Both (shared loot and personal loot) have it pros and cons. Like pro of personal loot is the excitement (if you can grap the item or another player is faster etc.) but i dont want to discuss which is better (shared or personal loot) i just want to write down a possible suggestion how shared loot could be IF it comes.
I wrote two variants a “Splitt the loot”, which should be easyly implemented into the current loot system and a “Everyone have their own loot” ,which will be very hard to implement i think, but least the devs maybe see some ideas from here and use it in a diffrent easier form.
Splitt the loot
In a /players8 game the player who kills the monster have e.g. 50% chance to get the item or 33% or 25% just to say numbers. In a /players2 game like 75% or something, etc… In the other cases the drop is given to another random player (full shared loot) or the drop goes public. (hybrid variant)
Maybe at the creating of the game the host can choose between: Personal loot (classic) or shared loot or even hybrid loot. I would prefer hybrid loot because it rewards active player who kills monsters and keeps the game/loot exciting because of public loot part. Its in my opinion the best of both worlds.
Everyone have their own loot
One problem in generell in multiplayer loot in D2 is in term of unqiues, almost the same number of uniques are droped compared to /players1 loot and only about x2.5 more misc stuff like runes and white stuff etc., (in a full party, due to no drop decreases) but you have 8x more players in the game so every player gets in numbers very few drops compared to singleplayer, because the loot have to splitt other all players. Its true with a full party you generell are killing faster but you will never compensate the “bad” drop rates. This lead to the point: loot is very bad in multiplayer games (beside you splitt farm or clearing a area alone in a full game while other players are elsewhere) if you want loot, you have to play solo. Only reason to go multiplayer is fun, quest progression or level progression (exp farming).
One solution would be giving everyone their on /players1 loot. The problem will be leechers (people who dont do anything). So you have to include the killspeed of the player into it. When one monster die: Suggestion 1) The player who killed him gets a higher no drop chance , Suggest 2) the no drop chances bases on the amount of damage the player dealt to to the monster in relation to the damage of the most damaging player, Suggest 3) The no drop rates are the same but if an item would drop, where is an addition calculation which include your damage dealt relative to the highst player damage dealt. there can be steps like when you did 80%+ damage you have 100% chance. In generell in case of the damage relation some things like static, chrushing blow ce, etc. have to be adjusted. cons of this some character who just buff and do no damage would be the same like characters you dont do anything.
In generell this system would lead to more droped items in generell. e.g. in case of a full party almost 8x more uniques (when everyone deals the same damage and not leech) and this would effect the economy. This would be an extreme scenario but just wanted to point out there would be more drops in generel then. If the major of people dont want a big impact on economy this could be reduced just with another % chance in generell to reduce the drops.
The main reason for this specific suggestion of shared loot is to make multiplayer in terms of farming more interesting. Now its terrible for farming. (When you consider a fair loot distrubtion, not counting farming alone in a /players8 game.)
