- Consumables will always be tradeable.
- Powerful items can be traded, but only once.
- The most powerful items will not be tradeable.
(information is from diablofans.com)
This is so wrong. This is going the D3 path. If powerful items are not tradeable, that just means that their drop rates must be relatively high, to give each individual player a somewhat realistic chance to find the item he wants. That also means that we are back to not being excited about an item drop, no matter what it is, just like in D3. It was completely different in D2, finding a valuable item there was a rare moment and the excitement was accordingly. Finding items in D3 on the other hand feels like nothing to me...
I remember when I once looked up a Diablo 2 Windforce on ebay, i think it was patch 1.09 or earlier. It was listed for 800 Euros (900 US$), that's how rare those items were. Such things give you something to look up to, in the hope that some day you'll find something of similar value. This equals motivation, it keeps you playing the game. A Zod rune had a drop chance of 1 in 184,000 or lower, don't know if I remember it correctly, later they increased the drop chance anyway. Finding it instead of trading for it was basically impossible, but you could work your (very long) way towards it through trades. Not discussing the dupes and bots topic here and their influence on the economy of D2.
So I'd rather prefer the system "extremely rare but tradeable" instead of "relatively easy to find but not tradeable" for very powerful items. And no, this doesn't mean that you'll be able to equip your character easy and fast through trading for these powerful items, because nobody is gonna trade them for stuff you can easily find. However, you can't prevent people who are willing to invest real money in their character to get their hands on these items faster than anyone else. And even this is a good thing, as the items need to be found in game, and they don't come from a blizzard item shop. Anyone who has the luck to find such an item knows that he is in the possession of something very valuable. Even if you never find such an item, the hope alone is enough motivation.
I also think that there are better ways to stop the value depreciation of items over time than soulbinding an item on pickup, on trade or on whatever. For example, give people an incentive to destroy items for crafting materials, even the most powerful items. This system would only work, if the materials you get from destroying an item would represent the real value of an item, the value as the community perceives it and not the value determined by the game mechanics, where two uniques have the same value but are entirely unequal in value for the player base.