Lately I've been running LittleBigPlanet 2 with p-p-j. The game isn't super stable, and on top of that we live in different continents, so one of us almost always disconnects or crashes the game at least once per run; we consider ourselves lucky if we can make it through the whole run together. We're trying to figure out what to do when a disconnect happens.
When one player disconnects or crashes, the other player stays in the game and can still continue to play. Therefore the most obvious option when this happens is for the host player to keep playing and making progress, then the disconnected player can join as soon as they're able. However I feel like this goes against the whole spirit of a co-op run, which involves beating the entire game as a team. I feel like people could abuse this case by starting a run together, disconnecting intentionally, and rejoining only during faster co-op tricks to avoid getting in each others' ways. Which is meh.
The second option is to wait at the most recently activated checkpoint while the disconnected player tries to reconnect. This is what we've been doing since the beginning, but given how often crashes occur and how long it takes to restart the console, boot up the game, and rejoin, it's gotten quite infuriating (just today we were 2 minutes ahead of PB pace, only for p-p-j's game to crash, which led to me spending all that time ahead waiting for him to come back). We could keep this rule but pause the timer until the player joins again, but from an RTA perspective this is kinda lame. However, this forces the entire run to be completed together without consistently losing time due to the game's network instability, which is definitely a plus.
We haven't thought of any other solutions; right now I'm kinda leaning towards the first option, as long as it isn't abused, but making sure it isn't abused to make a "solo run with co-op strats sometimes" is kinda arbitrary. I wanted to know how other co-op games handle these kinds of problems. Thanks!
When one player disconnects or crashes, the other player stays in the game and can still continue to play. Therefore the most obvious option when this happens is for the host player to keep playing and making progress, then the disconnected player can join as soon as they're able. However I feel like this goes against the whole spirit of a co-op run, which involves beating the entire game as a team. I feel like people could abuse this case by starting a run together, disconnecting intentionally, and rejoining only during faster co-op tricks to avoid getting in each others' ways. Which is meh.
The second option is to wait at the most recently activated checkpoint while the disconnected player tries to reconnect. This is what we've been doing since the beginning, but given how often crashes occur and how long it takes to restart the console, boot up the game, and rejoin, it's gotten quite infuriating (just today we were 2 minutes ahead of PB pace, only for p-p-j's game to crash, which led to me spending all that time ahead waiting for him to come back). We could keep this rule but pause the timer until the player joins again, but from an RTA perspective this is kinda lame. However, this forces the entire run to be completed together without consistently losing time due to the game's network instability, which is definitely a plus.
We haven't thought of any other solutions; right now I'm kinda leaning towards the first option, as long as it isn't abused, but making sure it isn't abused to make a "solo run with co-op strats sometimes" is kinda arbitrary. I wanted to know how other co-op games handle these kinds of problems. Thanks!
Thread title: