I bet every time the person in charge of the forums tries to justify a 75€ skin he/she dies a little inside ...I mean it's his or her job , what do you expect lol.
It's like the higher ups in charge already think the game is doomed so they are putting all their chips on the small minority that has no self control and are spending addicts before the game shuts down.
I actually think the game could get more support if they make the right changes though.
I work as customer service for a real estate website, so I know how it is to deal with angry customers (and people buying houses can be REAL bastards!). I only wish Mercury Steam was as upfront about what's going on with us, the players (or customers depending on the thought process), as I strive to be with anyone I talk to. I am never afraid to blame our website if it has issues and design flaws, like our search function was *awful* for the longest.... but the web developers thought it was fine and kept writing off our internal complaints. Everyone that complained about it, I agreed and sympathized with.
And eventually, it got changed! Now I don't have to apologize for our web search being crappy 10 times a day
Pretending a massive problem does not exist does not look good on a service provider. Admitting fault, having empathy and understanding and a willingness to correct a problem, goes a looooooong way. Acting like 80 dollars for a single cosmetic is justifiable is pretending like it's not a problem, and an attempt to invalidate criticism. Like my web devs at work claiming a function is fine, when we get 50 calls a day complaining about said feature.
Someone compared Ginebra skin to Bethesda's Horse Armor DLC, which is a good point. Horse Armor was massively mocked by the video game community at large, and now stands as an infamous meme in regards to overpriced useless DLC... and that was just $2.50! Imagine if Raiders was more mainstream, an $80 skin would become the laughing stock of every single game journalism site on the internet!
It's not as big of an issue as the much-needed economy changes, but they DO keep promising to fix those, which has kept a few of the lingering fanbase from jumping ship already. It's just such a mixed bag as far as some things we get a lot of dev feedback on, and others do not