Stop Making Should-Be Achievement Gear.."Optional Gear"

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

To be fair, 90% of the cash shop is reskins or event items that people already had the opportunity to acquire. the other 10% is exclusive items, 50% of which is npc gear that had to be retooled to fit all of the races.

This is an important distinction. While some insist things in the shop should be available in game, what they often fail to realize is that it wouldn't have existed at all (for player use) if it wasn't in the shop. Retooling npc gear to fit all player races take time and resources. To recoup the investment of time and resources (and to hopefully make a small profit to boot) those items are put in the store. If there wasn't going to be a cash shop, those items would never exist for player use. Anything in the cash shop is either extra work beyond the budget of a given xpac, or made available after an event that used to award them changed.

If they couldn't put those items in the shop SE wouldnt bother investing the time and money to make them at all. So its a choice of available in the shop or not available anywhere ever.

Now that's not to say SE doesn't cheat here and there by putting old event items up that already exist and function, or recolored armor sets that already drop in game, but generally speaking, much of whats in the shop wouldn't have been made in the first place if they couldnt sell it.