I do get your perspective, and clearly cooperative classes do work and people do enjoy them no matter what my personal preferences may be.
I think I appreciate a team based PvP game environment more when there aren't any support classes though.
Loners and the less social will always be present in social games. Doesn't mean they don't have a place in them. My only place to get a Mechwarrior fix for a very long time was MWO, so well I had to suck up the multiplayer environment. Yet I can still cooperate in that game by watching my radar, checking out my team composition relative to my own mech build and filling in certain roles. The game itself can provide mechanics and information that promotes teamwork.
Setting aside me personally, some players might just be new to a game before having found their own groups to play with. Or are just familiarizing themselves before playing with friends.
I don't really see what's wrong with wanting more passive communication mechanics like simple pings to facilitate a simpler form of communication. Or game alerts about team statuses. You can still cooperate in games without having to be on voice chat or say all too much. I still do play and enjoy team games despite not saying that much and it doesn't mean I should just play single player or FFA games.
What I'm against is a situation lacking flexibility in solution. If something can only be cleared with the very specific functioning of multiple people together, it isn't very fun to me. When the group has to hone a specific routine to the point where it removes any sort of player choice or agency. I guess my issue is less against how the teamwork is designed to fit within the game and more about how difficulty is implemented within the game.
I'm not so much against leadership than I am against the removal of the other player's individual choices and agency. It does tie back to the above. Depending on the game, each player still matters in terms of their individual ability to execute their role yes. But there can be slower paced games or even turn based games where in effect - the leader is directing every action of the other players and they practically aren't even playing the game at all.
I think we're going hella off track though about what we prefer in a cooperative game. We clearly prefer different things. I'm not really trying to argue any point here, just bouncing my thoughts.
I guess what I'm more interested in really is whether cooperation can be more organic and emergent without the need to build it into the very fabric of the game itself, be it through a class system that features intrinsically cooperative classes or a problem that needs to be resolved through very specific actions. And more about mechanics that aid such a thing, like a ping system, being able to receive feedback on the statuses of other players just by having it be a feature of the UI or an alert system.
I don'tand haven't played Valorant, but I got curious recently and watched some videos. The way they implemented their minimap is really close to what I was pondering about being able to see enemies through the eyes of other players. Though my idea was just to have stuff highlighted through walls. But what Valorant has is similar to a RTS minimap. Except where in RTSes, friendly units reveal stuff in a radius, here it accounts for individual player's cone of vision. And if your team mates are looking at an enemy, you will also see their location in on your map.
Just by looking at an enemy, you've already communicated that fact to the rest of the team without having the need to say anything through voice chat, or to ping. And I thought well, this is pretty damn smart and is sorta the thing I'm talking about when coming up with game ideas that induce cooperation. Something independent of stuff like player roles and classes, just a way to display and share information or some sort of in game feedback.
