Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

As long as a company wants me to pay money for their product, they need to have a thick enough skin to tolerate me being as critical as I want to be.

I approach my criticism of a company's for-sale miniatures very differently from how I critique another person's minis in the painting and modeling forum. In P&M I try to be generous with praise and offer little criticism beyond ideas for how the sculptor/painter can better execute what they appear to be trying to. But a miniature appearing in the News and Rumours forum is a very different beast. Now granted, I am sometimes generous with praise there too (If I think the miniature deserves it) but I reserve the right to call garbage garbage. Because there is a lot of garbage being peddled in our industry, and there are a lot of times when a company thinks they can unload a sub-standard product on us just because it's needed to fill a slot they have arbitrarily built into their game. They aren't going to improve without criticism.

Sort of like in my fine arts classes: I critiqued my peers as peers, and my goal was always to help us to move together toward doing the best work we could. Were I critique art as a buyer or collector, I would be as critical as the piece deserved. Some pieces deserve a lot of criticism.