I know it's been a while since last post in this topic but as i dont really want to start a new one i'll just post it here. I've been soloing a lot lately on normal and hard modes and i have some thoughts about it:
1. Drop rate reduction with only 1 player on server. I don't really know if it's possible, but 1-2 hours of farming on hard can get you a crazy amount of materials and with an archer or a skirmisher it's fairly easy to get to wave 12 once you get the hang of it. When you check the Auction Hall you'll notice that a better part of what you can find there comes from ppl who are doing a lot of solos and are spamming the market with what they loot. Results would be even more interesting if you could summarize all goods offered by alt chars of a given player. Now i'm not saying soloing shouldn't be rewarding nor whining about nerfing ranged classes ( as i play mostly with my skirmisher
) but it doesnt seem to be ok that you can basically get way more loot by playing alone a game that was designed to be played in a team. My humble suggestion would be to reduce drop rates by 50 or even 66 % when playing solo.
2. Another problem with soloing is that you can save the last mob on each wave while refilling by positioning your char in a right way. By doing so you can face each wave with full health and ammo with no problem at all, since you can autoblock virtually any attack by spamming right mouse button. Adding some fancy refill animation ( like realoading cannon in NW ) could be the easiest way to solve this issue, as you still could outrun the last mob to get some time to refill if you'd really want to.
3. Limiting the amount of goods you can forage on each map. When you solo you can just keep foraging for as long as you want either by autoblocking ( exhausting way ) or finding some way to keep mobs away from you (cading some choke point, playing on map like Handes Retreat where it takes mobs forever to get to you, or glitching if you're a jerk). Again i don't really know if it's possible but i think it could be a good move to limit your forage attempts to say 10 on each map or maybe 1 per a wave.
4. Solo players are more prone to glitch. Now i'm not accusing anyone but of all cases of glitching i've witnessed personally only one was done on a populated server, while others were performed by a solo players that weren't aware that i joined the server. Again i'm not pointing fingers, my point simply is that
occasio facit furem. Perhaps we could start a discussion here on forum about removing ability to play solo, by changing the game so that mobs wouldn't spawn until at least 2 players are present on a given server.
I don't know if any of these ideas could be implemented as my knowledge about modding the game is virtually nonexistent and i don't think many people will support my point of view, but it would be great to read what you guys think about it.