First, I would like to thank the devs for the 5.0 update. I´ve been playing coop since the first day and I appreciate the effort they made. Through the years there have been some Q&A and people come up with cool ideas and suggestions, sadly most of them couldn’t be implemented.
Community contribution
I know that only few devs remain nowadays and it is hard to pull off new content, that’s why I think it would be a good idea to let the community to help them in some ways. In the past, there were some sort of competitions where players create mutators or maps. At least It would be great if the community would have the possibility to create customs maps with the coop content (like Desert-Strike). I think there are plenty of people with sufficient knowledge and creativity that could give a hand a keep this game evolving (now more than ever with the Editor Patch).
Some personal suggestions:
Mutators
*Restless: still units will continuously lose health unless they are moving. This would apply also when stunned, under stasis, lurkers, tanks, etc.
*Commander swap: Every certain amount of time (fixed or random) you and your partner swap your commander. For example, I choose Zagara and my partner Raynor, then I must play with Zagara (I have to use my partner´s structures and units). Maybe this is not possible, but it would be fun and challenging when you suck at playing with some specific commander.
P vs P
For a long time, people have been asking for 1v1. Probably it’s not enough balanced to play it but only for fooling around would be great. Maybe setting an invulnerable start zone where it’s not possible to attack until a minute mark.
Another idea that came up was 1 v 2, one player plays with Amon against the commanders. This idea is quite hard to pull off too, but community might come up with an idea of materializing it.
I´ve been thinking different ways of bringing a versus coop mode that could be fun but also competitive (balanced). I come up with an idea:
Split map
They are mirrored maps with a middle division. This division doesn’t let any kind of interaction between the halves (top bar powers, drop, etc ). You are still able to see the other commander structures and units. So there are a bunch of maps with different objectives (can be recycled maps): Destroyed a well defended fortress, the first one to achieve it wins; Defend a structure, the less damaged structure wins; oblivion express, the commander that destroy more wagons wins. Maps with more points as win condition could have additional objectives as bonus points. In all the maps each player would play against Amon, so losing all your structures would be a lose condition.
In addition to this kind of maps there is a mutators mod: before the game starts each commander can select, for the sake of example, up to 3 mutators from a pool. Every mutator has a value assigned like Brutal+ levels. Majority of the mutators that already exist could be used with little arrangements. Mutators are the only way of interacting with the other partner and they can be used in exchange for resources, have cooldown or a limit of uses. Mutators would be available from the minute 5 of the game (to avoid any cheese or give the player better ways of facing them).
Some examples: Send a propagator to the rival´s map; Destroy a selected rival structure; freeze rival units for 3 seconds; send a hero to the rival´s map; mineral shield; etc.
I think this kind of PvP would be really fun and the mutators mod adds bunch of diverse strategies, avoiding a commander preference in a specific map. Moreover, it would not require any rebalance or arrangements to make it fair for all the commanders. The main effort would only rely on making the mirrored map version of already existing maps.
I hope I have made myself clear, I´m not a native English speaker.