How important are Multiplayer starts?

I admitted in the Confessional Booth thread that I never put any in my one-madman projects. Should I change this attitude towards people who prefer (if not always play) multiplayer or would this affect the reputation and the download count of my maps/wads whatsoever?

[EDIT] I forgot to mention that the poll's 4th option, '2' refers to NOT PUTTING Multiplayer starts in the levels (and also, not designing Multiplayer-only items either).[/EDIT]

Making maps that are SP and MP friendly would be sometimes a real pain in the butt, It requires a good setup to make sure all the areas will be accessible by every player .

Playing with a good friend is almost always more fun. If you go through the trouble of actually making a map, throwing in a few starts and extra items to support coop shouldn't be that big of a deal. I don't suppose you need to go out of your way to redesign all of the map and its encounters with coop in mind, if you don't want to. I also hear survival coop is a very popular game mode these days and as such, there's a bigger chance your map gets exposure among those who mostly play online. If that matters.

Why the heck not?

clarry said:

Playing with a good friend is almost always more fun. If you go through the trouble of actually making a map, throwing in a few starts and extra items to support coop shouldn't be that big of a deal.

The real trouble isn't throwing enough items for all players, It is making sure all important sections of the map are accessible by every player, Or the level will be unbeatable if the only one who accessed the section died there or left .

One of most annoying things is coming across a map with no MP starts, as you all spawn on the same point and you end up being telefragged and losing everything you came in with.

Maps that have balance for MP are great, though I can appreciate that it's quite a bit of work to balance, especially if you're making a lot of maps on your own. So as long as there are just MP starts then I don't normally mind. Extra player starts take all of about 10 seconds to add in, so that's the least that can be done if you don't want to actually balance the map for MP. Balancing a map, let alone a series of maps, for SP and MP is quite tricky as you need extra monsters, extra ammo, ensuring that traps don't end the map if someone dies in them, etc. That's quite time consuming, whereas adding extra starts isn't.

Since Im focusing only on SP in my maps I don't put the MP starts. Well, since isn't a big deal and reading the comments here I guess I will add them from now.

Survival is huge. Avoiding placing 3 extra things in a map to support it would be bizzare.

It'd be nice if your map didn't have any areas that lock players out in MP either so the map doesn't end up uncompletable if someone dies in a trap or something. Not hard to add a teleport in.

It's fun to play co-op, so having the extra starts in there is nice. I care less for placing DM starts in a regular map though, as generally, unless it's an actual deathmatch map it's likely not gonna play well in deathmatch.