My good friend Andrew and I were talking about competitive games and how PVP can effect the tone of the game.
Iron Marines is meant to be a casual RTS, but if there were to be multiplayer modes (or even just one mode for PVP) in the game, it would automatically become a hardcore game.
Take Plants vs Zombies for example. It's one of the easiest TD games I've ever played, but doing versus mode makes it a lot more serious. Instead of simply making a nice, symmetrical layout of plants, you furiously rush to destroy all zombies by making what you can as soon as possible. As zombies, I've seen a couple of videos where the zombie players just pick whatever they think is funny. "Ooh, the Gargantuar! I'll get him 'cuz he's big!" But you can take the game more seriously and pick certain cheap zombies for spam tactics or other combinations for deep strategies. My favourite was always regular Zombie, Zomboni, Disco Zombie, Gargantuar, and Flat Zombie.
Super Smash Bros. is a cartoony, silly fighting game with lots of mini games. To me, the point of that game was to let players have fun using their favourite Nintendo character, but instead, everyone picks Rosalina, Sheik, Bayonetta, and other top-towe characters because they think those characters are the most powerful. The game became hardcore as people wanted to win more than anything else.
I personally am not very competitive, but wouldn't mind having PVP in Iron Marines, especially if it was diverse with multiple modes and lots of options to change for different kinds of matches. However, putting PVP into the game would almost certainly make it a hardcore RTS rather than the causal one that Ironhide wants. I'm writing all of this so that we know the outcome of making multiplayer options in Iron Marines, and can better form our opinion about whether we want it or not. I still do, but I realise that it won't be the game that the developers want so much as what the community wants.