None of my friends were getting this and finding someone on the forum was a little more work than I was willing to do so I decided to roll the dice and do coop with a random match. The guy I got matched with was super nice, had a mic, and had only done a few levels. We beat the whole thing together and talked through all the puzzles. We bounced ideas off each other the whole time and never got completely stuck. So I'm wondering if other's have been matched with equally ideal people or if it has been the standard screaming 8 year olds who don't know how to play that I have come to expect from online games.

I'm afraid to, cause that game is so easy to grief in. I went through it with my cousin, but maybe someday I'll try it with random people.

You got lucky it would seem. If I had the game, there's no way I'd risk a random person. It could ruin the experience (which you only get once!). Man, I sound like Norm.

Does co-op dogging with a random stranger count?

I may try a random person to see what its like but theres no way it will be as good as the experience I had playing it with my cousin. We worked together perfectly and even spent time in each room just looking around at all the cool stuff.

I played a few levels with my friend, but she's not really into it. So I'm tempted to try a random stranger, but I'm afraid it might ruin the rest of the experience for me. I've heard a few success stories but way too many failures.

I'm really glad I played through the co-op with my brother. I'm sure there must be some good co-op partners out there but this is Xbox LIVE we're talking about, the odds of being paired with a troublesome partner seem scarily high.

I've played coop with a few randoms. One quit during calibration, one rage quit because we couldn't work out a test chamber, but I had one good partner to get through the teamwork block, and then with another we went through all of teamwork and all but the last mass and velocity before they quit out.

It's not bad. The ping tool helps out a lot and it's fun to high five after a successful test!

Yeah... Portal seems like it could be a terrible game for random co-op, but you know, not everyone online is an idiot.

I would never play this with just a random person. I am playing through it with my fiancée first, then I might be open to play it with people needing partners on this very site. But that is as far as I will stretch when it comes to random players.
And playing it with a random person for the first run through can be very dangerous. Not that far into the co-op, but it seems there are spoilers to be had even there.  

I tried it on launch day and it was quite good. I had to use the pointer a couple times to get my partner to do what he was supposed to do, but nothing too serious. I've tried going online a couple of times since then, but I get a weird error, like "can't connect to Steam" or something like that :(