Heres my $0.02 on this:
I've been listening to these arguements over the fairness of this new system, and I have to say that I consider it to be 101% fair. I know there are people who worked for ages to get (INSERT SUPER EXPENSIVE ITEM HERE), and they may find it really unfair that someone else gets it for virtually nothing. But that's life! Think of real life. Someone spends $10 on Lottery Tickets, and wins $10million. Someones else spends $2 a day every day for 10 years on Lottery Tickets, and doesn't win a thing? Or if someone wins that much money, while someone else spends their whole life working to reach that amount. Thinking otherwise it generally quite snobbish, since it implies that you belive "If they don't work as hard as me, if they don't get as many RE's, good restocks, or have as great internet connection as me, then they don't deserve to be happy".
Putting items in a shop is like TNT personally strapping their servers with dynamite and blowing each of them up in turn. The shop would be overloaded with items. Especially those high estimated value items which are in reality only worth 2 np. And then, only the 1337 restockers would be able to get anything worthwhile. Auctions? Only the best Auction Snipers would win. Money Tree? Don't even start with that. Putting the items into Shops, Auctions or Money Tree = lagfest
Think of it this way. Most newbies will end up selling a super rare item for 99,999np. They feel happy in the short term, and the person who buys that item will have the right to jump off the walls with joy.
And then, the way everyone is going on here, you'd think that every second newbie would find a Jade Scorchstone lying around. Fact of the matter is, most people will be bombarded with junk items they'll end up sending to the money tree anyway.
I think the best bet is to make this only available to people if they meet the following conditions:
A) They are over 4 months old
B) They have logged in in the last week
C) They sign up to recieve the items
These are the reasons why:
A) Most people under 4 months end up quitting early because Neo just isn't for them, or end up getting frozen.
B) The reciever of the prize should log in reguarly. Otherwise, the item will most likely be wasted on their account.
C) This is to make sure that only the deserving people recieve these items. The link could be available in many locations (News, Pet Central, etc), but only the people who read the news and actually know what they're doing on Neo, will recieve the items. A great anti New Member (I know, I wrote New Member myself) precaution.
*light bulb lights up*
IDEA
When a person gets the chance to collect an item, they can be given the choice of one of three items (you don't know what they are). And they choose one of those items to keep. The other two are sent back to the pool. That way, it's not entirely random, and people can't whinge because they got something crap.