did UV-solonet ever take off as a difficulty level?

I remember some wads including BTSX having a full extra difficulty level for top players that you accessed through single player co-op but I'm not convinced it was received all that well. With the "map UV for yourself" push we're having this year I'd necessarily wanna make my own stuff gentler and hide the unbalanced stuff I usually add on UV to make myself laugh in -solonet. Thoughts on why this is or isn't a good idea? Assume the level is already too mechanical to be much good as a genuine co-op experience.

solonet is awkward:

• Keys and weapons remain on the map visually after you pick them up, which looks bad even when you get used to it.
• If you play no saves and you die and want to pistol start from the beginning of the map again, you have to restart the game externally, as pressing 'space' will just respawn you with the current level state. (In practice, you just throw down a save at the very beginning of the map and reload it upon death -- but that just draws more attention to solonet being a flimsy contraption held together with scotch tape.)
• No cheats -- a significant inconvenience for exploring speedruns and other extracurricular investigations. 
• No pausing. (The game still runs even when you toggle the menu to change settings. Have to pee? Better find a safe spot, or have an empty bott- ... eww)
• More needs to be kept track of internally, so the game is slightly laggier.

Those aren't fatal flaws, but ultimately the experience becomes less smooth. As such, it's not really a true UV+.

Yes, solonet hasn't been used much outside of BTSX. It's usually preferable when hard wads are designed around that in the first place; sometimes there's only so much you can do by tinkering with thing placement in a layout not conducive to hard gameplay. I'd still fully welcome MP-flagged things on all maps beyond the usual duplicated resources and the party overseer cyberdemon, but this isn't a replacement for meticulously designed challenging gameplay.

The question of whether to use UV or UV -solonet for your 'wacky mode' comes down to what you want most players to play. Over the years, we've learned that people will lean towards playing on (regular) UV, even when your text file suggests that HMP is 'normal', or The Intended Experience, or Won't Make You Miss Out On A Third Of The Content™. 

I'm still in the HNTR=challenge mode camp, but Solo-net UV is the next best thing to combat the UV-or-bust mindset.

I would like to see that happen, some maps really drop the hammer on -solonet, but in other cases (valiant 29 comes to mind) you just get a SMM and free roaming cybie, which actually doesn't change much.

4 hours ago, rdwpa said:

No pausing. (The game still runs even when you toggle the menu to change settings. Have to pee? Better find a safe spot, or have an empty bott- ... eww)

You still have the Pause key, which works.

Yeah that's true -- I'd conflated the menu not pausing with that.

5 hours ago, rdwpa said:

solonet is awkward:

• party overseer cyberdemon.

 

TNT legacy must live on!

Why play solo-net when you can play with bots? AutoDoom can fix you and you can use the -bots 1 command-line to play coop with a bot.

12 hours ago, Fonze said:

I'm still in the HNTR=challenge mode camp, but Solo-net UV is the next best thing to combat the UV-or-bust mindset.

I think this is a good move if you want to be subversive, and has some cool benefits, but I'm hoping for a larger change in the community mindset where HMP is the default difficulty and UV is only for weird enthusiasts. And NM is for extra weird enthusiasts I guess? That's one of the other cool benefits of inverting the difficulty order: NM becomes a weird easy mode, and ITYTD becomes a softer hard mode.

10 hours ago, printz said:

Why play solo-net when you can play with bots? AutoDoom can fix you and you can use the -bots 1 command-line to play coop with a bot.

I'd love to! Last I heard, only Doom1 wads without Boom features were recommended for use with Autodoom. I'm eagerly awaiting the Doom2 Boom-compatible version. :D