A small issue Valentione's day event quest

[tacoguy4]

just finished the seasonal event, normally i don't have any issues with doing these but this one in specific employed a rather troublesome mechanic, you got a reward based on your character's gender and then you were forced to trade for the reward from someone who's character is of the opposite gender to yours.

there are two major flaws in this approach...

1. this assumes the ratio of male to female characters in the game is 1:1 when it's fairly unlikely to actually be the case given that you can choose which gender to play as. if there is a large enough disparity in the gender ratio this makes one item more valuable than the other and those who receive the more valuable one really don't have any good reason to trade their excess and would likely benefit more from selling them instead.
   
2. it may be pretty darn hard to find someone to trade with someone if you do the event later on

[tacoguy4]

i did this today on my server, Famfrit, which is pretty low on activity as far as i can tell (nothing compared to coeurl which is the server i used to be on) and there was no one else doing the quest, i had to go buy a bitter from the market and it was listed at 3 times the price of a pure. it's fine if you want to get people to interact, this is an MMO, i get it. i just think it was poorly implemented this time around.

[Sagittarian]

it's fine if you want to get people to interact, this is an MMO, i get it. i just think it was poorly implemented this time around.

I think this is widely agreed with but the general response on the forums has been "just buy one from the market board" .. which isn't really encouraging players to interact.
Aside from unknown avatar gender ratios on the servers it has also been discussed that many male avatars don't seem interested in doing the event and that there are implied societal expectations.
For players with accounts that allow multiple characters, creating an alt and power leveling just to run the event is a possibility but seems a silly need. I've created one just in case anyone in our FC needs help finishing the event.

1. it may be pretty darn hard to find someone to trade with someone if you do the event later on

i did this today on my server, Famfrit and there was no one else doing the quest.

Case in point, there were several threads about this last week. Some of them are still floating around. I tried a melodramatic humorous one about the distressing price of chocolate. There was another good one about about Buying-love-the-sad-state-of-eorzean-romance