Heya!
Just a quick question of interest:
When You play with friends in a private game: How do You determine who gets the loot?
Because that has always been the biggest problem in games with friends and the main reason why I would like to have private loot.
Thanks 
This sounds like a great reason to have personal loot in private games!
To answer your question, with personal loot in private games, the same amount of drops would occur, yet there would be a timer on the more sought after loot. Where initially, it would be the player who was determined the winner of the roll to pick it up within that allocated time frame. However, if they don’t, anyone in the game/area can pick it up as it becomes FFA.
You might’ve misunderstood:
I do understand how private loot will work well. But how do You play with friends with public loot? How did You play in Diablo 2 with real-life friends? Because we never figured that out properly…
we use advanced techniques like “talking” and “compromising”
Loot call outs.
Talk to each other about who needs what, who will benefit the most from what modifiers.
Basic communication.
We normally have our main classes, so when an item drops for a specific class, we will give the one playing that class as main the first dips.
This quickly stops working as soon as people start to play more than others and suddenly have 1-2 main classes or even more.
Of course there are also those items that are no longer good enough for the “main”, so those will then go to the secondary classes of the friends (if there are any).
But the problem of this is that it basically rewards those who have many characters at the same time (on a low level) while those who actively play many characters are basically giving everything out to their friends.
Sure, you can simply say no, but it is kind of a silly move.
Private loot would work like this:
And it would help in the above scenario, because every player would know exactly which items are “his/hers”, so for each it could be decided, if it should be given or not, because opposed to the other scenario, it is not one big pool of items, but everyone has their fair share and you can basically trade on a 1-for-1 basis (rule of thumb).
It makes it a bit easier to keep the balance of exchange up.
I was usualy lone wolf but when i wa splaying with friends and shared loot:
If item drops person who need that items gets it based on the character, if all need it person who picked it up should keep it but next items should go to someone else. If something very valuable drops, it should be sold and profit shared. Something like that. Idk I honestly cant remember dealing with this situation.
We just usually ask who wants want, but that is in private games, in public games, we just collect what we can… What you ploot types need to understand is that you are not ENTITLED to receive anything in a public game, Diablo II isn’t a participation trophy game.
It’s astounding that the ploot types can’t see this, it’s like chalk and cheese.
Friends generally in my experience, do something closer to smart loot. By using something called communication. It requires words and talking/typing to each other.
Barb helmet, goes to the barb(assuming there is 1) unless barb doesnt want it and someone else wants it for an other character.
If you cant get a long or share among your friends, I worry about how much of friends they are.
What Blash said.
When the situation arises that you have duplicate or triple of same class their would be a multiple of different ways to solve the problem. First can be to just take turns on who gets that drop. Second can be the player that is carrying the team. third can be who grabs it first. Fourth if in Discord or something, pick a number between 1 and 10 this number can be decided upon by someone that the drop isn’t geared to the class the player decides. Fifth option duel for it. Winner gets the drop.
Well whenever I play with friends, we help each other out as friends normally do. When big items drop we discuss who would benefit most.
Let’s say player A is playing a zeal paladin, player B is a frenzy barb and player C is a fire sorc. If vipermagi drops, that will typically go to the sorc. Similarly, if G Face drops, the paladin and barb will discuss between themselves. It might make more sense for it to go to the paladin if the barb is already using a nice +skills barb helm.
Normally, friends are good at sorting this type of stuff out because they want to help each other. If your “friends” don’t do this, then you might want to find some new friends who treat each other like friends.
If you fight and kill mobs in FFA you have greater odds of grabbing the gear before anyone else.
The ploot crowd want to sit in the back and do nothing. Only to get 100% drop chances.
Yeah… I get that friends communicate. We did, too. But it’s the communication about loot that I wanted to skip.
Scenario:
Big boss killed, three players, one legendary armour, +3 to all skills. All our armours are crap compared to that. Now we talk. Mostly it ends with two players making the sacrifice of not getting any cool loot so one player gets an epic item. (doesn’t that already sound like private allocated loot? 
)
We also tried a system where we always remembered, who last got to pick an item of their choosing and rotated through all players, so there’s always one who gets to pick the best of the drops. But that was actually work to remember that order and who’s turn it is. Was not actually fun. 
And… again: Isn’t the whole compromise and give loot to one of the x players a kind of private loot? Just throwing out the thought…
why do you want to play with friends if you want to skip communicating? talking to each other sharing gear, making compromises passing on an item to help out a friend, him returning the favor thats one of the things that make D2 amazing. why rob the game of that to make it stale grey boring and autmated like D3?
No talking to each other and sharing loot is closer to Smart loot, which is a different system.
That allocates gear based on if players can use it and other variables. Need over greed and all that.
Doing a “This person got gear last time so they dont get gear this time” is pretty bad, imo with diablo drop rates. Works in like wow raids with dkp type systems. But gear has static drop locations in wow raids/instances.
Yeah, I guess that’s the different ways and reasons to play. We like to chill and fight together after our work days and not fight each other (aka compromise) over loot. But yeah, as You wrote, that’s all a matter of preference and play styles…
Was just asking, if there was any creative way to sort out the who gets what fiasco.
Yeah there really isnt a creative way of solving the problem. ploot doesnt even help, because it distributes random, not based on player need.
Barb Helmet Drops, Ploot → gives it to sorc, now sorc then has to pick up item and give to barb, unless there is a timer system added.
Would be faster in FFA for everyone to see barb helmet drops and just leave it to the barb friend to pickup.
Also, with ploot being random, there is a change for everyone wants items, like Shako(everyone will most likely want it) to repeatedly go to the same person at Random. Which is kind of the opposite of what you want lol.
if you fight each other over gear maybe you guys need to change something in your friendship instead of in the game. no offence
some people get pretty toxic over loot, and thats why in mmo raids, there is generally a decided raid/loot leader and then the group uses its own system dkp or /roll.
Yeah… maybe You don’t get what I mean, but that’s fine. Thanks though for Your input.