Recently , Starbucks has this lanyard promotion . You pay SGD 28 and you received SGD 20 in your Starbucks card and a lanyard set . You cannot use your Starbucks card to pay for this lanyard set . You have to pay with cash or card . I find this to be very similar to the Tidus promotion whereby Tidus is the free gift that you can only get if you top up a certain amount of credit into your account . At the same time , Starbucks has another promotion for their umbrella . Spend SGD 50 in 1 receipt and you get an umbrella for free . This is like the FFX card . As long as you do a 5 summon tickets or more in 1 transaction , you will get a FFX card for free . How many people are comfortable with these types of transaction ? Topping up credit to use in the unforeseen future . Single transaction of a certain amount . Some of us that are used to these kind of transactions see it as a norm . However , for the majority , they might not be comfortable to these kind of transaction . Like what you had said , SE had dragged the majority of the players out of their comfort zone . For SE to success , they had to find ways to lure you to spend money . They had to find ways to lure you to keep playing . They had to find ways to lure you to promote their games . We make mistakes as we tries out new things , so do SE . At the end of the day , SE has to answer to their shareholders , their investors . They are sandwiched between their investors and their players . Without players to produce the income , there will be no investors . Without investors to fund the RD , there will be no players . For some people , 12 , 000 magicite can pay for a month of transportation fee . For other , 12 , 000 magicite is just another bottle of wine at a pub on a weekday night . Quite glad to see so many rants posts and salty posts about Tidus . This just shows how many really cares and loves about this game . You won ' t rant about something that is not part of your life .