I know you are more about worldserver technology and such, but if you could change enemy health and AI, then Quake 2 would be alot more playable than it is now. There are some things we can learn from the cooperative mode in Halo (Xbox game). I don't like the game at all, but its cooperative mode appeals to my brother and one of my best friends, while a Quake2 cooperative game does not.

Lets admit it; Quake2 cooperative feels like you are playing singleplayer with half-items and half-enemies in the level already dead or accuired. I play the game anyways, but some other people won't.

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The Master Chef (player in Halo) runs really slow compared to the Quake2 guy. Because he moves so slow, it is hard to lose your teammate unless you run behind a few corners, and even that is tough because the areas are wide and usually open. In Quake 2, the player runs very quickly; so quick that you can be four-five rooms away before your partner even notices you are gone.

I love the fast-paced action of Quake 2, but I know it wouldn't hurt to slow down the speed. I know this because I have beaten the whole game with autorun off just to challenge myself (I had to use +speed on a certain pit of spikes, but thats it). The only problem with slowing down the player is that those robot dogs deal too much damage and their attack lasts 1.5 seconds too long. Maybe the flight speed of the grenades from those grenade-launching guys could be reduced by a fraction of a second. Those enemies who use the railgun should also get an additional 0.2 second delay in shooting their railgun.

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The Master Chef's enemies come from two-three directions and take more than 5 seconds to kill. But in Quake2 the enemies die before a second player even has the opportunity to shoot at them. The game gets intense as soon as my partner and I surround a group of four enemies, but the excitement dies down quickly because we killed them too quickly.

A good idea would be to impliment a kind of system where the enemies gain 160% additional health for every player in the game. The 100% because there are two of you, plus the 60% because the enemy can only attack one of you at a time anyways. A full game of 4 players would have enemies at 580% health. 1x100% + 3x160% = 580%.

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In Halo, there are areas where the game needs to load additional level information to the Xbox, and with these transitions, the one player who is not stepping through the transition area will be teleported to the transition area. Cause only one part of the level can be loaded at a time and both players have to be togethre for that to happen. This is a very convenient way to make sure players stay together. Maybe we can manually set up entities where if one player passes over the base area of the entity, and the other players are not within a range of the entity, those players get teleported into the room. We would have to manually place these entities into the game using XML rules, but I can already think of good locations to put them.

most of these changes seem pretty realistic. I dont know much about the worldserver or what variables it is able to mess with but i dont think it would take much code at all to change and these little tweaks might help playbility and encurage cooperation.

I know this isn't a vote thing but I vote for these changes

It is possible to create xmlrules files with additional items and enemies, depending the number of players in the game.
There is a special keyword used in xmlrules files for that :

[random_1_player_20] is converted into 20 x number of players (from 20 for 1 player to 80 for 4)
It can be used into <switch random> tag.
Sample : 20% chance of adding a gunner if 1 player, 80% if 4 players


It is already used for additional monsters in base2.

The health point of each monster proportional to player number seem to be a good idea. A mix of most HP and more monster could be ideal.

I'm not very enjoyed in changing the speed of the player.

I also don't really want to force players to play near. There is a HUD with direction and distance for helping.

Except the merge of the worlserver database with the user-list of the future coopordie forum, I don't planning a lot of work on the coopordie Quake2 mod. I have already started to work on a little tremulous mod...

I know this is an old post, but I had to throw my opinion in.

I don't like the idea of increasing the HP of the monsters when more players are added. Increasing the the number of monsters I find works better. Sven Coop has monsters with upped HP and I find it very irritating, the human grunts for example just take unbelieveable amount of damage, and I find it just makes your weapons (and by extension, you) feel impotent and weak. I just find it more fun having an army of players cutting down an army of monsters than having four guys banging on one grunt.

I have to whole heartedly agree with that. Increasing monster HP really changes the dynamics of the gameplay. If you want to make it harder, simply add more monsters. *thumbs up*