Guild Wars 2

The only purpose I can see for Soulbound items is to increase grind and make players duplicate effort in a bid to make us spend more time in the game.

If a player has already earned something once – why should we have to earn it twice, three or eight different times for our alts.

GW2 is the first MMO I have played (but I have played computer games for the past 30 years), so I rolled a ranger to level 80 and after a while I decided it sucked and I didn’t want to play it any longer (and I couldn’t be bothered waiting any longer for the mythical fixes).

So I rolled a warrior, guardian, thief and mesmer. After playing with all of them for some time I took the thief to 80 (I really enjoyed all the other professions though).

The point is my ranger has a set of profession-compatible magic find armour for farming and I would like my ranger to give this set of armour to my thief. I don’t think I should have to pay twice for the exact same thing.

The question is: why must I grind/pay for the exact same medium armour twice?

My ranger also has a Mystic Crescent (these go for 7 gold on the TP) – why can’t my thief use my ranger’s shortbow since it is compatible with his profession and my ranger isn’t using it!.

If I can give my 15-slot bags from my warrior to my thief, why not weapons and armour?

The only soulbound items should be event reward items specifically awarded to that alt (e.g., story line, halloween backpacks).

If someone grinds for nearly 2000 fractal tokens to get ascended item – they shouldn’t have to do that once for each alt.

Even karma purchased items should be account bound.

Soulbound seems to be simply a grind inducing setting.

Arenanet – if I am wrong, please give me an example of why Soulbound should exist [other than previously stated reasons] and tell me why my thief shouldn’t be able to use my ranger’s armour and professional compatible weapons?

TL;DR: Players earn items, not alts. So almost everything should be Account Bound.

Well I can’t really say for sure why all items are soulbound I can give my thoughts on why it is that way.

Back when I used to play final fantasy 11, an online MMORPG pretty much same as this game is just older, a lot of the best items in the game were not soulbound or player bound if you will. This meant that gear could be acquired by anyone then sold on the in game Auction House (same as the trading post in GW2) for profit.

While this is fine at first the real problem came with rare items that were the best for their respective level. They only dropped off certain monsters usually very rare and difficult to find or defeat, so if you wanted said item you camped them. Well when you went to camp them you found gold seller bots/players everywhere and unless you did the same thing like run with 10 other players/bots or got really lucky you weren’t going to get the kill. Now the items in question did not always drop and when they did they usually were to a gold seller guild. What’s the big deal you might ask well they were the best items in the game( or components for said items) naturally everyone wanted them.

Since almost all the drops went to organized gold selling companies they could pretty much sell them for any price they wanted on the auction house and then just sell the gold right back to you, since if you really wanted the best gear you had two options do what they did or pay real money for them. Making items soulbound upon acquiring them eliminated the ability to make a profit off the item so only players who actually wanted the item would go hunt for them, making them still hard to acquire but not nearly as difficult.

I think similar cases in other MMO’s probably caused most games to just use a system like this, as for being soulbound on use well that is another one of those ways they use to get rid of in game gold, you have to buy new items instead of reusing the same items. Least that’s the only reason I can see why items are soulbound on use and not acquiring them.

Of course I liked the character system FFXI had instead of switching to a different character to switch professions you would just use the same character but play a different profession, you retained your old professions levels upon switching back (they were just called jobs in that game).

Making items account-bound would also disable people from selling them
Personally, I’d much appreciate account-bound over soulbound, but I can also see why they’d want people to spend more time playing the game to get those things (again)…

I still want my dyes account-bound, as they were intended to be at some earlier point :P

Agree with account bound instead of soulbound.
Agree with less and less bounded items.

also, allow salvaging of those items. would be nice to be able to resell my runes i over-paid for back then.

Frotee.2634:

Making items account-bound would also disable people from selling them
Personally, I’d much appreciate account-bound over soulbound, but I can also see why they’d want people to spend more time playing the game to get those things (again)…

I still want my dyes account-bound, as they were intended to be at some earlier point :P

I agree that making things account bound solves any botting / gold seller issues that are mentioned in the post further above. I don’t mind anet arbitrarily making items bound to the account, I just totally disagree with soul binding (well in almost every case).

I also can see why they want people to spend time in the game, but all they do is demonstrate a complete lack of confidence in their end game by trying to keep you on the gear treadmill. If the end game was good then they wouldn’t need soul binding to maintain user engagement.