15 dollars for one set of armor?

They are vanity items! Vanity items are expensive. Gold watch? expensive! Diamong earrings? expensive! They are intended for the people that can afford it. If you need to consider the price when purchasing them then maybe you shouldn't be buying them to start with.

Gold watches and diamond earrings are expensive because of production costs and the rarity of their raw materials (relatively).

There are NO production costs in virtual items (effectively) and NO raw materials (rare or common), the cost of producting such items is effectively $0.00 and as such it is 100% mark-up and 100% profit.



It's like comparing apples and thin air.

I definitely agree on that the armor sets are ridiculously expensive, which is why I haven't purchased any.

On the other hand, I've spent the last week or so selling crafting materials (and augmentation kits) so I can pick up Cartel items from the GTN. So far I have a complete Life Day gear set, two sets of Elegant Loungewear, basically the entire new tier of spaceship parts, and various other goodies.

I'm happy with this.

That's not exactly correct. These sets have a cost. It's the design/art team's time in creating and ensuring that the armor works with all the character skeletons. After that work is done, each marginal unit has a near zero cost in production. Substantially less than a penny, but it's not zero. And all revenue goes back into the general fund used to pay overhead and production costs for the game.

You'll appreciate this analogy. These goods are very much like drugs. The majority of the cost comes upfront in design and marketing. The actual materials/production/distribution might only cost a penny or less. But once they have their patent, the drug companies think nothing of charging $10-15 a pill.

So when folks were taunting how this game costs $200+ to create. Well.... The EA boss's Maserati isn't going to buy itself.

I wouldn't mind it so much if the stuff actually looked nice or if we could change the colors of it. They seem to be obsessed with adding spikes and extraneous ugly stuff to the armor and then closing their eyes and randomly picking colors for it.

It think it's a sad state of affairs when some random NPC has a nicer looking uniform than we can ever get. Hey, Mr./Ms. NPC, I just saved your planet from utter destruction... could you spare a uniform as payment?

I would buy the outlaw set if the "Outlaw Duster" was actually a duster, and not just a black shirt

I honestly wouldn't give a damn about cash shop and its prices if we had the advertised armor sets in the game. Our character classes were advertised to wear gear sets which are nowhere to be found in the game. Even Jedi Knight gets an epic tease with an amazing set on the character creation screen.

If we had those sets in the game and / or hood toggle then I honestly wouldn't give a damn but right now cash shop is the only way of getting decent robes for the Jedi. This thing was built on our backs while we kept subscribing and supporting the game. That's what we've got instead of promised content updates. Overpriced armor sets. There is not even a chance for a discount for subscribers who spent a certain amount of money on the game and kept in participating in a game which is, de facto, a beta after the whole year?

As long as the only way to get the Jedi look in a STAR WARS game will be the cash shop I will not be satisfied. Why NPCs can look like Jedi and players, who paid for the game and were lured in by falsely advertised character appearance, are forced to look like space-hobos with oversized shoulder guards and hoods glued to their heads?

Most of the sets on cartel shop are retextured/recoloured existing sets. This is much less work than actually designing a completely new armor. And after its done - there is no physical or any other materials involved that would make the price reasonable.

Yes, there is a small inital cost, it is not great however and every time one of those items sells the effective production cost gets closer and closer to $0.00, certainly selling enough would push it under $0.01 which is effectively $0.00 as I said.

Gold watches and diamond earing are nothing like the same however, as each item always has large production cost involved, and then mark up on top.

It's not really like drugs either, because an awful lot of very expensive research and development and testing goes into drug production, so the intial production costs are very high, however yes like drugs the average production cost effectively goes down with each sale (although drugs always have A production cost too).

The is why the Mini was so profitable, they designed it once, and it sold almost unchanged for decades.

Yes but the mount is for all your toons and any toon in the future. It also levels in speed as you buy the training, so it is useful forever on every toon.
SWTORS is for one toon....
and although it is more opinion, the WoW mounts have a lot more style to them, its a rickity snowblower with raggity christmas lights...

the solution for you is simply......don't buy it