SO we know that we will have a bank for items that is shared for every character. Isn't this bad? I could just make a character, get a bunch of cool gear, and give it to a new character and have him be overpowered in the beginning.

Though i can always show constraint of course.

You still have to be high enough level to use the armor, so it will only make it easier to get good gear for your level, it will not make you that OP.

I just hope the bank is big enough to hold all the clutter that my 2 or 3 characters will horde onto.

The mmo's that I have played that had account wide banks, had both character bound items and account bound items.
If they want to lock an item to just one character they can, otherwise all your characters get to use it.

You can be assured they will, if you don't items just keep collecting in a game and that sinks any chance of a decent economy.

Personally, I find a bank accessible by all of a player's characters to be pretty convenient.

And how is this bad? In games that allow this, it's actually part of the fun. To equip your new character with very good gear that allows him to take on higher level monsters from the start. It's a great challenge and requires a lot of planning and possibly the help from guildmates. How does it hurt anybody else? You might reach max level faster, yes, but you will still have to level your individual skill lines, and in PvP everyone is scaled to 50 anyway. So where exactly is the advantage?

All it does is offer me new challenges when creating a new character, instead of having to run through the same content every damn time when I want to play a new char.

I haven't seen anything that suggests such level requirements for equip.

There are other ways to drain items from the economy than stupidly game-y bind-on-anything mechanics.

Forget banks, stuff all your loot in a big expensive player house, or in a player house that's a hovel and has only one pot for storage, or a player house, with a good solid oak chest, or maybe in a player house with cool storage solutions. See where I'm going here?

Also, instead of a darn bank, which is an institution with questionable motives, how 'bout something else to store gold and stuff anything, but a bank!!

If that is what you're thinking of, I bet you could manage to find ways of transferring gear to lowbies without a shared bank. A shared bank allows players with game OCD like me to stop from logging on and off constantly to check if the items of all my characters are in order.

Ok, fire away. What type of sink works better to keep the economy from overloading with gear/weapons??

I wasn't defending the methodology, but it IS pretty much the industry standard.

- Item degradation / breaking.

- Failure chance when improving / upgrading items.

- Deconstructing items as a primary source of materials.

- Increased rarity / difficulty of best gear / improvements.

- Incentivise alt characters.

- Introduce new gear.

Artificially limiting trade itself is usually not a fun way to keep a "good" economy, whatever that means. From my experience, money sinks are much more important to stop inflation. The really good gear will always be so difficult to acquire that the supply will never match the demand.

That is a great list of currently used supplemental sink systems in MMO's

An MMO economy requires sinks of various types to keep the economy thriving, if you set sinks on only money and allow the rest to run wild your efforts with the money are in vain. It requires a checked and balanced system.

BoP and BoE are used so widely for the simple fact that they are the most effective passive system to keep items in check on a server.
Most current MMO's integrate some of what you already have listed there in one degree or another, and shocker...they still use BoE BoP.

Having a shared bank between all characters allows them to slightly loosen the strictures of the BoE/BoP by adding in BoA. You can now share it between characters easily but it has been removed from the market.

You are specifically limiting repetition of trade of the same item without pissing everyone off with breaking gear and bad RNG failure systems.

I don't remember any MMOs having economy issues before the BoA items came into existence. I don't see how this game would be any different. Also I think Bind-on-mechanics is bull, it doesn't make sense and it forces unnecessary restrictions, I think it's time a new sink is introduced that doesn't restrict the player.

Sinks by definition.....are restrictive. They restrict something from piling up on the server, money/items what have you...

The only other plausible type systems that would do that for items like weapons and armor, would be degradation over time type sinks...Do you want to have to replace your expensive/hard to get armor/weapon every month?? It would be a great money/time sink.....and the current MMO player base wouldn't play it...they have gone away from that for a reason.

I have had this same exact discussion on beta/live boards for years. No one has ever come up with a solution that works as well and doesn't piss of a large portion of the casual player base.

BoA items are actually making the system LESS restrictive, balancing the effectiveness of BoE/BoP out a little more.

Or players or player crafters or npc smiths/crafters would be able to repair items.

The Elder Scrolls Online has repair kits for repairs in the field, and players can visit an NPC to have all of their gear repaired.

There is item deterioration on death, at least. For Elder Scrolls single player game players, it isn't a strange concept. Morrowind had repair tools you could buy and carry with you; you wore out or broke more of them when you had low skills in armorer. Or npcs could repair it for you. In Oblivion you used repair hammers to fix your gear. Or npc s could repair it for you.

Would I want to completely replace expensive hard to get gear after some arbitrary time period? No. Would I care about having to get my gear repaired after it got damaged in the course of playing? No, and I actually want it to happen. Besides keeping the economy moving, it makes sense that players would want expensive hard to get gear repaired.

There was another thread on items being tied to one character; Single owner crafted items. People had reasons on both sides of the issue.

A sink can seem restrictive or it can feel like a thing you'd do anyway. A good sink is repairing, because it makes sense and it's something you'd do to keep playing, and it doesn't feel like a restriction, more a necessity. Binding equipment on the other hand, is artificial and actually feel like a restriction. mechanics is basically how to play with the illusion of choice, physics, movement, economy. It's not really there it's just designed to seem like it is there, and the way to successfully implement a system that restricts the player is to alongside with it make it seem like an investment on the player side rather than a straight up restriction, like repairs, or less frequent drops. For example, a good way to make people sink money into the system is to make an area that when finished, rewards the player with a piece of equipment, but the journey there is costly, it would require the player to buy potions, repairs, buy extra soul gems and so on. Not that it hasn't been done before, but you get the point.

I also don't believe that I, you or anyone else should come up with a solution, but I think it's it's important to raise the question so that the actual developers get something to think about, and that is far more important than the community cooking some semi-good solution to a complex problem. That said it's important to challenge systems that we love and at the same time acknowledge how desperate of a design desicion they are in core, I don't see the point in defending it (not saying you do, but I've had my share of those who do) considering it's biggest flaw: blatant restriction with no ties to the gameworld or gameplay.

But now I'm getting ahead of myself, I get your point and it's valid, but I'd personally rather see something different. It's sometimes a good idea to invest some brain-points to come up with an idea that blend seemlessly into the gameplay that can replace the current more noticable system with something new, and it doesn't even have to be similar, because all of those systems have the same goal: to sink money/gear or other acquirables, and the sooner we can replace the bind-mechanics with something better, I'd be a much happier person.

That is a money sink not an item sink and unless it ends in eventually breaking the item if it is not bound, the server overloads with gear.

Oh I'm certainly not a mighty defender of the system, I just sometimes take the devil's advocate perspective. The system I enjoyed best in MMO's was DAoC and you DID have item degredation and breakage. No one in the ever expanding casual mmo player base wants that kind of time sink anymore. A system that replaces the binding system will have to fit in that framework of playerbase, the binding system is just there and most people don't even notice it.

I would say that people don't really care anymore. Much like any normalization of a bad system works. Objectively though, it's a bad mehanic. Repairs are not, I haven't seen anyone that actually complain about repairs as a restrictive mechanic, most people I've talked about it with and people I play with actually don't seem to make a fuzz about it, they don't want it but it makes sense and it would break more than it would fix to remove it. Because it is a working sink and have been since time immermorial. This is the point I'm making, repairs is a restriction but it's an invisible restriction, sure you notice your items breaking but it's not perceived by the player as a restriction, more like a necessary evil to continue playing. Binding on the other hand is restrictive and it is practially spelt out as a restrictive mechanic, why would a piece of equipment bind only to you? For what reason and why can't other people wear that piece of equipment? Because it's restricted to your character with no explanation other than to sink gear.

There is a distinct difference between the two and I can say that most new MMO players raise an eyebrow when they are first introduced to the bind mechanics. I did when I first played WoW, my friends did, people in the chat did. But noone complained abut the repairs because they made sense in the context of the world, while binding items didn't. But that's my experience, I can't speak for everyone, evident by some of the responses I've read in defense of the mechanic, which all boils down to it being a necessary for sinking gear. Which is funny because my point is to introduce another sink to replace the current one, not to remove the sink system altogether.

Most MMO's have good economies and do not have ANY issues with BOA and BOE.

....well ya. what's being discussed is what would you replace them with that wouldn't seem so restrictive to some players. It's already been discussed that they work as intended to keep the economy stable......

The problem is making a system that removes items as effectively from the market without seeming restrictive.

How about leave it alone, it is not changing in ESO and most people i see have no problem with it. The Binding system is also there to stop people from buying and selling endgame raid/PVP gained gear and getting a "complete" character the moment they get to max level.