve; one player can probably SSG a Boss Monster, 8 players probably can't SSG 8 Boss Monsters.

And even then, map design comes into play - as people have mentioned, some maps just aren't suited (at all) for certain playercounts.

I've been doing a lot to improve that, though. Honestly, SamsaraHold at insane playercounts might be fun, until everyone gets kicked from the server for packet loss. (SamsaraHold induces a truly ridiculous amount of packeting when things start going wrong. It's my only standing issue.)

In my opinion?

Although I've played a lot of wads that don't scale well; I can't really blame them because good multiplayer scaling is very difficult.

Admittedly, I've never been one for making stances, but it's my two-cents on the matter.

[troll]actually it's my 3-cents because obviously I'm more important than others[/troll]

[Cruduxy]

If maps stopped handing out Artifacts -megasphere, soul etc- and blue armor even vanilla would be a bit more challenging, Of course without hordes of enemies. Most map in multiplayer just turn into slaughterfests with pickups and monsters everywhere. Or are balanced for up to four players with all respawns being off. And eventually turn into the same hold bfg fire while mowing down 100 -insert enemy type- over and over.

Anyway people seem to having mis-interepted the type of "a$$holes" that ruin the fun:
A) Players who go for kills\points : TL;DR : MAX all maps noobs why exit with 1 imp alive.
They are playing in a pub for reference. Why on earth do they need to kill ALL and every monters in the map? Some maps would end 20-60 minutes faster instead of -I won't be a coward must kill everything-. Usually they are the last players alive and mostly they shoot a shot then run behind a corner. Rinse and Repeat. Extra points if they run for ammo\health everytime. I know this is the majority of people I found in pubs and don't care to say their way of playing is boring to death both trying it or spectating them.
ARGENTVM : Yes they measure "skill" by kills or points and it wasn't sarcasm or teasing just annoying players.

B) Speedrunners : TL;DR Iwad trolls.
Didn't mean the players who go to doom 2 and finish every map in less than 2 minutes. I meant the people who go to a "hard" map with a clear strategy to beat the map. They won't pacifiest the map and usually just fight with other players and help people find their way. If they are last alive they might speedrun as a last resort.
People -Especially mappers- seem to have a lot of hate for any kind of speedrunning. Why don't they just lock areas that must be fought instead of putting archviles and cybers around everything.

Offtopic : This isn't Left 4 Dead or Killing Floor. its DOOM where the playstyle is fast fights with bullethells and other shit. Enforcing teamwork in it is just silly. People should be allowed to play the playstyle they prefer instead of following really stupid map designs to enforce one. Maps that need 30-60 minutes each don't really suit pub if they have instakill traps or 2000 enemies per room.

Untitled ever considered buffing up enemies with more players instead of adding more enemies to waves -Kinda like in shotgun frenzy-? I know it isn't like the original stronghold but it plays a lot better in multiplayer.