I don’t really see how you could arrive at the conclusion that it’s false hope when nobody, even higher level officials, are going to be predicting the results of the current offensive let alone the situation in a year. I hear any and everything from both sides. But it’s off topic and we don’t need to get into it.
There should have been a general adjustment of how things are going to work if the Board has decided that Russia is now North Korea. If avatars are being given as some barter equivalent to prize money, then there needs to be rules ironed out about how much money equates to an avatar and whether only FAF official prize money is capable of being spent on said good. Doing this in dms without any rules set up as NOC did clarifies nothing for anybody, really. Even if gieb and whoever else is involved. Money is transferable to avatars now and that needs to get explained.
I would personally have given people the option of having funds reserved or transferring it into some sort of service ie avatars as long as it matches some criteria set up by the tournament team. I think the “complexity” argument is quite silly, the account ledgers for FAF are not that complicated where this is an insurmountable obstacle.