Remove the Party Experience Bonus!

[Rataxes]

No, none of my friends play D2. Pretty much all of my D2-only friends left a month after LoD was released, and I've been on and off D2 too frequently to have had a chance to make any new friends on Bnet. I also switched realm from Europe to USEast a few months ago. Besides, even if you play PW games with a "few" of your friends, it is still not the same thing as when you're involved in D2 Closed, it's more like you're part of a world with hundreds of thousands of other players then, and you have a chance to stick out if you just work hard enough. Well, maybe you will in v1.10, no chance of any such thing happening in v1.09.

the party bonus isn't that great. I get maybe at most 2 levels more clearing the whole of Act 1 partied all the way through, contrasted to soloing in 1 player.

It's great enough that a person will get about the same amount of XP per monster in an 8 player game whether he's managing on his own or playing in a party with seven leeches. The bonus being so great, or just simply being there at all, more or less on it's own makes it a complete no-brainer to party up. I'd like to see people making an effort of their own to make sure their party is worthwhile, or not party at all. This will never happen as long as there's an ultimate and automatic incentive such as the XP bonus in place.

Also note that removing the party bonus, if nothing else, is the ultimate leeching deterrent. Rushing might've been present to a certain degree in Pre-LoD D2, though very rarely seen in the extreme shape it has taken today, but I'd like to see anyone try to XP-leech if the conditions were changed back to how they were before. No other solution comes close if you're only looking for a way to destroy leeching (note, I'm not).