I feel crowd mode, in some ways, is a step in the wrong direction - How about we get a game mode where we are able to start a *harder* difficulty version of ADOM, but on character creation we nominate players from our steam player list as 'party members', and then allow item trading between this party?
Maybe just have a single location in each town, a 'trade area', in which items are swapped when the game is closed/saved?

I'm unsure how hard this would be to code, but it would be absolutely brilliant for bringing more players into the fold...