Listen,
This command is the wet dream of any loot bot. Any bot owner with so much as a rudimentary understanding of economics will want /players 1-8 online. This command would just see an exponential increase on loot bots. They would love to be able to run their bots on /players 7. With the potential higher drop rate they would have a much stronger hold on the market, because it would increase their ability to control supply or demand by selling or holding on to GG and HR.
Player drops cannot compete with bots – both in the time spent looting (nearly 24/7) and the speed and efficiency with which you do it. The gap between players and bots would just increase, instead of diminishing, giving bots an even higher edge.
Players findings would still be far between. Ask any SPer running the game on /players 7 how many GG and HR they found in their lifetime (many will tell you “NONE!”).
While in the larger scale of online play an increase in availability would be expected and prices dropping the certain outcome, you would be a fool to think this would have any bad effect on bots. Lower prices mean more opportunity to make money if you are the one holding on to the larger chunks of the stock. 101 Economics.
The only way for bots to actually be defeated in Diablo II, would be for the GG/HR drop rates to be significantly increased to the point there is only limited room for trading and players are expected to see most of these items for themselves in the span of 6 months (the sweet spot) of gameplay, like with so many modern games of this type. The NoDrop reduction in the /players 1-8 command is not nearly enough.
If the reason you want to play online is just to hook up with your friends once-in-a-while and trade with them, then you are doing exactly what you are supposed to in an online game. And this is what is expected of any other online game out there. Not just Diablo. NO GAME allows you to artificially increase your drops rates.
I am truly sorry Blizzard removed LAN play. You should be asking for that instead. But if you want the benefits of artificially increasing your characters progression and loot with cheat codes, you need to play offline. There is currently no other reason to go online. None. Since D2R launch, all items, runewords and special events are available to offline SP.