Can't post any links here, but there are some pretty satisfying threads out there right now for people who aren't fond of botters.

Making the top tier items soulbound (BoA / account bound) means botters are reduced to farming for gold and relatively worthless rare items and trying to sell them via third party RMT. People could only really use the gold for crafting, there's no "instant gratification" potential where they have an awesome item and players want to buy it.

For those who missed it, Travis discusses the soulbound items change here:




The top tier legendaries and set items will be soulbound and therefore self-found only. However, in a group, you can give it to group members who were there when it dropped (for a limited time afterward, currently 2 hours).

Botting had a massive impact on Diablo III's economy that made real player hours relatively worthless, and it was felt in ways that people don't think about day-to-day. A person's earning power from gold farming is sitting at about 3 cents per hour now. Humans felt powerless in that economy because the botters were there buying up good items with their farmed gold and reselling them at inflated prices. The only way to meet those prices reasonably was to buy gold with cash (or buy the items from them on RMAH), so there was this constant leeching of botters pulling money from other players. Personally, I don't think the game sucked because of the AH - the AH sucked because of botting. With the AH gone, the same thing would have kept happening if Blizzard had kept the top items tradeable, buying up top items with botted gold and reselling them to create pressure to buy gold third-party. It just would have taken longer and focused more on the high-value, high-end items to be more efficient.

Overall, this is a very strong move by Blizzard against botting, so there's a silver lining with this change.

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