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Has anybody else noticed a change in the GW plastic when it's stored with high levels of heat?

Years back I had a bunch of Tau models that were in a storage locker in Iraq where temps reached 120-130+ degrees and the plastic turned a very light shade of grey and got considerably softer and a little bit brittle. These were models crisis suits and tanks from when Tau first released so I kinda forgot about it happening and figured it might have been due to a bad batch or different formula of plastic at the time since it was 15 years ago. Earlier this week I got a Ravenwing battleforce box I won off of ebay that were still sealed in the box but you could tell they had been stored somewhere hot as the box was slightly faded, shrink wrap was a bit brittle and the plastic was all that softer grey. The seller was in Nevada so I'm thinking it was in a shed, garage or some other storage container that has seen quite a bit of heat over the years.

It doesn't seem in impact the details of the models or how they glue together but they are a lot softer and the plastic bends or cuts super easy and it's very easy to damage it accidentally with the clippers while removing it from the sprues. I can easily bend a space marine rider leg or a bolter, where a normal one tends to take a bit of effort and if it deforms it's usually right before it snaps. It's still perfectly usable I just have to be careful using it not to damage the details, but I was curious if anyone else has run into a similar situation with models that have been in storage?

I dont think iv ever noticed something like that though i guess i never left anything in 120+ heat.

I do know that older GW plastic was natrually lighter and more soft.

newer kits are all dark grey and hard as a rock.

I've noticed that over the years sometimes the shade of the grey varies but it's usually fairly close. Whatever is going on with the heat seems to turn then light enough that they are almost the color of light grey resin like Forge World or Finecast uses. I have a couple set of marine bikes that were also from other battleforce boxes and have been stored inside in my room so they were temperature controlled and while they are a touch lighter grey than recent plastics none of those models are suffer from the issue of weakening. The battleforce kits would all be right around the same age and time of production so the difference in brittleness I suspect is probably due to an environmental factor.

With outside temps in Iraq reaching 130 some of the stuff inside containers was probably reaching 150+ degrees, anything metal we couldn't even touch. While Nevada isn't quite as bad it's still one of the hotter areas in the US and a garage can probably heat up pretty high during the day. I think it might also happen if people make a habit of leaving their models in a car and live in the southwest.

I had some dwarf miners that were crumbly and soft. When cleaning the mold lines sometimes big chunks would just fall off, like Andy Dufresne's wall in Shawshank Redemption. I called GW custserv and they replaced it. Never knew until now what had made the plastic so different.