sourclams wrote:DarknessEternal wrote:GW models explicitly never become illegal. Buying updated versions of models is your preference only.
Scott filled in the rest of my objections to the mythical pricing schemes presented.
You're completely wrong.
Squats.
Lost and the Damned.
Powerfist Chaplain.
Inquisitorial Allies.
Space Wolf Leman Russ Exterminator.
Even if the exact model does not change, the nature of the army will alter drastically. Nidzilla is effectively impossible, for example. An Inquisitorial army list built around Storm Troopers is very likely going to lose all of its hellguns in favor of mass special weapons. Space Wolves went from footslogging
GH and
BC squads with the occasional vehicle to 15 missilelauncher Long Fangs and vehicle walls. It is, simply, stupid to compare a Same-Army-For-Five-Years player to an Every-New-Videogame player. They are tacitly not the same.
I've spent more than $7,000 on
GW models in 4 years.
From 2004-2008, including a $1200 desktop, I spent roughly $2,000 on two World of Warcraft games, monthly subscription fees, and Dawn of War. Somebody (and they exist, I know one) who plays nothing but Counterstrike on his 7 year old desktop spends approximately $0 on videogaming.
Peoples' approach to either hobby will vary. It is dumb to try to make sweeping cost generalizations, because the spending pattern will be entirely dependent on what their degree of involvement is.
Inquisitorial Allies and the
SW LRE can always be exchanged/sold to people who collect the army(s) that can still use them. Other models can be converted. Yes, nidzilla isn't really possible anymore. Carnifexes are very secondrate. So convert your carnies into tervigons/harpies/tyrrannofexes. This is even easier if you magnetize your models, which many 'nid players do.
Lets take the new
SW codex and what you would have to change from the old edition:
Sell off your Leman Russ tanks to
IG players
Use that money to get 3 devastator squad boxes and
SW heads. Get some of the random missile launchers pretty much all
SM players have laying around they got with their
tac squads.
You will have to buy a bunch of rhinos/razorbacks, but you can get them secondhand for cheap, or even if you don't you probably aren't gonna spend over $250 on the models, then however much you will need to paint them(doubt over $300 total).
And a new codex comes around every 9 years or so it seems unless you play vanilla space marines(who don't generally have dramatic model changes in their iterations anyways). So $300 every 9 years? Not too bad. It was only the initial investment that was huge(which is really the barrier to entry for the game).
If you collect multiple armies or are constantly army switching to the new biggest badest army, then yes, it is going to cost you an arm and a leg. That is the cost of trying to stay at the head of the power curve. Keeping a state of the art computer is likely going to cost just as much though.