15 dollars for one set of armor?

EA develops more than just MMO's, they produce a wide range of products. Products which are funded by some of their major cash cows such as The Sims franchise. However, also leads to the development of risky titles which do cost money to develop, yet may not turn back the investment.

So any form of additional money you can make out of cash cows, in a business sense is great, as this allows big budget titles to continue being developed. For example Mass Effect, the game sold approximately 3 million copies till date on XBOX 360 and PC. Which has probably yielded EA an income of about 80 million tops. During its first weeks, just a portion of all of that was sold. Yet the game had an estimated development budget of around 40 million.

If EA didn't drag in money through cash cows, they wouldn't have been able to afford the development of Mass Effect 2, let stand 3.

You are looking at things far to much from the perspective of a player of a single game. You need to understand that SWTOR's income will far from all be devoted to SWTOR alone.

Bind to legacy at very least.

Because they spent $200,000,000 making tthis game and lost probably half of their subs in a year's time. This stuff is 100000% optional and considering I see people constantly opening cartel packs I'd say they have no shortage of people willing to spend money. The only people that should be concerned is BW and whether or not they're happy without the amount selling or if they alienating too many with the prices.

I don't see why they can't do it two ways. Make the items obtainable from daily comms or bh comms for the people who don't mind earning it in game as well as the market for the I want it now crowd. I know they did it with the ship parts so why not with everything else

Simple, most hate not getting enough points in pvp because of all the premades. And FP's most won't queue for and most don't want to run with those too lazy to get pre-HM gear

If everything was too cheap then everyone would buy it and it would then be crap because everyone would be wearing it.

It's a ripoff and I'm sure as hell not buying it. No sense encouraging this kind of behavior by actually buying it.

I know people who have spent over $100 on Random Cartel Boxes... So yeah I doubt we will see any price drops soon with people throwing money away like that....

Sad thing is 60% of all profits from the cash shop go to EA CEO and Executives for there bonuses, then 30% goes towards new cash shop items and 10% goes towards new content for subscribers....

Just guessing with the numbers but I doubt i'm far off

Difference is in WoW you get them on all your toons and future toons. They was also speed level adaptive making them very useful for new toons. In SWTOR with the bound and one toon only items, it's just a ripoff.

Yes the are, and expensive to produce, at least in decent quailty.

Of course if you own a blood diamond mine, you might beg to differ, I dunno.