We are proud to announce the FINAL FANTASY XIV Grant A Wish Contest! It's time to get your dearest wish ready, attach your fairy wings and make use of your magical wand but will you obey to the little devil inside of you? There are some lovely prizes up for grabs, so head over to the forums to see how you could be in with a chance of winning!

Kind of a weird contest. They wan't people to play "asshole genie", where you grant the wish of the previous poster with unfortunate or unexpected consequences.

That's the kind of thing they do on GameFAQS, lol.

EU only?

Yeah. Didn't stop me tho.

The rage from EU countries not allowed to participate is pretty amusing
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/thre ... e%E2%80%9C

The thing about legal problems and the EU is perfectly true though, its the same reason a lot of PSN and XBLA stuff isn't available in random european countries due to all sorts of weird crappy laws that companies decide isn't worth putting up with.

Not european, but for example, you are not allowed to run a contest in Canada where you win entirely by chance. So what you have to do is make the winner do a "skill test". Basically the company must ask the winner some kind of math question, that if unanswered or answered incorrectly they forfeit and goes to the next person. By doing so they avoid the anti-gambling contest canadian law thing.

Now imagine instead of just having to account for the US and Canada, but you had the weird and wonderful laws of 20-30 countries to deal with. That's the issue the EU has and most companies choose to just stick to the big EU countries (UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain) where the companies have established offices with good knowledge of the local laws.

Why the contest is EU only and exclusing the US and Japan I have no idea though. But it's not the first time, there have been a bunch of US and JP only contests too. I recall the US and EU both held two completely different contests each regarding valentine's day.