Over 240 maps and no blue bird.

[Alukah]

Why assume he bought the maps?
By now it's very possible to have gathered that many peisteskin maps on his own.

I got my own Bluebird only a few weeks ago after having done not only my own maps pretty much every day since 2.1 arrived.

True, but even if you gather the maps yourself it's still a money loss.

[blowfin]

True, but even if you gather the maps yourself it's still a money loss.

Don't know about you, but running Peiste with four players, you should make your money back every round (4 x maps). When you include the chance of an Unhidden, it's definitely positive income, even more so if you take 5 minutes to farm them yourself.

[Alukah]

Don't know about you, but running Peiste with four players, you should make your money back every round (4 x maps). When you include the chance of an Unhidden, it's definitely positive income, even more so if you take 5 minutes to farm them yourself.

Peiste maps must be really cheap in your server, here they wander around 30k, pretty hard to get your money back unless you get lucky.

But where I'm getting at is, if the income is positive then OP got enough gil from those maps to buy the minion directly, if the income is negative then OP should consider selling the maps instead and buying the minion directly.

I understand the bigger picture and I agree that it's ridiculous to keep vanity gated behind an RNG based grind wall, but for OP's specific case I think it's time to make use of the marketboard, at least this vanity item is tradeable, unlike others.