Are there any workarounds to the lack of /players command in D2R online play?

[Grinning Serpent]

Haven't had much luck with googling an answer. The /players command works fine in offline games, and there's even a slider in the options menu for controller users, but to my knowledge, there's no way to use it while on online/Bnet games. This kinda sucks, seeing as how D2 is rather easy on default settings and you get better loot drops (the real reason anyone plays!) with higher player counts. It'd be nice to be able to play with a couple of friends and still get all the benefits and challenges of simulating a full 8-player game, like with the old version.

[Hotmail]

There are not. Some mods fiddle with droprates and overall difficulty, but you'd be back to playing offline either way.

This has been a heavily requested feature but development on D2R patches seems to be done so people who want to enjoy both online play and the /players command are out of luck.

[Flame6]

Doesnt look like it. Did some googling and a lot of people are against this too. They feel that nobody would group up, and this forces groups to happen.
Offline is the only option.

[Biomega]

Not for online play, no.

They want you to, you know, play with actual people. The offline command is meant to compensate for the fact that you can't; they do not intend to cater to those who merely don't want to.

Personally, I think that's a terrible decision, and they should just enable the command everywhere. There's a reason some people prefer to mostly play alone, yet want a challenge (and the associated rewards) without having to jump through hoops. Not to mention the weird consequences like people joining random games just to leech off their player count and so on. That can't be intentional.

Playing with other people should be for two reasons: 1. you need/want them to help you; 2. you enjoy it. That's it. It shouldn't be something you're forced to do just for better drops, treating it like a hostile necessity where you have to suffer 7 other people you try your utmost to cheat out of their share of the loot. How they can think that is anything but toxic design I cannot say.

But I doubt they'll change their mind on this anytime soon.

[RobertoCarlos]

You'll notice in online baal leveling runs you get people doing cheeky pit runs or pindle etc as a way of using a full player 8 game.

But really it's not as simple as just increasing the player count to increase the drop percentages. You actually need the other players to be close to your character for the drop boost to actually work.

That's why a lot of the times people just farm the act 3 tiles map on player 8 because drops from chests/rubbish piles do get the player 8 buff