u/Rasputin5332

Not sure if this is one of those questions that are basically going into the void (because most people, me included, treat co-op as an afterthought at best) but I just gotta ask it because I have a worm in my head yearning for it.

Basically, my tribe for Darktide on Gameram kind of temporarily disbanded this summer, vacations etc, and I’m turning from horde shooters to ARPGs again. TBH its so hot that I really can’t think these days, and mowing down mobs is the perfect chill under my AC (that’s btw blowing straight into my head, so I might be already brain damaged atm of writing this)... but I want to play that in co-op as well, just chill and chat with someone while we’re grindign together.

Sadly I know that even the live service games are usually optimised terribly for playing with other people. The difficulty scaling is either nonexistent or completely unhinged, and half the time grouping up just means one overgeared friend deletes the screen while everyone else jogs behind picking up scraps. The genre kind of assumes you're a lone wolf, and most of us play these games solo anyway. Which is how I usually play too, but now I’m in a coop mood.

It’s weird because I mostly prefer the singleplayer games like Grim Dawn/ Titan Quest and I even play Last Epoch mostly in legacy or solo found. Even the ones I’m looking forward to now (like The Dark West) are all singleplayer compact experience. But I've always had a soft spot for coop in ARPGs even tho it was never the focus, since my real love of the genre started in Diablo 2, played in the most carefee, brainless way imaginable with my best mate. Just the two of us mowing through Baal runs and babbling, OH and killing each other for those meme ears ofc

I always remember those times fondly, so I guess that’s it. So I’m tryna figure out whether some kinda co-op scene actually still exists somewhere, and which games have it. I know Path of Exile 2 and Last Epoch technically support it, and Grim Dawn has its devoted coop crow from some old threads I been reading. But I never really tried anything but classic Diablo 2 in coop, nor where I would get a partner for it..

I just want that Diablo 2 energy back - low pressure, easy to just drop into with a friend/ or random friend to be. Where would you point me for this kinda experience?

For me it's just games that are grindy, and that blow me with numbers and reward me for indulging my inner loot goblin.

It's been part of my character almost, since I was a kid. Troubled family, lots of yelling and I would blast Diablo 2 with metal to chill out and block out all the awful shit.

This has led me to across Path of Exile and Last Epoch (probably my favorites) to Grim Dawn and even trying Diablo 4 even though I hate Newblizz with a burning passion.

All these games kind of let you set up your character and then just click and click and see the effects of those builds. It almost feels like it's an idle game if I turn off just enough, becomes almost like meditation for me. It's the reason I played WoW, it's the reason I played Runescape, it was even the reason I tried newer MMOs that are crafting based (Loftia is the one my wife is hyped for)

It's just that bliss of knowing all you need to do is click and those numbers will increase. Like, I know objectively I could be putting that time into something more productive.

But that's the thing, I can just pick them up and enjoy the burst even if it's like for an hour. Playing for whole days is such an incomprehensible thing for me now, but I still like to just turn off and grind now. FPS are also good but these games just require no reflexes at all, where for FPS I need to be focused to have any sort of fun (in pvp... you know how it is)

But that's me more or less. What is that mental state you chase after work in gaming?

Never in fifteen years together did I manage to get my wife to touch a game, not once, until this one. 

I've watched her humor me from the couch plenty of times, but the controller may as well have been a live wire to her. Split Fiction finally changed that, and I can’t not be emotional about it.

It works because it never asks her to already be a gamer, I think that’s a major part. It's built for two people from the ground up, so there's no solo skill floor to clear. The whole thing drags you both along through wild sci-fi and fantasy worlds that keep reinventing themselves every twenty minutes. She didn't have to learn "gaming" first nor be immersed in it as a concept as I was from childhood. She just had to press forward and react, and the game met her, and me alongside her, exactly where we were.

Mostly though I just loved watching her forget to be self-conscious about it. About an hour in she was actually arguing with me about which way to go. The friend's pass meant trying it cost her nothing, so her last excuse was already gone. By the end she was the one asking when we'd play next (a first in fifteen years, believe me).

I don't know if it'll turn her into a lifelong gamer, and truthfully that was never the point. (I do hope she will be down for It Takes Two soon though, and possibly Hela and Water Me & You when they come out!)

At the very least, it gave the two of us a thing to do together that's ours now, and after all this time that feels like something rare and good. 

Anyone else here get a partner into it the same way?

This might sound weird to you (my choice of games, maybe) because it’s so subjective and depends on what time of the game’s lifecycle you happened to land in.

Everyone agrees most multiplayer (especially pvp-centric multiplayer games) feel better in the beginning before people - as a wise man once said - optimize the ever loving shit out of the fun. But PvP might be the odd example cuz they just breed toxicity at some point because competition between people will always produce losers, and losing (as in the process of knowing ya gonna lose) just ain’t fun. So in pvp games it just depends on so many factors, whether you’ll have a good time or not and teammate quality can vary so much by rank and even by time of day/ day of the week.

But if we aren’t talking PvP, there’s only one game that I had the most wholesome time in, 9/10 times awesome and 10/10 never bad even if you do fail because someone accidently blew you up.

I’m talking about Deep Rock Galactic of course! I swear that game has the friendliest playerbase I've ever seen in multiplayer. You join a random lobby and people are already ROCKS AND STONES BROTHER before you've even picked what you gonna play. I sometimes play this with my IRL bros, and sometimes with the odd person who matches with me on Gameram (where I forgot what games I even set as my “currently playing” sometimes) but deep down, it’s not even important because every single person you get here is 99% odds of being chill.

Deep Rock is also one of the best examples of a game with a kind of organic hype that’s almost contagious and proves that a chill (mental) environment like that creates chill players I think. Even if the game itself is really stressful sometimes (not for a real dwarf of course!!!)

Some of my best gaming random peripheral memories are from random matchmaking where you end up vibing with strangers who play like they've known you for years, and those moments CAN feel even more special than any coordinated squad sessions, sometimes. 

This is why I’m asking this - what games have YOU had the best random teammates in? It’s OK even if it’s a dead game now or something that’s not in vogue right now. We’re talking best random matchmaking systems (and chill playerbases) that just overlapped perfectly in a game in one point of its lifecycle.. and you were there to see it!

AI has transformed everything leading up to outreach, to the point where it can all be autonomous; it finds leads, decides who/what matters, writes targeted outreach automatically etc. But on the other hand, the actual sending/execution infrastructure still works almost the same way it did before AI, even after all the progress.

When you think about it, even with "smarter" AI generated outreach, platforms like LinkedIn observes behaviour through patterns and detects AI-esque automation, not only whether it was necessarily written by AI. This means the underlying constraint comes down to how human the sending behavior looks over time, not how well written the message is. 

I tried wiring an agent into send timing a few months ago, and my idea was: let it decide when each prospect is most likely online, and create the human-like dynamic delay between the initial "connecting" and the 1st direct message- with the aim of basically replacing fixed time windows with ‘smart’ pacing.

Just two weeks in, my reply rate was down almost 15%, with the pause queue blowing up by a third!

It seems like the main issue was the agent's overly cautious behavior funnily enough, in ways which I couldn't debug or predict fast enough. Felt like the "more human timing" input was taken too literally, so I just backed out.

Of course, naturally most delivery platforms have built in AI features, like Expandi’s response detection distinction which is actually pretty solid when you set it up correctly. Or the smart send timing element of MeetAlfred’s, although I’ve used them only a few times so I can’t really say too much about it. When you strip it down, it’s mostly edge-case improvements, nothing really rethinks how outbound delivery is structured at a fundamental level. I mean, the tools still do an amazing job, don’t get me wrong, and they deliver exactly what they’re supposed to, but I’ve just been wondering if this AI era will bring any foundation-level changes to how outreach is done. Will, for example, Expandi or even Waalaxy be able to track activities across specific keywords, maybe understand the context of the comments even, and reach out to the prospects who match a certain criteria, without any human input?

So what it comes down to, is whether the next step in delivery is gonna be agent-driven send scheduling, or is the core operating model that we see in the tools basically locked in, with only incremental safety and optimization improvements coming?

For a time, I think most cozy suggestions I got on Steam were some variety of grindy sim, usually based on farming or some other cottagecore activities. I think for some games, their definition of cozy literally was just cozy = grinding in a pleasantly colored game with bright colors. I understand how influential Stardew Valley was and how much money it’s pulled in. It’s anything if not deserved, the game is an absolute classic and the dev will be remembered as a legend for what he pulled off solo with it.

However, and this a big however - somewhere along the way a big part of cozy games got locked into this one very specific grind of farm/mine/gift/sleep/repeat and that is starting to wear thin, at least for me. I say this as someone who sank 500+ hours into Stardew. Grinding can be a meditative activity, but in itself tedium does not = coziness for me, not in the way some of these games seem to think.

We already have proof you can make a beloved cozy game without a single crop tile. Spiritfarer had me tearing up on my couch at 1am and there wasn't a watering can in sight. Managing your little boat and saying goodbye to characters you'd grown way too attached to, and it nailed that cozy *vibe* harder than most farming games.

It’s also not as if farming cannot coexist with a bunch of other ingame activities. I love when there’s grindy stuff to grind, but split across different activities with different gameplay mechanics that are relaxing in different ways. I think that’s why a lot of people find even some non cozy games like Red Dead Redemption 2 so cozy. Because of the minigames of course, the whole bunch of them!

Social elements and profession variety in multiplayer also add diversity, it increases for me in proportion to the number of other progression routes and stuff you can do besides the obvious one (or just … besides farming at least) It’s something that I loved in Runescape, it’s that sense of vertical progression but spread over many possible paths you can take, that interact in fun ways as you play.

It’s something I also noticed the best of the current multiplayer cozies achieve, like Palia. I also sincerely think Loftia also has the potential to sit right beside it in terms of sheer gameplay-type variety. It doesn’t even have to be a bogus large number of skills which both games show. Palia has basically 9 main progression skills and Loftia a similar number in absolute terms, plus social skills have their own trees as well, another interesting way to encourage people to play together in a persistent MMO game (main reason guild progression systems exist). There’s also lots and I mean LOTS of just running around gathering stuff but, and another big but - you’re never on a timer, which is a must for me to feel relaxed.

The point is, there’s a variety of activities to do and how they mutually interact never squishes you into a one-track playstyle. This goes for all games, you’ll say, but for cozy games even more.

I’m not dunking on farming as an activity in cozy games. I’m dunking on it as a trend, which as all trends will spawn some truly amazing games. I just don’t like it being the go to cozy activity every time, all the time.