Equipment binding in FFXIV

Not as official as some of the other news, perhaps, but a translated post on the official forum confirmed that any equipment with any soul bonding points on it will become exclusive to that character and untradable.

For those unfamiliar with soul bonding, it is the process by which you turn a piece of equipment into material. Exp. you get while wearing any piece of gear is converted also to soul bonding points. So any equipment you have actually used in battle will no longer be available to trade or sell to other players (presumably, you will still be able to sell it to NPC shops).

This will arguably make leveling from 1-49 more expensive as you now cannot expect to make back the cost of equipment from lower levels. Fortunately, if the alpha was any indication, at least for your first job, quests provide so much of the gear you need that this should not be a huge issue anyway.

On the upshot, this is very good for crafters and gatherers, and given that Square Enix is trying to put emphasis on both crafting and gathering classes as legitimate pursuits, I'm not too surprised to hear about this decision. This effectively removes most equipment from circulation by making equipment a consumable good. Like materia-melding, which removed equipment from the market by introducing high failure rates, thus driving up the demand and lowering the supply for such items, this will help mean crafters aren't diluting the value of the item they're crafting every time they produce it.

This does make me excited to be a gatherer because I am really OCD about going to EVERY node that I see on the map even if they are lower then what I need (like in WoW or LOTRO). This game just keeps getting me more and more excited.

Not good news to middlemen like me who like to play the market rather than make money off of producing actual goods.

I'm sure there will be other things you can use to play the market.

Yeah, I look forward to finding them. I'm always fascinated with the economics of MMOs.

How does this negatively impact that strategy? Sure, it limits the available supply of goods since anything that is every equipped is effectively removed from the market, but that will drive prices up. You can still buy the equipment from crafters, you just can't use the equipment before selling it. The opportunity to buy equipment when a larger amount of it appears for sale at a lower price and then sell it when supply dwindles because crafters are doing other things will still exist.

This will also mean that certain items only obtainable via battle will get you more money when you sell them to crafters, I imagine. These things have a tendency to balance themselves out. There are certainly a lot of crafters in FFXIV, last I checked.

This means an upward trend in prices in general. Making money in FFXIV was never as hard as it was in FFXI anyway.