IMC has made endgame equipment too vital in character capability and progression (probably as a broad, general band-aid fix for their inability to actually balance the game and its classes properly) instead of actual experience and hard-work, and such equipment are largely locked behind RNG or Silver if anyone is selling it on Market.
With all these content rankings encouraging competition and rewarding the ranked, along with IMC’s dumb balancing creating such a huge disparity between meta and non-meta builds, players will do anything possible to excel in endgame content that will only get harder, even if it means buying items and gear from such content to do said content if it’s for sale. For non-viable builds who can’t even do endgame content (lacking damage, party members, a higher minimum gear requirement), their choices are either to give up, farm loads of Silver to buy them (legit farming, not RMT/botting) or be blessed by RNG for progression. With that said, I literally saw “a well-known botter” in my server often get lucky in Goddess Grace, even getting 2 top rewards back-to-back in the same Goddess Grace last week. One can easily guess where the Silver required to do Goddess Grace comes from … 
What makes it worse is IMC balancing the game taking these endgame equipment into account. With how they keep going on with this (Vaivora literally making or breaking a class, Archstone RNG, IMC putting stacks into every class without thought, Goddess Armor making IMC change skill mechanics themselves into channeling just to conform to the Armor etc), IMC will never be able to keep the player-base from declining once they see the dumpster fire fueled by RNG, Silver and crap balancing at the end of the road, no matter how many Seasonal Servers they host.
Also, yes, Archstone is a dumb idea and should never have existed.