Item quality and multiple players?

[Kevin]

More items would drop in general, because there are more mobs to kill, too.

First time I've heard of that.

I'm going with the MF averaging as the source of the rumor.

I've not seen anything official, but I commented last night while playing in a game with Swirly that it looked like there were more snakes in the emperors chamber on the first visit. I chalked it up to having last done it in single player on normal difficulty and us playing in nightmare. But Swirly mentioned that others have noted more mobs and they think it was a stealth change that went hand in hand with removing damage scaling on mobs in multiplayer games. I actually think that would make sense if it were true. The damage reduction was needed but it felt like too much because there are class synergies, even if it is just having fewer mobs for each toon to deal with. Adding some more mobs in with the HP scaling I think would work well to keep multi fun.

It's not the easiest thing to test because there is some randomization to spawns even on the fixed layout maps, but it is something that would make sense, to me at least, as long as it's not a huge increase.