ohh, ic
So how bad would it be to reserve X many player slots?
That is twice as many slots, you could easily hide it from the outside world, clients are another matter they would have to store the status for twice as many players. Pretty wasteful, unless you can find something more with it. Then again could always optimize it from that point (pair them up and make them share common stuff, make 2 types of 'player' structs, even totally hide it from the clients, etc) and what are few megs worth these days?
Now that would just be the quickest/dirtiest way to do it.