gbaz69: I really do hate bound gear in mmos. (saving database access/alteration by locking it to one account/character).
Pheace: Most items would devalue like crazy without it though probably. This is a way to keep gear from flooding the market and making sure there's a need to get more (thus keeping the demand side of the economy going). It's that or have gear break after a while. Or it being worthless, in which case you'll get into a new MMO and probably be able to get far better gear than you could farm for yourself for pennies on the auction house (or similar place), thus ruining the experience.
yes, it has very little to do about databases, bound objects serves a purpose, both for the economy and intensives for game-play. If all the high-scale items where non-bound, then all items below would devalue and much of the economy would collapse. Trade value of items is an important money sink in MMO's, and it would need to compensate in other areas. This is especially important when considering costs on crafting material dropping like a stone, if all high end crafted gear where not bound. (there is a difference her in BoP and BoE, BoP can only be used by the crafer) but point being that one item can ever only be used by on char, so the material becomes valued by this fact. If 1 item could be traded, those materials do not become so valuable.
Secondly - intensive to play. A lot of MMO's intensive is gear grinding, like it or not, and without bound objects this intensive is lost. There is on point raiding with your second or third alt, if you can just transfer all the gear to it. There is not much point to play the alt, except for the narrative of the quests, as quest rewards would also be pointless. You may ask then what the point of replaying the game again with an alt when you already know the narrative. Granted there are more reasons to play, but character progression through gear is a large part of it.
