White Raven earring given out at The Rising event 2018

[Vaer]

I do get what you're arguing for, but I do think it's a little... iffy... to say that an achievement for learning how to do a video game fight has the same depth/strength as something like a diploma (which has 2-8 years of somebody's life invested behind it) or a wedding band (which is hopefully the symbol of a deep and abiding emotional commitment between two people.)

I get the overall concept. Things have different meanings to different people, and people attach importance to different things. I'm somebody who cares passionately about video games (if you took the ability to play some of my favourite games away from me I'd probably go on a rampage)... but I cannot and will not accept that these things have equivalence, and it alarms me a little when people try to say that handing out a video game trophy is on the level of being married to someone who decides to take multiple spouses. You're not married to Square Enix, they're a company that takes your money.

I wasn't really saying they are equivalent, because they are not. I just used those examples as items that people might find meaning in that others might not. There was a post earlier about the Airman's Coin that summarized what the OP was trying to say rather well.

However, someone else did actually make that "trophy item" and "spouse handing out wedding bands" correlation. Maybe they're just bad at metaphors, but it's kind of scary if they really do equate the two.

Yeah I don't agree with that. It's not the same thing at all.

It sounds petty because it is. I'd actually have slightly more respect for their position if they were against the glamour being obtainable as well, but since that doesn't bother them, it makes it rather apparent that what they're really after is the game going out of its way to tell them how special they are because their sense of self-worth is apparently not internally sourced. It's not the game's job to manage people's emotions for them.

Real life mementos also tend to be valued irrespective of whether or not anyone else can get them. Many of them are mass produced items, but they're kept because of the significance to the individual, not because of their rarity. Nobody goes around expecting anyone else to be in awe of them for having a dead relative who liked baseball or whatever either. This breaks down in the MMORPG iteration because it's not for the same purpose at all. Instead, it's about prestige (that doesn't really exist) and an attempt to establish some sort of social hierarchy based on tenure and outdated accomplishments.

I get what you're saying, but even IRL there are collector's items and limited editions that are actually kept for their rarity and/or prestige. I mean I might not give a damn about a rare baseball card, it's just a piece of paper with a drawing right but others might. So really it seems the impasse is that it's a digital item.