I don't know if this was intended as a criticism or agreement with the person you replied to. Either way, competing on levels that are far removed from the bottom hierarchy of needs is something we should consider a good thing, whether or not the sheen wears off for some people. The problems with our hypercompetition for many of the basics are that it produces cheating because there's such intense pressure to stay/get ahead ("The Cheating Culture"), and that failure can leave you with absolute, rather than just relative, levels of privation.

As far as the sheen wearing off, I'm not sure I'd agree with that. In extant communities that have no rewards outside of their status hierarchy, people continue to participate, often with great gusto: gaming, stamp collecting, meme creation, drawing, etc. People do them for both intrinsic rewards, and for status rewards only within that hierarchy or in "nearby" hierarchies.

Even Trotsky thought "the powerful force of competition which, in bourgeois society, has the character of market competition, will not disappear in a socialist society, but, to use the language of psychoanalysis, will be sublimated, that is, will assume a higher and more fertile form" "individual competition will have the widest scope." In the cases where the sheen does wear off, people can always switch, as they do now, to other areas (get bored of WoW, start playing Dark Souls, or go to a completely different hierarchy [games -> painting].)