Suggestion - Smaller COOP teams.

This I think it one of the core problems with COOP at the moment. Ill make a few points and encourage a discourse of fors and againsts.

I think at the moment the teams we have at the moment make the game too easy. Rather than making the bots more difficult I think the teams should be smaller. Having a meaningful impact in a game with 8 or more players is hard and most of the time its 2-3 players that carry the rest.

Honestly its enough that we have to compete against the bots let alone against the team to do well and get points. I think smaller teams will encourage slower more meaningful team work and a lot more fun. I know that the games iv enjoyed the most are the ones where its been me and 3 others. Nearly out of ammo, trying to make it through this wave to get to the next objective. Potentially smaller teams could mean the introduction of medics or maybe wounding mechanics.

Smaller teams would also mean team composition would be more important. Do you take the two slots it needs to call in support or do you forgo that to get more utility in the team? etc etc.

At the very least I would like to see this as an option in the setup menu. I think this would really add some depth to the game and allow teams to gel more and learn to work together.

In my opinion, we should reduce supply points from 20 to 10. It'll get people to be more careful of what they choose and as you get more kills you get more SP like in previous titles.

On my Very Not Fun servers, I stripped the game down to 4 classes, and 6 players. It made things way more streamlined, we could move as a death ball or split into 2x 3-man fire teams. 8 would be good if there was any sort of teamplay mechanics in this game, but given how the best way to play is to rush around and solo cap, having fewer players can reduce the annoyance of that.

(Regarding coop checkpoint only) I've noticed this in both Insurgency (2014) and Sandstorm. During times with 6 players and below, the game's pace changes. Players usually slow down and work together more often.

In Sandstorm, comparing servers with 10-16 players vs 4-6 is very noticeable. I actually have my Sandstorm server limited to 6 players.

It typically takes 1 player to rush and a snowball effect occurs. Another player doesn't want to be left behind with fewer enemies to kill, so they catch up. Then the next player does it and so on.

If we're having 8 player default co-op checkpoint, having more things sound like a preferred direction given the running simulator pacing of the map design/game. A couple of mini-checkpoints that need to be unlocked in areas/buildings before the team proceeds to capture the next main (A, B C...) checkpoint to (optionally) split the teams and actually utilize the often uncharted buildings and areas might help.

Compared to Insurgency (2014), Sandstorm's map design is like asking a painter to paint a busy shot of a city on a giant canvas vs a smaller one in a specific amount of time. More attention and time and detail per square inch is given to the smaller canvas whereas the larger canvas is more thinly stretched and diluted in order to fill in the blank space. Also trying to make it multi-purpose for both co-op and PVP is going to be a bigger hurdle because of balancing each side's advantages and respawn areas.

I really like @thisisjames idea of sub/side objectives between the main objectives to utilise the map space better. I think that the maps are actually quite well made and detailed, but the problem is that we don't really see much of them since we're fighting for rhe same fixed objectives all the time.

Side objectives (especially dynamic ones) might be a great way to introduce more dynamism into the game mode by forcing teams to split up and otherwise change how they work through the map. So instead of all concentrating on a single point, the team may have to tackle 2 points simultaneously, or do them one by one.

As for rushing, I agree that it's very cancerous towards the pace and enjoyment of the game in general, and I think that it needs to be addressed in 3 ways:-

  1. Increasing the cost of the rushers' best friend, the incendiary grenade. This single grenade is hands down way too effective for its cost; it kills instantly, destroys caches and also does decent area denial in a pinch.
  2. Increasing the lethality of all weapons against unarmoured foes, which simultaneously makes Battle Rifles less meta and makes the preferred no armour rush loadout less dominant by introducing appreciable downsides to it.
  3. Improving the AI so that it defends better; doing stuff like using and being affected by suppression, retreating instead of charging blindly, setting up ambushes, and (most importantly) better defending open stretches by setting up kill zones.

All this IMO, can curb the rampant rushing and allow for a more measured pace of combat, with appropriate penalties for reckless rushing and a more rewarding challenge in co-op which actually rewards the proper use of all tools available to the players (such as smoke and flashbangs, which one rarely sees due to the rampant rushing).

Hellp all.

Thank you for your feedback! This will be passed on to the team!

Having options for players to call votes for would be nice, i.e more bots per player.

Some servers on the custom list restrict players to less than 8 so you can play in a small specialist team and even change roles if need be.