<rant>
I started playing BTW co-op with my girlfriend just over a week ago. Never had any experience with multi-player BTW before. She's completely new to the mod, and I'm pretty green when it comes to a lot of the recent early game survival aspects. So I'm used to building mill-stones and windmill right off the bat.
We were both thinking that this hardcore-spawn thing might be an issue, wanting to build a base together and all that, and I mentioned that it could be turned off. She was of the "hell no" opinion and I didn't like the option either. So we began playing co-op together with hardcore spawn enabled. We had a few restarts from making stupid mistakes early on, and - in the beginning - being separated really dampened our spirits. We teleported a few times and we both felt like shit for doing it. Our current world is moving along at a steady rate and we've invested some time in building landmarks (we're in the biggest swamp-by-swamp-by-swamp biome I've ever seen) and I think we should be pretty good if one of us dies. If we can't make it back, I'm fine with that because
that is the way the game is designed to be played. I'm not going to labatomize a dynamic aspect of co-op play because this co-op doesn't come in the symmetrical "let's do everything together" flavor.
An amusing story:
While showing her the ropes, I made care to mention not to go hunting zombies with her wolves. But it didn't take long before something went wrong.You see, she remembered from a long time ago, when I was the only one playing BTW, that I'd use the rotten flesh to feed my wolves. Now kibble was implemented along time ago, and the beast added recently, but she didn't know any of that. So she fed the dog the rotten flesh and had herself a bit of surprise. I guess I should have been more explicit.
So: I support mandating the hardcore spawn rules. Flowerchild has made an ingenious compromise between vMC's total lack of death-penalty, and the out-of-this-world distressing penalty to vMC's hardcore mode. The result is something slightly less penalizing than your one-life rogue-likes: You lose your progress if you die, but it further encourages exploration and construction projects in a way which is really unique.
I understand that when one really wants to play co-op, what they don't want is an experience which is no different from solo-play. But dying in BTW SMP isn't anything like SSP - at least from what I've seen. In SSP you can't go out hunting one day with your wolves to stumble across a lighthouse - civilization! - that you never built, misty in the far distance. And, to be honest, hardcore spawn really adds to the RPG elements of the game, in that Steve gets a real story besides vMC's "this a block world, build things - or not." Go on rescue missions! Climb those distant peaks, raise medieval towers across that flat horizon, do what
you can do to help Steve return home!
The way I see it is that some people are looking at co-op BTW as adding a casual social element to the game, without changing anything from the usual SSP experience. That's not what co-op does in BTW. In BTW, you get the grueling worry of having to protect your friend's back, you
have to work together in ways that are fundamentally different from SMP without hardcore spawn. You wouldn't go pointing fingers at some AAA title with asymmetrical co-op and say "Hey! All I want to do is do this thing, with my friend here. Not any of this intentionally designed crap that adds oodles of intelligent features and challenging gameplay. I want me and my friend to play SSP - but together."
Of course, you wouldn't say that because AAA titles simply don't have the eye for gameplay that Flowerchild has. Too busy spending their art and marketing budgets.
Different games do different things, and co-op BTW just simply isn't the same thing as SSP twice over.
</rant>
I remember when people got upset over vMC's redstone update because the official philosophy seemed to be "Don't like it? You don't have to use those blocks." I was upset too - not because of the content of that update, but because Jeb didn't seem to care about delivering a complete product, but just began dishing out random stuff because "hey - it's a sandbox. You'll figure out something to do with it. Probably something really exploity." Something is wrong when a dev is completely ok with people just ignoring swaths of their game, because that means they're ok with a game with poorly thought-out design. BTW tries really hard not to do that and I think FlowerChild is right in not compromising (read: bowdlerize) here.
Oh, and because I seem to have forgotten: I find co-op with hardcore spawn enabled very enjoyable, and I wouldn't turn it off even if I still had the option to.
