You are correct. It was not only for VP, but all keys which later became soulbound. There was no support for handling these cases until July 2000, when they made these and others soulbound.
This is not something that is planned for r99 because we had no support for limiting items per era when either server (pve/pvp) was initially released. If this persisted for longer than a few months on the timeline, I would make it happen.
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Keyed Dungeons: The key for Charasis (Howling Stones) is now NODROP per the patch message from a couple of weeks ago. Furthermore, when your character dies, keys for Charasis, Sebilis, and Veeshan's Peak, will no longer remain with your corpse, but will instead return with your character to its bind point. We made this change to reduce the difficulty and corpse-loss potential of these zones, and eliminate the need to do the key quests multiple times.
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http://www.tski.co.jp/baldio/patch/20000719.html