Possible issue with coop games.

[BobTheJanitor]

Isn't a vast part of what makes MMOs successful is that they are substantially cooperative?

So-so. It's co-op versus the other guys though. The PvP and potential for griefing with open world PvP brings in a lot of people. Others (like myself) tend to hate open world PvP (probably the result of 5 years playing on a WoW PvP server before I finally kicked that habit). Also, at the high end you get into a meta-contest with other players who are ostensibly on your side over who gets to loot the nice gear. That could almost be considered PvP in its own strange way.

But anyway, having an MMO that had zero PvP might be a recipe for failure. I can't think of any, at least. Even the pure PvE servers in WoW had their battlegrounds and their arenas.

[x4000]

Team-based stuff is definitely tricky to classify.  Is it co-op or is it PvP?  There are attributes of both in there, and different people treat it different ways.  For me, I see it through the lens of co-op, since I can play with my wife and thus we can be doing something together, rather than one of us just watching the other play (which is lame and boring).  And I don't game on my own anymore.

For others, perhaps the competitive aspects are more important, and that's great.  But honestly, the amount of time I have for gaming means that I'm never going to be putting more than 70-100 hours into most games, and even that's pretty rare.  For the average FPS game, if it's a 10-20 hour solo/co-op experience I'm satisfied with that, as usually any more would just be padding out the experience.  There are always higher difficulties I can play on, or I can come back in a year or two when it's feeling more fresh again.

Playing with actual human opponents is both a blessing and a curse.  At advanced play, it can indeed be more interesting.  At lower levels, it can be extremely off-putting because there's no real difficulty controls.  Sure there is supposed gating to keep advanced players out in a lot of games, but it only works so-so. 

Warhawk is a good example of a game with this really exciting premise -- FPS with the ability to get into planes! -- but when you play with real opponents you wind up only being able to survive in the air for 10-60 seconds max, it seems.  That's... something of a letdown.  It's not exactly the Top Gun scenario most people picture, I don't think.  For my wife, it was so intensely frustrating that she just stayed on foot or in ground vehicles, but even that could get really frustrating.

Contrasted with us playing Unreal Tournament or Counter-Strike, we were able to play those against bots just for hours and hours and hours.  The bots would occasionally do something surprising, which added some spice to the affair, but largely we existed in a quasi-predictable space where we could test ourselves and see what interesting things we could do, and work on our skills, etc.  And that was the whole game for us.  To us, UT is as much a co-op game as L4D is, as that's the only way we play it.  To others, UT is the very definition of a PvP game.

The problem comes when, as has been happening lately, the bots are left out.  Then it's just PvP, unequivocally.

[Professor Paul1290]

Human players can be the best and worst features of a multiplayer game. On one hand they can provide a nice variation, but on the other hand it's hard to apply any sort of quality control over them.

For me the best part of multiplayer games is interacting with other players and I think coop has a lot to offer in this area because you don't have to protect players from each other as much in a cooperative game. You can allow players to affect each other in more ways without having to worry as much about things going wrong.
In PvP games, my ability to interact with the other person feels much more limited by necessity. I don't feel his/her presence much aside from being the opponent on the other side.

I think another part of this is that I used to often review recorded games for the purposes of coming up with new tactics, and unfortunately this has had a rather disillusioning effect on my opinion of PvP. My experiences in this regard have told me that that the majority of human opponents don't provide much more variation than can be provided by really hard bots/AI and players that provide a unique experience are few and far in between. It appears to me that outside of exceptions like more competitive matches at higher skill levels, much of the appeal of PvP has more to do with the psychological aspects of playing against another human player than the gameplay human opponents actually provide.

Admittedly, I do have a rather cynical and atypical view when it comes to this sort of thing and others have probably had much more positive experiences.
To be clear I still enjoy PvP games, but not nearly as I used to.

[TechSY730]

Human players can be the best and worst features of a multiplayer game. On one hand they can provide a nice variation, but on the other hand it's hard to apply any sort of quality control over them.

Yea, sometimes it feels like that PvP would be much more enjoyable without the other P.