The Phantasy Star Fleet discord server states the following in its #na-guides-and-info channel. I am posting this here because the official forums are the best place for our voices to be heard.
Before we can talk about some stuff, we need to talk about Star Gems. Star Gems are an ingame currency obtainable for free through various methods or via real money. In JP, there's an alarmingly large amount of ways to get SG for free. In NA, you get them for costumes (30 a day unless you pay for another character), or S ranking story modes (one time reward). They removed the ability to get SG from the casino in NA because ????.
NA has a "mission pass" to let you get cosmetics and such by playing each week (think battle pass, but half free - You need to pay 200 SG (~$9) once per pass to get the cosmetic rewards). However, the items gained from these mission passes are untradeable/unsellable and the Mission Passes expire after time, which means that the cosmetics from previous mission passes (before PC was added) are 100% unobtainable for PC players.
In addition, NA has something called "Fresh Finds" (If you played JP, it replaces the Treasure Shop - It's similar, but only takes star gems for cosmetics while some other items can be bought with SG or meseta). It has 4 cosmetic items available for purchase that change daily, and 3 that change weekly. These items are also not tradeable, and are previous Fresh Finds items 100% unobtainable for PC players. You can see current and previous Fresh Finds here: https://github.com/SynthSy/PSO2-Dictionary/wiki/Fresh-Finds
To recap, the issue is that, alongside no real good ways to get SG in NA, they are heavily pushing SG items - You have fresh finds, which contains 4 cosmetics that change daily and can only be bought with SG. Then you have 3 weekly outfits/packages that can only be bought with SG. This does not exist in JP. There's a shop that sells 1 cosmetic item a day that costs SG, but you can also get that item with meseta instead if you desire. Then you have these SG sales where they take previously Arks Cash items (read: tradeable and buyable on the player market) and make you buy them in package deals instead of individually. Then, you have Material Storage, which is borderline necessary, costing SG, along with a number of other things in the game.
Even worse, nothing bought with SG is tradeable - So if you don't buy it right then and there, you'll likely never get it again until the Fresh Finds rotates back to it in months, if it ever does. This is a predatory practice called FOMO - Fear of Missing Out.
So in JP, you can get most of these items by paying meseta at any time - In NA, you either were there and bought them with real money (or used the super limited free SG you had) or just didn't get them.
It is completely understandable that a free to play game needs to get its money somehow. But Star gems and Fresh Finds are just predatory. I propose an alternative, whereby players may still be inclined to spend money, but not have to live with the anxiety of knowing that they may miss a day fresh finds has an item they want, and are never able to have it again. A type of "backburner" store, where every cosmetic item released may be purchased from with AC after said items are out of circulation. I may describe this more in detail in another thread.
If you don't like these systems that are in place, I urge you to speak up about it. With enough traction we can make a change. The same has been done for AC scratch tickets released before PC release - or at least, we've gotten a response saying that the GMs have brought it up to the developers.