Not going to be too long winded here, but why is this happening? I probably don't speak for myself alone when I say that the merc pack is great. It's affordable and gives a good amount of nice things to play with.

I know BPO's need to be limited for a player market to flourish but all you're doing now is making them available only to people with a lot of money.

Bottom line: Merc pack is affordable. The others are not.

I tend to agree with you about the price of the merc pack, in fact I have bought many of them myself. The change in BPO availability is to move mercs towards being reliant upon the market for their gear. This is so that a functioning exchange of goods between Mercs and Capsuleers can occur. In Eve you pay for *everything*. If you lose your ship you buy another one (velators/impairors/reapers and ibises aside) or make do with a noob ship IE starter gear until you can afford a replacement. If you play one match and die enough times to require a restock to field any suit at the end of the match, the militia stuff is cheap enough to get you into at least 100 of them for the next match and the cost of it is not likely to change much when Eve becomes involved in our market. I imagine that CCP has milked the merc packs for a long enough time to feel that Aurum purchases will suffice to keep people in boosters and if they are a die hard they likely have lots of BPOs already or would be willing to buy an Elite or Veteran pack for the BPOs.

For any Mercs still wanting BPOs without needing to buy the expensive packs, the Merc packs will be around until October 8th if I recall correctly so buy a few, get the BPOs from them and spend your Aurum on BPOs while they are still available, I'm sure there will be a market for BPOs if/when the market system becomes available for people to sell stuff on or to trade to other players.