But then I realized a lot of other people were using that same set of NPCs, so I went with this NPC instead:



I posted my entry with the snowman NPC quite early on in the competition. I was only on page 9. And I got a lot of likes. So there was LOTS of opportunity for people to "copycat" my idea. But no one did. So I think what you're assuming to be copycats is just a lot of people having a common idea. Stuff like cactuars, sylphs, uniform NPCs occur to everyone, doesn't mean they're copycats.