So now contest prizes can be bought?

[Nariel]

It’s not exclusive though. It was always available. If you entered any contest here on the forums you literally could have won it.

Yup, they where gifts, bonus reward with a certain emotional value to the winner.

Won't cry a river if someone buy a coffee cup I eventually win in "whatever random contest", its still a cup I win and he/she will have a cup he/she find nice.

All I can see its people complaigning about items they probably will never notice on somebody else cause they don't care more than others care about an earring cause you barely see them at all. Its about personal emotional value they put in it. Sooooo... Whatever, let people have their cute little item and brag about how you get it as a prize.

[Sakuraluna]

Yup, they where gifts, bonus reward with a certain emotional value to the winner.

Won't cry a river if someone buy a coffee cup I eventually win in "whatever random contest", its still a cup I win and he/she will have a cup he/she find nice.

All I can see its people complaigning about items they probably will never notice on somebody else cause they don't care more than others care about an earring cause you barely see them at all. Its about personal emotional value they put in it. Sooooo... Whatever, let people have their cute little item and brag about how you get it as a prize.

Your previous statement was that people were upset over an exclusive being made unexclusive. I was correcting you; it’s not exclusive and has been available for years. You’re thinking of this in the same mindframe of the white ravens where their release is diminishing their worth as an exclusive shiny that only those who had it from x moment in the game’s history should ever have access to it, while I view it as closer to players doing recently-added content, some even hardcore content, only to wake up the next morning to find it being sold on a moogle for 30 Gil (The scarf was even set to be distributed to the newly-announced winners of the most recent contest). Not the same thing obviously, but imo a bit more similar in value.

Realistically, you’d eventually start to think, what’s the point. I can either put in the effort now, or spend the 30 Gil in a day or so, and in a game that is already designed around steep vertical progression, it not only diminishes the value of the item, but it diminishes the value of gameplay itself. I don’t think it would have mattered at all if the playerbase were made aware of these reward changes far enough ahead of time, and/or if the moogle sold a “replica” of the item. They definitely shouldn’t have left current contest winners scrambling to select a different reward. That just seems disrespectful to the player base.

It’s not about the item. It’s not about the exclusivity. It’s about taking a reward that people were actively working toward and without warning, handing it out to everybody for minimal cost and effort.