Sumimi wrote:
Strange, I always thought putting more people into the game increased the actual drop rate of any item from trash monsters.
I'll heed that advice.
The short version is that adding people to the game reduces the chance that a monster will not drop anything. This is pretty irrelevant for white items though as the "nodrop" is really only more important for more rare items. So if you are farming a set/uniq or whatever you can reduce your nodrop chance with more players, but if you just want white stuff dont' bother as white stuff will drop with frequency anyways. In fact, you may want to keep the nodrop value high as that will result in fewer uniqs & sets.
The long version is here:
http://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Player_Settings Items
As already stated, the player setting will not affect the item quality, but will affect the amount of items dropped.
So how does the player setting affect monster drops? First, we'll have to introduce a term called "nodrop". Every monster has a certain chance for this "nodrop", that is the chance to drop nothing at all. The greater this number, the greater the chance to drop nothing. This value is cut down with increasing player settings according to the following formula in V1.11 (for basics on item generation, nodrop an so on see the Item Generation Tutorial for Patch 1.11 on the DII Strategy Forum from Warrior of Light):
NewNoDrop=int( ProbSum/(1/((NoDrop/(NoDrop+ProbSum))^N)-1) ),
where N=int(1+AdditionalPlayers/2+ClosePartiedPlayers/2),
AdditionalPlayers — the number of all additional players in the game, where the monster is killed,
ClosePartiedPlayers — the number of players in your party near you (not far than two screens away),
ProbSum=Prob1+Prob2+Prob3+...+Prob10,
int — operation of truncating fractional part of a number.
This looks pretty complicated, so for the sake of comprehensibility let's just say:
* For normal monsters: The more players, the more drops.
* For Super Uniques (like Pindleskin), Uniques and Champions: player setting is irrelevant.
o Super Uniques will always drop two items.
o Uniques will always drop one item.
o Champions will always drop one item.
* Bosses: "nodrop" will be reduced to zero for 5 unpartied players or 3 near players in the same party. In Single Player the difference between the drops for 3 player setting and 5 player setting is only marginal though.
Note: The formula implies, that for unpartied players (and simulated players via the Players X Command) only every second additional players has impact on drop rates. So the steps for more drops are players 3, players 5 and players 7.
In other words: players 8 and players 7 have the same drop rates, players 6 and 5, players 4 and 3, and players 2 and 1. Note that the amount of Experience gained and monsters' Hit Points are nonetheless different for each player setting (as stated above).