Yes, true, as Jay said at BlizzCon we are planning to have some amount of items that will bind to a character upon equipping them.

We absolutely won't have items that bind when picked up, except for the obvious things like quest items and other character-specific items that wouldn't/shouldn't be tradable anyway.

That alone, I think, should dissuade the most severe concerns with binding items.
And before I go on just understand that while a lot of this is very stable in its concepts, the details aren't final.

For Bind on Equip (BoE), the idea right now is that it would only be applied to "end game" items of specific quality levels. So to start, it's not every item, and it's not even every item above a certain level. For the BoE items that will exist, you can pick them up, if you don't want it you can still trade it, or give it to another character, a friend, vendor it, whatever you like. But, if you make the commitment to keeping the item and equipping it, yes, it's yours now.

The reasoning is that in reality we need a solid way to keep the economy stable at the end game. With items building up over a potentially infinite amount of time there's no way to have any measure of control over worth of items. While an item may be the rarest and best in the game, over four or five years a stockpile has built up and those items are now commonplace and hold little value as compared to their rarity. The gold being earned by players stays the same or likely increases as players become more proficient at playing the game while they spend less as items lose their value. Gold value drops, and we're skirting into a familiar cycle.

By ensuring we can rely on some amount of "consumption" of items, their relative worth stays high, the market is predictable and both sellers and buyers enjoy a stable marketplace for (hopefully) many years.

Diablo II has an inconsistent approach which is the somewhat stable Ladder economy, since it's quite literally flushed out every so often. But it's a very intrusive approach to a problem that could be solved through other means that don't require making everyone start over.

As a quasi-aside: There's an idea being thrown around, and this is really not guaranteed in any way, that some or potentially all items that are bound to you could be bound to your entire account. So if you yourself "own" an item from it being bound, you can trade it between all the characters on your account freely. Feed alts your old-but-still-very-nice items, etc. That's just an idea, it may not take shape, but it's a possibility. One obvious issue with it is that it removes market demand. If you already have the best staff in the game you'll never need one again, eventually no one ever needs them, prices drop, etc. etc. That's maybe an over simplified scenario, but anyway, we'll see.

There are two statements that spark some concern, or at least wanting further information.

1.For lack of a better example lets use D2 info. Would something like an assassins claw be BOP?
Or perhaps from your statement in D3 there may be items that drop only for certain classes?

2.Does that mean no potential ladder resets in D3?

Not that I have a problem with either, just curios.

1. Hrm... well no, I didn't mean class specific items. What I mean was... for the items that ARE bind on pickup you wouldn't be surprised that they were.

2. I didn't mean to indicate that but I'm not sure it's a system we're looking to carry forward. The leveling competition aspect is really cool (if it works), the dumping of one economy onto another... maybe not so much.

Bashiok,

While I'm not completely against the idea of BoE / BoP since it has worked just fine in other games (not talking about WoW), I am concerned since WoW is Blizzard's "it worked here, so..." game.

I'm curious to see what you mean by "you wouldn't be surprised the item is BoE/BoP". It makes me think of Asheron's Call where they implemented a similar system for certain high level items (and some not so high level, but still instrumental and needed). Is it safe to say that many (perhaps most?) of the BoE/BoP items are ones you obtain from doing arduous quests that require a full group to accomplish? In this scenario, you're all rewarded with a BoE/BoP quest item, which is useful in its own right, but not necessarily unique in the sense that, if the item is good enough, most people will have it. This makes sense to me.

What wouldn't make sense to me is having "BoE/BoP" a possible Prefix/Affix. Anyone who played Diablo 2 at its highest level of play knows that there are many classes that, for optimal performance (typically in PVP), Rares/Crafted items are best in show. As long as BoP/BoE doesn't take up a Prefix/Affix slot (similar to having +Light radius on a crafted ring in D2; a useless bonus that could have gotten something else) on these items, then I believe it's fine.

I trust you guys are really thinking about this from all angles. Picking and scrutinizing. What concerns me is an interview where Jay talks about Uniques/Runewords in Diablo 2 as being better than rares (and I believe crafted, although not sure if he mentions that specifically). Rares/Crafted items can be much better than Uniques/Runewords. I understand that only the very high-end ("hardcore") player mentality may really care about this, but 10 years later I know very many people who dominate the ladder season after season in D2, still. These are the hardcore. There are many of them, and they do help to keep a game going.

This wasn't a plug for keeping the game hardcore. I just want to express my concern about going overboard with BoE/BoP. In WoW, it works. For Diablo, I think that system wouldn't work. But it seems you already know this...so...I love you.

The end.

I'll be honest I skimmed this, sorry, :P but let me clarify again (I'm not doing this well today, huh?) and see if it helps.

No armor/weapons/equippable items will be Bind on Pickup unless they are rewarded by quests.
End-game items of specific quality types are currently planned to be Bind on Equip.

I confused it all by attempting to allude to other things just so I don't get called on it later, and it really wasn't necessary. Just follow the above two lines.