Oh, evenews!!
I'm at the wrong site!

soulbound items are used in MMOs where equipment is not destroyed. When equipment is never destroyed, only repaired, you have an issue where crafters/farmers over saturate the market. It is an inevitable problem with a system that doesnt have a sink. The end result is the top of the line gear, with somewhat decent drop rates, devalue quickly. soulbound items do not have this issue, well they do… just not as quickly as they otherwise would. This buys time until new content/crafts are brought in with an expansion.

Obviously EvE does not have this problem, so there are no soulbound items.

In all seriousness, though, you are trying to shove a sandbox economic system into a themepark and chastising the GW2 devs for not doing it themselves?

Let me run down some issues that I am rather perplexed you did not see yourself:

1. Market saturation.

GW2, and all themeparks in general, have persistent gear. You don't lose your stuff when you die. That means the only way that a piece of armor or a sword in GW2 can be 'destroyed' is if a player willingly destroys it when it is in his inventory. Every single non-soulbound piece of gear can be used and sold afterwords with no detriment to the user. That is what you were going for, right?

The issue with this is that, because equipment never vanishes from circulation, you simply have thousands of people using the same gear and then trying to sell it afterword on the market.

This leaves you after a very short while with 100% supply and no demand. Consider if EVE worked with the same rules regarding loss of equipment, alright? Rifters are produced and sold by players, but don't get destroyed after you lose them. They simply respawn with your pod. What do you think the market will look like for rifters? Think that there will be a big 'yay free market' bonanza for them?

Same priniciple applies. One of the ONLY things keeping a themepark economy going is that most of the good gear players want is BOE. That's bind on pickup, I'll save you the trouble of figuring it out.

That means that once a player uses it, it is out of circulation. In all intents and purposes, it is now 'destroyed' with regard to the open market. Themepark economies still run into the issue of only having to buy something once, but in a system where the name of the game is to put players on a gear treadmill, that doesn't matter much in the long run.

In fact, one of the biggest criticisms that a lot of crafters in GW2 have about the economy is that MORE stuff isn't BOE, so they could actually craft things that would sell. Go look at the crafted gear on the market. 100% sell orders.

2. Artificial level caps vs Actual level caps.

You want there to be a sword that is level 1, then another type of sword that is level 10, and anyone under level 10 will use poorly. And I'm assuming another type of sword at level 20, that any sub-20 will suck at if they use it.

How is this any different from simply having a level 1, 10, and 20 sword that only levels 1, 10, and 20 to use it?

You could make the argument that "Oh, how good it is will scale to your level", but then you have just defeated the purpose of a themepark progression system. Again, you are trying to shove a sandbox-centric system into a themepark, and it simply doesn't work.

3. Upgrades are one of the few things that crafters can actually produce that are in demand.

Same as BOE gear, the fact that you have to destroy your current upgrade to use a new one in the same piece of gear is what is driving the upgrade markets in every mmo that uses that sort of system. If you want to put the same upgrade you have in your sword into a lower quality sword, because you just bought a shiny new one? You have to buy another from a crafter.

Reusable upgrades would simply saturate the market and then your supply/demand for that sort of item is fucked.

Is the fact that you can't simply take out a gen from a sword without breaking it retarded? Of course it is. But themeparks need retarded systems in place to have any semblance of a 'player driven market' to exist.

The stuff you suggest would work if GW2 was EVE. It isn't. Stuff isn't lost when you die and need to be replaced, gear isn't infinitely customizable, and gear isn't universally produced by the players with a fundamental part of the game being a free market.

They are two different types of games. EVE is an entirely different animal than any other mmo on the market. This means that EVE's game mechanics are more or less incompatible with them.

I really need to stop reading this blog…

The way I see it, from a storyline POV, if we have the technology to put a chip into a live person's brain in less than five seconds, why don't we have the technology to remove the chip from a dead person's brain?

I think reprocessing corpses for implants is a fun idea.
Give corpses some use other than necro jokes…