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I have an idea for soulbinding.. I've always hated it, yet in some games I see how it's needed (obviously WoW for example). However I like not having it so you can have a great economy.

So to me a fix would be to have soulbinding give you bonuses. If you don't soulbind it then you can still trade it away after using it, but if you soulbind it then the stat bonuses on the item increase. So instead of +5 str maybe it will give +7, or something like that. You wouldn't have to have this available on all items, but you could if you want, you could take the idea a number of routes.

The details could be worked out as well as how much of a bonus to give, but what do you guys think?

My apologies if this has already been brought up...

Well I mean.. if you're a newb and don't know what soulbinding is, and you do it once, I think you would know how it works after that. Too me this is hardly too complicated for even a lower than average gamer to understand and be able to implement..

And yes that's the point, if you do soulbind the item so that it's a little bit better while you use it, the tradeoff is that you wouldn't be able to trade it or give it to friends later. So you have your choices, and the benefit is that some items are taken out of the economy, but at least this way you still have an economy (as opposed to making soulbinding forced on the player).

Nice collection of info.
Good job Winged!

So.. can someone explain - what will happen with hardcore characters when they will die in the arena? I can't figure it out

Quote from Fluin

So.. can someone explain - what will happen with hardcore characters when they will die in the arena? I can't figure it out

The development team hasn't chosen what will happen when you die in the HC Arena yet.

I asked @Diablo the questions regarding items because I am wary of what happened in D2. I actually was just writing about the twitter exchange we had when I came across this post. Good summary of why it's important.

One thing that still concerns me is how much money there is to be made from account theft in Diablo 3.

When you take the combination of the real money AH, no soulbinding, and an armory... you have a real volatile combination.

In the end, the items that will be worth the most are the random stat rares, and runestones that will basically be better than uniques. Uniques will eventually just clog the AH. But the good stuff, the really good stuff that will sell... that's the stuff that people will wear.

The Armory for D3 will eventually become a hacker's catalog. A list of potential targets to hack into and steal gear of any worth. Someone who devotes real time and money into their D3 account will have to be extensively vigilant against people trying to take control of their account... even moreso than in WoW.

Soulbinding in WoW is one of the few things that makes the armory somewhat safe there. Anything that's publicly visible is really of no worth to a hacker. And what you see from an armory profile really doesn't give a clear picture of the account's worth.

On Diablo 3, an armory profile would pretty much display your account's worth. Good gear is one thing, but say if you logged out in the D3 equivalent of a MF pumped farming gear from D2... there's another give-away that the account might be worthwhile to hack.

If they make it so that you can't tell what account any given character is on, then the armory is not a problem.

for instance, if my bnet log-in is "gonnabe@hacked.com" and my diablo account is "hackbait" and my character name is "pony" which on the armory shows up as "pony[#1536]" there wouldn't be a way for someone to know that "pony[#1536]" belongs to the account with log-in "gonnabe@hacked.com" (assuming that the numbers following the character name are randomized).