Bind on Pick-up

Bind on Pick-up refers to items that a character can not drop or trade to other characters. These "bind" or stick to a character as soon as they are picked up.

The only BoP items in Diablo 3 are quest items, things that are not used or equipped, but that must be held in the quest items inventory tab and that are needed to complete quests. These items vanish as soon as the quest is completed, or once the character abandons the quest.

Blizzard Comments

Jay Wilson spoke on this issue at Blizzcon 2009. [1]

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.