While I was re-reading the topic
Using Sub-Objectives to Encourage Better Cooperative Gameplay I came up to a simple question:
What is needed so that people are willingly going to play DD2 together, as a team?
To answer this question, we need to know why a lot of people preferred to build alone in Dungeon Defenders 1, rather than communicate with others and build together.
Most games - in the higher levels - where like "You have better stats? Nope, okay then I am gonna build. Plz just do nothing (upgrade)."
So what we need is simply a way to reward cooperative playing, because there was simply none.
Actually, there are the following features in DD1:
1. As the hero you build towers with, you get a tower damage bonus. In my opinion, this is an important point, I hope this will be also be implemented in DD2.
1.1 Additional idea: When building as a squire, I would rather give a tower health bonus than tower damage. So if you want to be a tank, and also build your barricades, you have more health on towers and can also be skilled as a dps char.
2. You can change to any hero while building, what makes the cooperative aspect pretty useless. DD2 went in the right direction with the hero deck. As I've seen, there are (actually) four heroes where you can have three in your hero deck. That's great.
Don't give us the possibility, to use all available heroes when grouping up.
If there's going to be a solo mode implemented (what I think it will be), then make more deck slots buyable. Depending on the the amount of heroes, you should never be able to have all heroes in deck while playing coop.
Maybe you could buy extra deck slots for the solo mode, so that you will have the ability to also build everything on your own.
(Of course, if there are e.g. 6 heroes available at DD2 release, the hero deck should have more slots.)
3. DD2 is focussing on coop gameplay? Then do it right. Higher the base xp amount you can get every round when playing with 4/4 (x/x) players. Also have a (litte) higher chance of getting better quality loot.
4. In DD1 we have 100 levels, a wide range of possible skill points invested in stats, and even higher armor stats, resulting in 3k, 4k or even 5k stats, what makes it very hard for new players to be able to keep up.
My suggestion is, maybe the most important here, after reaching a certain level (e.g. 50) just give us only more available prestige/veteran ranks, which are harder to reach and only improve actual stats with additional percentage. So when reaching prestige rank* 1 (maybe show the 50 with a different icon), you have the ability to give addtional x% to your selected stats.
E.g. at prestige rank* 1 you can give to 3 different stats a bonus. That means, you can still get better relics and the x% bonus is always the same at this rank.
What do you think?
Maybe other people also have some ideas of better rewarding cooperative gameplay. Feel free to add some ideas.
* just a placeholder
Edit:
Just a short explanation on these points. I think it's important not to split the community like in DD1. As a player with over 500 hours played, there was no chance for new players playing together with you (except they wanted to be xp boosted). I want to be able to play with all players together and not only with the best 5-10% (of course, at least the level requirements for the maps should be reached).