PSA: HQ items cannot be restored through item restoration if not discarded

[Liinko]

Recently I accidentally desynth an expensive crafted item with expensive melds, knowing that there is an item restoration policy, I filed a ticked and talked to a GM who said "HQ items are not restorable as they contain unique information."

I asked if it were any different if I had discarded it accidentally, and got the response "If you have accidentally discarded the item we will verify discard though our logs and if evidence is found your item will be reviewed for restoration."

Apparently you can only get your HQ item restored if it was accidentally discarded.

If any dev, or community rep would like to share why this is that would be great.

The GM said I could leave feedback so here it is,
To whomever is in charge of item restoration:
Please consider other accidental loss of HQ items other than discarding such as converting, desynthing, and trading in for seals, some of us spend a lot of time and money getting our items, just to be told that we cannot have them back.

Thank you LGM Enkrateia for the reply:

Greetings!

It seems there may have been a miscommunication that I would like to clear up, and I will be looking into the contact with the GM to see if there are ways to improve how this information is conveyed to our customers. The GMs have the ability to recover HQ items and items with materia on them as part of the item restoration policy. Thanks to certain changes with items, we are able to restore a number of items that may not have been restorable in FFXI or earlier versions of the game, and we try hard to find ways to expand this policy to cover as many items as possible.

That being said, if an item was used properly in the game, then it would not normally be eligible for restoration through the policy. This would include turning in an item for a quest, converting an item into materia, or failed synthesis, among many possible variations of this guideline for the policy. This is in place to prevent abuse of the item restoration policy to try to improve the rewards that can be obtained.

That being said, many cases like this are escalated to the SGMs and myself for consideration as an exception to the policy (both for how the item was lost or if the policy was already used by a customer). When considering an exception, we need to balance the context of the situation, fairness for all customers, and the workload for the GM team. You are always welcome to request the use of the item restoration policy, although these exceptions are not guaranteed.

I hope this explains things a bit better, and provides a bit more insight into the policy.

LGM Enkrateia