Quote Originally Posted by Skivvy View Post
A quick way to lose faith and respect amongst your paying customers would be to start releasing "exclusive" items that come from events / special purchases to the general playerbase. Essentially, these items are a little "thank you" to customers for spending additional money (either through events, buying CDS, preorders, whatever) outside of your subscription fee.

There seems to be a lot of entitlement that floats around with the crowd who thinks all items should be released to everyone. Outside of showing up to conventions, just about everything else is available easily to those who want to pay for it.
^ This. If you want your "thank you"-items then you should have been supporting the game. "I didn't know it existed" isn't really a good enough excuse to make it sound like you should be able to essentially go back in time to get those same items that others got. In another game, RIFT, they had a special mount and minion that you could only get for having bought the Collector's Edition... some time later those exact same items were then available in the cash shop. Why? So some kid who joined the game a year into it (considering a lot of games at the time RIFT came out didn't last a year... Star Wars... before going F2P) could tell everyone else he bought the CE when he really didn't? Just because he liked the two-headed turtle mount and the little Bogling? The point is that making them either reappear over and over, or offering them in the cash shop when they were originally distributed for special things (events, CEs, etc.) you remove the whole "thank you" aspect from it, and that's the whole issue right there.