Party Effects While Solo

What: Basically what I'm suggesting is the ability to, when you create an instance by ctrl+lclicking on the entrance, pick what size of party you want the instance to be created for, with the minimum size available being the size of your current group.

Example: Bubba is one seriously bad dude and can basically faceroll his was through anything the game can throw at him and had even been inviting people to his party to pad it so the game would give him more challenge. This would allow him to instead ctrl+left click on the entrance to the zone he wants to go to and when he's prompted to pick an instance, there's a drop-down menu for party size (call it Difficulty Rating or something) with 1 being the default. Being as bad as he is, he picks 6 and goes on in to challenge an instance created for 6 players solo. It'd have more monsters and better drops like teams do.

Why: Some people want more of a challenge and this is a way to give it to them. Others don't like sharing or aren't very good team players but want to be able to get at the better drops a party provides.

So I had a similar idea to this a while back.

The premise was as follows: Currently, groups receive 3.5x more loot for the same currency invested as solo. This difference in return on investment (ROI) is the crux of the solo vs party imbalance. Grouping should be encouraged, through character synergy, but not through arbitrary +%loot per map mechanics. The existing party mechanic is identical to Diablo 2 and pre-existed the map system.

Before I give my suggestion let me explain the problem with a simple /players X mechanic. Groups receive 3.5x loot per map, but they also have to kill 1.7x monsters to get the same amount of loot as a solo player. That's not really a problem because mobs are only 3.5x harder, meaning they die proportionately much quicker. However, it does mean groups do more walking between packs for the same amount of loot. Groupers have to walk 1.7x as much as a solo player. That, again, isn't a big deal because ROI is so much better and group synergy tends to speed up killing speed anyway.

The problem, then, with /players X is that solo players will have to do even less walking between packs compared to a group. In fact, it would be as though a solo player has 252% increased move speed, that's multiplicative not additive. That imbalance would shift from parties to solo.

My suggestion is this: Modernize the party mechanic so it scales proportionally. 6 players = 600% difficulty and 600% loot. Now, allow players to Ctrl+Click map portals for separate instances. Doing so consumes a portal but creates a separate instance. Each solo instance would have its own scaled loot and difficulty. So, for solo players that's 100% loot * 6 instances. For a group it's 600% * 1 instance. No nonsense with movespeed, no nonsense with difficulty, no nonsense with ROI.

There are 2 concerns here. Overall this is a buff to maps, 350% to 600% loot per map. This can be resolved by reducing overall map drops by 5/12ths. That will put loot levels at where they were before. The next issue is groups of 4 or 5 players. Since 6 is not divisible by 4 or 5 these parties will have unused portals. They will have to give up the extra loot or split up the party. That's not good, we want to encourage social play, not discourage it. My solution would be a new type of rare or craftable portal scroll that opens a more permanent map portal that players can enter without scaling the instance, thus preserving the same total difficulty and loot.