Lets me honest here - any sort of “bind on …” mechanic is really bad. It actually acts as a “cure” for a problem that doesn’t exist, if things are done right.
People want freedom, if they find something great, but of no use to them, they want this to be tradeable. Similarly, people who get those items from the trades, want full freedom of what they can do with them as well. Limiting any of that is really bad, short-sighted. I know many people have said this before, but Diablo 2 is what it is largely because of the freedoms to had to offer.
Lets see the core issue at hand here. Firstly, the “BO” systems came from WoW team members /ideas leaking to teams working on Diablo 3. The problem was: the game was immensely popular, lots of item farmers (not that being an item farmer is a bad thing, its another “reason” to play and any reason is good, even if it was 24/7 “RMAH store tycoon” play type), no item sinks. BO-mechanics offered a quick solution to that - if you find something good, you cant sell it! Was that fair - NO, it only served half of the players, it was a cheap solution from WoW slapped on top of D3.
Many people quit at this point, myself included. I only recently bought the D3 expansion to play single player of it, while the last time before that when I played D3 was something like 2012 or so, pre BO stuff.
Anyway, like I said above BO being a cheap fix doesn’t mean both sides of this debate cant be made happy. What pro-BO folks really want is not BO, but a stable economy. What against-BO camp wants is stable economy but not by sacrificing any freedoms. We are all adults at this point, Diablo games are mostly played by adults, so why not find a proper, adult solution instead?
Diablo 3 touched a little bit of a new mechanic, that would be helpful in achieving that - you could destroy items to get some materials. This is a perfect sink method. The better item there is, the bigger chance of getting some materials, which are super hard to get by any other means. Those materials, could become the new currency, similar to SOJs on D2. With those mats, similarly to D3, artisans could upgrade the existing items, craft, reroll stats etc. How would that be different from D3 then? The difference would be in actual usefulness of that: upgrades could be substantial, reroll would be very expensive, but still within range of the being more optimal than finding the item again. Crafting would be very random, similar to D2, where you need many many attempts before getting something good, but when you are lucky, it would be better than anything else.
Another sink could be a mechanic when an item gets to 0 durability, it’s basically unrepairable. Items don’t get damaged too fast, but that would surely be more realistic and fun than any sort of BO.
The materials collected from good items being destroyed could also play a huge role in Clan system. Clans could have a shared stash of those materials - each member can place/pledge some mats to it, but not take. Then by a popular vote, some things could be done with those materials - secret levels opened, clan-wide perks enabled etc. Clans could even level-up with those, similar to paragon levels on D3, by spending mats.
There are literally 100’s of better way to destroy items in a good cause, removing them from the circulation, than limiting peoples freedoms by locking them to account/character.
Bind on … is lterally a cancer of D3, hopefully not D4.
And regarding the AH (even RMAH) - bring it on, people should have every right to sell their items if they choose to do so, whatever would be left for sale in their stashes that is.
Additional feature could be a league division but I suspect with properly implemented/balanced risk-reward sink system, no such thing would be needed.
