What happened to group play...?

Is this a solo game now? I have been trying out multiple strats with my friends for the past 5 days, and no matter what we do, we seem to always gain negative currency instead of gaining even a little chaos. It almost feels like group play multipliers were reversed, so instead of getting more, you are getting less...? It's literally been less loot in a 5-man group compared to when I'm running maps solo. I play solo mostly, but in this league most of my friends are playing, and we wanted to try to play together, but everyone is getting kind of frustrated when we are all just losing currency no matter what strat we do. So the total loot seems to be less while in a full group versus when playing solo; in other leagues, you could EASILY notice the loot increase difference while running with friends. So far, we have tried multiple different strategies with many different costs ranging from 28c to 2d per map, for example:
Legion
Harvest
Rogue Exiles
Delirium
Blight (Unfortunately doesn't even work because half of the party's games close randomly during Blight; optimize Blight, pretty please?)
Alva
Ritual
Harbinger

Quite honestly, running out of ideas, we made it our mission to find something that would be at least a little bit profitable for this league to run as a group and so far have not succeeded.

Just want to clarify that this is not a rage post about "BuFf LoOt GGG gAmEs BaD!" just a genuine question regarding the current state of party play and if it is intended to not play with your friends but solo instead during this league?

The game is balanced around T17s. You wont see returns until you are there in group play. They nerfed group drop rate scaling as well. So the problem is compounding for anyone staying in T16s. Your best bet is to farm beasts in a group with the extra capture procs and split the rewards.

You only get 50% more loot per 100% more players, so yes, the loot return is nerfed by additional players. It's because there was a multiplicative effect brought on by loot-farming teams of players with special builds meant to exploit the mechanic. So instead of being able to enjoy the game as a group of casual players just chilling and mapping together we're punished for the actions of the few.

A few farming teams ruined multiplayer for the rest of the community by exploiting the multiplayer loot increase mechanic and GGG won't ban for the exploitation and instead just punishes the casual groups of players who want to have a good time with friends.

It could be solved by giving everyone their own instanced loot drops but... there's probably some background systemic reason why that wasn't done.

Yes it's dead.
Auras also dead so you can delete the aurabot.