Bind on Pick-up

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Bind on Pick-up, or "BoP," refers to items that a character can not trade to other characters or drop on the ground for others to pick up. These become soulbound to a character as soon as they are picked up.

Though World of Warcraft has numerous BoP items, there was never any serious consideration of including BoP in Diablo III. BoA and BoE were considered, but ultimately ruled out, and in April 2011 Jay Wilson confirmed that there will be no item binding of any kind in the game.[1]


BoP In Diablo 3[edit | edit source]

Early in development, quest items were basically treated as BoP in Diablo III. When players picked up a quest item, the item automatically popped into a special tab of the inventory where only quest items could be held. These items were not equippble and had no function except that they were needed for the quest. Items in the quest inventory could not be picked up, and were only removable by canceling the quest, which would make the item(s) related to that quest vanish.

The quest item inventory had finite space, which would potentially have forced players to go back and complete earlier quests they'd neglected to finish, if they ran out of space in the quest item inventory. During development the D3 team found this system inconvenient and confusing, so quest items were eventually removed from the inventory entirely. Such items still exist, but players can hold an unlimited amount of them, and they are not displayed visually in the inventory. There is no picking them up either; they are taken automatically when an NPC gives them or a player finds them in the dungeon.


Blizzard Comments[edit | edit source]

Jay Wilson spoke on this issue at BlizzCon 2009. [2]

Jay Wilson: We have no “Soulbound” or bind-on-pickup, except for quest items. We do have bind-on-equip for the highest end items in the game. We targeted, roughly, any item above level 85. These we will do as bind-on-equip. The reason for this is that we want people to be able to trade them, but we also want to remove the high-end items from the economy. One of the greatest ways that you can do that is with bind-on-equip. What we don't want is to have a situation where you find something on the ground like, “Oh, man. This would be a perfect weapon for my Monk. Oh, but I just picked it up and now it's on the wrong character.” We don't want that at all.
Most of our focus on Diablo 3 is as a trading game. So, if you take trading out of the item space, you ruin the core of the game. Finding a really great item that is not for you is still a great event because it means you have a bartering tool to get the item that you do want. We definitely want to make sure that that still exists.


Binding was finally ruled out in April 2011, by Jay Wilson in an interview with Diablo3.cc. [3]

I’m happy to announce that we recently decided there will be no binding of items in Diablo III. They will be freely traded for the life of the item. The only way we are going to do any kind of binding would be for things that are not progression-sensitive. Like we might say…a quest item. We don’t want you to be able to give to other player to short circuit a quest, but if you find a sword, piece of armor, or gem....anything that you find in the ground, once you pick it up, you can freely trade it... forever.


Related Articles[edit | edit source]

Other forms of item binding include:


Reference[edit | edit source]