Honestly, I think the smartest thing to do is make most items soulbound on drop, and have cash shop items (fairly cheap) that remove this restriction. I've seen that pretty commonly with recent games.

Then you might end up with an auction house that's empty of lower level items.

It beats Auction houses flooded with bot-farmed weapons at rock-bottom prices, or (if NPC's buy weapons) thousands of % of inflation per year.

Perhaps a compromise - have bind-removal items be categorized by item level, and make the lower and mid- level ones available as quest rewards or drops? (Though in my personal opinion gear should not be droppable at all, but even if gear is primarily crafted, a similar system might have crafted gear not be salable without the use of a "crafting ticket" which is basically the same as a bind-removal item.)

Personally I dislike random rare drops; I favor fixed drops like, the 10th time a particular avatar participates in killing a particular boss, that avatar gets the boss's rare drop. If 2 or 3 characters are all on their 10th time, they all get one. But whether that drop should be salable totally depends on your game structure, as I was mentioning in your previous post. Is your game a trinity-based themepark where you want all players to spend the majority of their time repeatedly running dungeons?

Unique items are something I don't use at all in my designs, because I think they are pointless, but if you're going to have them I don't see any reason to make them non-salable. In fact auctions of a particularly rare item like that can turn into interesting community events.

Personally I like Elder Scroll's model better. You kill the guy, you get whatever he's wearing. If he's a Lieutenant it's bound to be good, if he's a boss that'd be your rare and epic quality loot. Of course since the son-of-a-bitch is wearing it, he's benefiting from it and making it harder for you to kill his ass.

Honestly, I think the smartest thing to do is make most items soulbound on drop, and have cash shop items (fairly cheap) that remove this restriction. I've seen that pretty commonly with recent games.

Then you might end up with an auction house that's empty of lower level items.

It beats Auction houses flooded with bot-farmed weapons at rock-bottom prices, or (if NPC's buy weapons) thousands of % of inflation per year.

Perhaps a compromise - have bind-removal items be categorized by item level, and make the lower and mid- level ones available as quest rewards or drops? (Though in my personal opinion gear should not be droppable at all, but even if gear is primarily crafted, a similar system might have crafted gear not be salable without the use of a "crafting ticket" which is basically the same as a bind-removal item.)

I suppose that depends on whether we're talking realism or arcadie games. If the games supposed to be RL based then, well, you're probably not going to be able to wear most people's armor. It's simply not fitted for you. If you try to put it on, you'll have all sorts of movement penalties or a lower armor rating. It makes sense that the thing should be bound to your character, but it also shouldn't be impossible to trade. Most armor smiths were able to reforge or tailor armor to fit a new owner far faster and more easily than making something new.

Looking at it from an arcade perspective though, you've got respawns to think of. Special item classes are supposed to come from special or even unique creatures so if you have it, you should be the only one who has it. Being able to sell or trade it to other people and have, say, 5 holy Grail's or dozens of Excalibur running around the market is just absurd and immersion breaking. And how would you even set a price on unique artifacts like that?

Unless I'm thinking about it wrong?

On the subject of AH's being full of items, I've never particularly understood why games don't typically have mechanics for salvage or spoiling in the case of organic components.

I just think that having soulbound items is a very good way to make the player feel that his items are 'special' when implemented correctly. Over time WoW neglected this and I don't think it has much bearing on the game anymore. But this is a question of exclusivity that can very well be implemented by using these bind-on-pickup items. I think it's good design.

This leads me in a follow up question I got when thinking about a unique item drop mechanic, where an item has a low drop chance and only drops once. Should an item like that be soulbound and making it imposible for other any other player to get it, or should it be in your oppinion, a tradeable item, resulting in a high auction price, if the player decides to sell it?
Thanks.

How future-proof is this?

The item drops once, just once. I get it, and now I'm bored and leave the game. What now?

In addition to unique items always being problematic (for the above reason) you have now made it impossible to trade it. Now, even if in some fit of "responsibility" I wanted to hand it down to someone else so the item stays in game, I can't.

Another aspect is the rarity of the high-end item drops which can force the player to have to repeatedly play the same mission content (limited by game producing economics) over and over to get the desired item (and often a complete SET of such items). This happens alot at a 'end-content' (versus end-game) points where there is not much else left for the players who already reached the current expansions limits.