Thousands of views on this thread
I am not feeling hopeful about Square Enix fixing the situation since it seems like they took part in hiding that it was a raffle/lottery. But I guess we'll see. My hunch is that they want it to just die down. I think if players want them to fix it, they have to keep being noisy -- keep it at the top of the forum, keep contacting SE customer service, etc.... but even that may not work. The cost of lost future $ from these players might just be too insignificant compared to the amount of money they can still make from others who didn't partake in this campaign or hear about the people screwed over in this campaign. Also, SE knows that most of us are not likely to cancel our subscription and walk away from the game because of this, which also lowers their own financial incentive to fix it.
(If you want to understand this better, research the Ford Pinto scandal from the 1970s. Ford knew there was a serious, fatal flaw in the design, but it was cheaper for them to pay off the families who sued rather than to recall the cars. The only reason they did the recall is because investigative journalists caught them and broadcast it. There is a phrase for this in economics, I think, but I'm hungry and can't think of it right now, lol. Cost-benefit analysis?)
But, anyway, there is a personal cost in continuing to pressure SE/GH about this "campaign". Time and energy. For some of us, there may also be an emotional cost. If you're someone who has experienced some major betrayals in life, particularly when you were growing up, then small incidents like this really poke at old wounds. Put another way, this little event feels like an emotional mountain because it's not just about this one event. It's all those previous ones, too, that you never fully healed from.
Anyone who is hurting more about the betrayal than about the missing emote really understands what I'm saying here. If that's you, then my guess is you feel hurt because you trusted Square Enix, and you feel stupid or ashamed for having trusted them. This is how I feel -- and I do have a history of trauma in my growing-up years. I'm trying to take a positive slant on this and just view it as another opportunity to process & heal from all the old stuff. I'm also trying to keep in mind that 98% of the time, I don't fall for scams like this. I'm hyper-vigilant, so it's usually not easy to con me financially. Sometimes I'm going to fail, though, and this is apparently one of those times.
I continue to take solace in knowing that I am not alone. Take a moment and look at the thread views from the General Discussion section. Notice that most threads that began in the past week have just 300-2,000 views. This one, by contrast, already has more than 22,000. There are a lot of people who were also scammed who are reading others' experiences but are not commenting. They're also trying to figure out what happened to them or their friends or their FC members.