Diablo III, Featuring BoE

For anyone who doesn't know about BoE, it's basically an item that once equipped, is permanently bound to your character. You can take it off, sure, but no other characters will be able to use it.

This, is one of the many features that us Diablo players have been rather skeptical about. In a rather lengthy post, Bashiok explained why BoE will be in Diablo III, and why it is an effective way to manage the economy. The following will be a highly condensed version, but see here if you wish to read the all of the related blue posts.


Official Blizzard Quote:



I want to downplay or even kill this notion now. We do NOT need to drop items more frequently because of Bind on Equip. Let's not kid ourselves here - the economy in Diablo II is broken. The "fix" for this broken economy is to, every so often, wipe it clean. All characters and items are swept into the trash bin that is non-ladder and we have a pristine economy ready to welcome trading with open arms... until it turns to crap and the whole cycle begins again. This wonderful dystopia also comes with incentives to play there (rankings/unique items/etc.) and it all works to help create a somewhat stable economy. For a little while.

While the Diablo II economy was fun for a while, we have to admit, Bashiok is right. The economy in Diablo II was horribly broken, do you remember having the first wave of Shakos worth several high runes, then plummet down to a Pul rune about a month into the ladder reset?

It is this kind of flooding that BoE will be preventing. Without BoE, stockpiles of the highest items can be amassed, and freely traded between characters. While this does allow you to amass wealth, it does not keep a stable economy, as it will be flooded with items, with no way to remove them from the economy aside from losing them, or ladder resets.

With BoE, we'll see a much more stable economy. This is, of course, because items will be regularly removed from the trading pool once bound to a player. This will also force us to put a lot more thought into our builds, we will have to plan them out, and figure out exactly what we want to bind to our characters. So for those of you who think that Diablo III will be "carebeared", think again, BoE has got your back.


Official Blizzard Quote:



We could have drop rates in Diablo III with the exact same frequency as Diablo II, and by making the highest items BoE, create a far more stable economy.

To me, this made perfect sense.

Most often, the highest items were the ones that drove the economy. This was because they were the rarest, and in the highest demand for builds. With BoE, that demand will stay high, since the economy will not be saturated with items several months into the ladder.



Official Blizzard Quote:



But just adding in BoE items obviously isn't going to totally fix things all by itself. It's important to note that BoE items are not the one stop fix for all economic issues. It's going to take a lot of different attacks from a lot of different angles to ensure we have a nice stable economy. Bind on Equip items are just one of those attacks.

This has me quite hopeful for the economy in Diablo III. Honestly, we can easily guess that not much thought went into stabilizing the economy in Diablo II, aside from the ladder resets, and the occasional rust storm to weed out all those duped items.

However, in Diablo III, not only will we be getting what Diablo II began, but we'll be seeing all sorts of new methods of stabilization. BoE just happens to be one of the crowd, and I'm quite excited to see what else they've got in store for us.

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