The question is what we want to achieve with this game. Do we want the endgame item hunt to be an individual endeavor or a cooperative one? It has nothing to do with fairness or competitiveness. As it stands with Diablo II currently, there is simply no point playing in a group to find items.
Most normal monsters in a solo game have a nodrop chance of ~62%. This means that they will drop an item about 38% of the time. Currently, in a full party with 8x the people, you aren’t even getting 3x the drops from normal monsters that you would solo. This doesn’t even factor in the unique monsters which always drop something regardless of player count, and those are where a lot of the highest end unique items such as Crown of Ages are coming from. In fact, normal monsters cannot even drop that particular item. Even with high end unique items that normal monsters can drop, you need to kill 15-20 of them just to have the same chance as killing 1 unique monster. And that is with a nodrop of 0.
As far as the economy is concerned, well there never has been a legitimate one in D2, at least on BNet. Duping has been around since pre-expansion days and botting soon followed.
I have been playing on a server for a while now where the nodrop is 0 across the board for all player settings. The economy works quite well there. However, at the end of the day, the problem still exists that everyone is in their own private games to find items rather than playing as a group.
As an example, I have done around 1700 full clears of Hell Chaos Sanctuary since the beginning of the last ladder season and have not found 1 Ber or Jah rune in those runs. That is with every monster dropping something and me collecting all of the items. It isn’t as if these things are going to be raining from the sky even if there are increased drops per person in games with multiple people in a party.
There needs to be an incentive item-wise to play in a group. Currently, playing solo nets you nearly 3x the drops of an 8 player party in which the drops are divided equally, and that doesn’t even take into account unique monsters which always drop something whether there are 8 players or 1.
I suggest a personal loot system in the sense that when a monster is killed, an item is rolled for each particular player. All items will still be tradable. Decrease the nodrop by 5% or so per party member in the same area. What I mean by that is that in a 1 player game, when a normal monster is killed, it will have a 38% chance to drop an item. In a game with 2 people in a party in the same area, when a normal monster is killed, it will have a 43% chance to drop an item for player 1 and a 43% chance to drop an item for player 2. And so forth for each additional party member in the area.
I get that there is the thrill when an item drops and everyone can see it. I like that aspect of the game as well. However, if this remains the case, there is no way I will be playing in a group to find items.