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 SickSix wrote:
I'm not sure what kind of math Kingsley is doing... GW raises their prices far and above inflation rates.

I'm looking at the actual prices from 2004 and making comparisons.

 SickSix wrote:
Yes, some kits get a lot cheaper when they finally make it to plastic and you end up getting 3-5 when you used to have to buy one at a time.

You'll notice that none of the things in the list that I compared prices for were metal to plastic conversions, and yet prices still went down when adjusted for inflation.

 SickSix wrote:
But have you seen the price of mega-armored Nobz in finecast? Holy shEEt!

Some things go up, some things go down. So it goes.

 jonolikespie wrote:
Alright, DE, GKs, Necron imomortals and paraias, chaos raptors, and all those other things were metal. Yes, the price did go down now they they are plastic but what else is left in the line (other than SoB) that need to be converted over? Prices drop when something becomes plastic (most of the time, the HE white lions and phoenix guard only dropped a couple of bucks IIRC) but now that pretty much everything is plastic or finecast we are not going to see any price drops in the future.
DEs, GKs and Necorns did all go down overall (I assume, I haven't done the numbers) because they were all incredibly old, mostly metal, ranges. There is nowhere left to go but up.

Aside from the entire Sisters of Battle range, there are a lot of Finecast sets that I think might see plastic conversions in the future. We'll see what happens as new releases arrive...

I edited my post so you probably didn't see these comments:
Not to mention GW production costs are going down. They are getting more efficient. So prices should be DROPPING ACROSS THE BOARD!

How does a kit that has been in production for several years suddenly cost 15-20 dollars more to make? It doesn't. They are just greedy sonsabitches.


Also, you aren't even factoring in the state of the global economies in 2004 and now. in 2004 a lot more people had disposable income. Now, a lot more people are having to save up just to buy one kit. And with the prices of EXISTING plastics skyrocketing, more and more are being forced out.

If you throw out metal to plastic conversions, there is just no way you can buying GW armies is getting cheaper.

 SickSix wrote:
Not to mention GW production costs are going down. They are getting more efficient. So prices should be DROPPING ACROSS THE BOARD!

"Should" is a dangerous thing to say. GW certainly could pass production cost reductions on to the consumer, but they are by no means obligated to. Remember that GW wants to price to what the market can bear and will raise prices until enough people stop buying that they start losing money. If you think prices are already too high, stop buying, but don't get mad at other people if they think the situation is fine, nor at GW for attempting to make more money.

 SickSix wrote:
Also, you aren't even factoring in the state of the global economies in 2004 and now. in 2004 a lot more people had disposable income. Now, a lot more people are having to save up just to buy one kit. And with the prices of EXISTING plastics skyrocketing, more and more are being forced out.

This is very hard to evaluate objectively.

 SickSix wrote:
If you throw out metal to plastic conversions, there is just no way you can buying GW armies is getting cheaper.

Except that I actually did the math on models that didn't involve any metal-to-plastic conversions (the Scouts went to plastic but didn't cost substantially less), and the overall price of the army I was looking at had in fact gone down from 2004 to 2013 once you adjusted for inflation. Let me repeat that:

If I bought the army I was looking at in 2004, I would pay more money for worse models than I would if I bought the same army in 2012. So for me, price has gone down and quality has gone up.

Kingsley wrote:I'm not very interested in talking about the relative merits of GW and FFG books with someone who works for FFG, so let's just say our opinions diverge there.

Nice try, but you don't get to dodge this one so easily.

Take Total War, the core rulebook for BattleTech (or any of the main hard-back rulebooks). Now none of these books have the same level of artwork as a GW or FFG book (and for the record, I wasn't just talking about FFG's 40K RPGs, I was talking about their production values in general), as they instead do a lot of miniature photography, but even so these core rulebooks are 400+ page affairs, in full colour, and cost less than a GW Codex.

You going to sit there with a straight face and tell me the Codex/Army Prices that GW charge are reasonable?

 Kingsley wrote:

 Kroothawk wrote:
Do you have any reasonable explanation, why GW keeps on making business decisions that have been proven to hurt their sales?
Or all those 50% price hikes lately?
To me all this looks like unprovoked economic suicide. Even in a yes-company, there must be some manager with basic economic knowledge and/or common sense.

This is currently a golden age of 40k, but many people simply can't accept the fact that GW is actually doing things right for once and hence the Internet naysayers are still in full effect.

A Golden Age? Really? The rules are a +0.1 development of previous editions, the new flyers and giant plastic kits (which the rules encourage to buy) are of extremely questionable aesthetic value, and their is almost nothing innovative amongst new releases with new model releases a mix of re-runs of stuff available 15 years ago and those aforementioned Tomix Toy-like plastic kits. And to cap it all it is massively expensive - a 'Golden Age' would hardly see long term players of the game driven away from it in such numbers.

 Kingsley wrote:

 jonolikespie wrote:
There is a difference between lowering the price and releasing an entirely new kit in plastic. Comparing plastics to plastics on a model by model basis (so no claiming it is the same price because you would have had to go get a blister to get that special weapon) things have only gone up and up and up.

Sure, but the way I see it, the reasonable thing to do is to compare what an army-- as an army-- actually cost in the past and what it costs now. That way we remove any bias due to liking one type of kit or material over another and end up with how much it would actually cost to make the army, then and now. This also helps get a more complete picture than cherrypicking units that support one claim or the other. Personally, I found that my prices went down. I bet for some people (foot IG) their prices will have gone up. But certainly the general claim of "GW is constantly hiking prices" seems to fall down when sometimes prices drop after eight and a half years of purported hikes, even if every army doesn't benefit the same.

Are you seriously arguing that despite changing to a material that is far cheaper to produce, GW still maintains the same price level or got "cheaper" compared to using metal?

That's about as irrational as you can possibly be. What if GW suddenly sold papercraft armies at the price of plastic models? Would you happily embrace that too, stating that GW always maintans their prices?

 Kroothawk wrote:

Throgg 66% more than comparable Ogre characters.
DA Land Speeder 100% more than same sized Land Speeder Storm.
All army books and Codices more than 100% more than previous edition at release.
Tell me these are all myth.

While I think above examples are overpriced, exaggaration or outright lying does your cause no good. Throgg is much bigger than those Ogre characters, DA Land Speeder is much bigger than Storm, Codices are not "100% more expensive" and much better print quality than old books.

In fairness to GW, some stuff does go down in price. When I started the game three years ago, single Ork Killa Kan costed 30 euros. Now you get three for 36 euros, and they have better options than the old kit.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Kingsley wrote:I'm not very interested in talking about the relative merits of GW and FFG books with someone who works for FFG, so let's just say our opinions diverge there.

Nice try, but you don't get to dodge this one so easily.

Take Total War, the core rulebook for BattleTech (or any of the main hard-back rulebooks). Now none of these books have the same level of artwork as a GW or FFG book (and for the record, I wasn't just talking about FFG's 40K RPGs, I was talking about their production values in general), as they instead do a lot of miniature photography, but even so these core rulebooks are 400+ page affairs, in full colour, and cost less than a GW Codex.

You going to sit there with a straight face and tell me the Codex/Army Prices that GW charge are reasonable?

The only FFG book that I own is the Dark Heresy core rulebook. I considered this book worth what I paid for it-- slightly over 50 USD IIRC. I also consider GWs new full-color Codexes to be worth it at about the same price. The Dark Heresy book obviously has much more rules content. Most of the Dark Heresy book is rules and I believe it is 3-4x as long as one of the new Codexes. However the new Codexes strike me as much stronger from a visual design and artwork perspective. This is apparent even from a look at the covers of the respective books and continues throughout.

As rulebooks, FFG's books definitely provide more bang for the buck. In terms of artwork, fluff, design, etc. GW's Codexes strike me as far superior. Overall, I consider both products to be worth it and will happily pay full price for GW's next Codex for an army I play. I will also pay full price for FFG's Dark Heresy expansions if they strike my fancy. I do think GW may be making a mistake in raising the quality (and cost) of Codexes to the level that they have, in that I used to buy most Codexes and now only anticipate buying Codexes for armies that I actually play, as I think the new Codexes-- while beautiful-- are too expensive to be bought only on the merits of their fluff and art. If Codexes sold for 30 USD, I would probably buy every new book GW put out.

However, this may be mitigated by the increased prices-- I'm not sure how many people in GW's core audience actually bought every book, but suspect it was not high. We'll see how this move plays out.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
I'm a big proponent of just going back to metal. It was the best of all the worlds, for detail, price and strength, and had few downsides. There has never been a single (normal) figure in the nearly 20 years I've been collecting and painting 40K (not counting large, multi-part monsters) that I ever had a lick of trouble with in metal, where what I've seen of Finecast has scared me off ever, ever buying a single model in that material, and I refuse to pay even more than metal models for those in a medium whose entire reason for being was because the high price of metal made it a cheaper medium to work in!

I understand that Finecast is actually more expensive for GW to produce than metal, even though material is cheaper.

I don't quite understand metal nostalgy. I've seen plenty of problems in metal miniatures, usually things which are supposed to be straight, are horribly twisted when cast in metal (Broadside weapons, BFG ships). I don't know if they'd be better in Finecast, mind you, but they can hardly be worse. Putting together multi-part metal models is a horror and their weight often makes them awkward, particularly if the models are tall. OK, metal does have some upsides: it's more durable to some degree, paint is easy to strip off, and you certainly feel you get "more" for the price because of the weight.

Pacific wrote:

 Kingsley wrote:
This is currently a golden age of 40k, but many people simply can't accept the fact that GW is actually doing things right for once and hence the Internet naysayers are still in full effect.

A Golden Age? Really? The rules are a +0.1 development of previous editions, the new flyers and giant plastic kits (which the rules encourage to buy) are of extremely questionable aesthetic value, and their is almost nothing innovative amongst new releases with new model releases a mix of re-runs of stuff available 15 years ago and those aforementioned Tomix Toy-like plastic kits. And to cap it all it is massively expensive - a 'Golden Age' would hardly see long term players of the game driven away from it in such numbers.

6th edition 40k is the strongest edition yet rules-wise. You claim that the rules are designed to sell new flyers and giant plastic kits, but this rings false to me. I'm a fairly experienced player. The current rules seem fairly troop-focused to me and many people have abandoned vehicles entirely, while these large (and expensive) kits used to be extremely common in 5th edition. For instance, the Dark Angels recently came out and indeed featured new flyers (though no "giant plastic kits")-- which are generally considered bad and few people seem to be fielding them! I have yet to see either of the new Dark Angel flyers on the tabletop.

It seems monumentally confused to say the Deathwing Knights/Command Squad/Terminators set are "re-runs of stuff available 15 years ago." To me this kit seems to unambiguously be the best Terminator set ever made. Similarly, a quick look at Dark Vengeance-- GW's cheap snap-together starter set offering-- seems to disprove the claim that there is "almost nothing innovative" being produced by GW. This set is perhaps the best 40k starter yet and is extremely innovative in terms of both æsthetics and physical production/design.

Is GW's design team perfect? No. I'll be the first one to point out that the new Chaos Space Marine Mutilators, for instance, are trash. But saying that GW's kits are "Tomix Toy-like" fails the laugh test for me.

Sigvatr wrote:Are you seriously arguing that despite changing to a material that is far cheaper to produce, GW still maintains the same price level or got "cheaper" compared to using metal?

Er, weren't you the same person who said "I have no idea why people consider metal superior. I absolutely HATE metal miniatures. I convert so many models and metal is a major pita to model, paint keeps going off, it doesn't look as detailed as Finecast does etc?"

I consider most metal to plastic conversions to produce better model quality for cheaper. I also don't care what things cost GW, I care what they cost me. If GW now sells the Immortals that used to cost me 10 USD for 1 bland metal figure in a box of 5 plastic figures for 35 USD with superior detail, posability, and bitz, I consider that an unambiguous win for me as a consumer.

Further, the army that I cited as having gotten cheaper did not include any of the kits (like Command Squads, Devastators, Wyches, Immortals, etc.) that got cheaper for the consumer based on material switches. I could have produced a more dramatic effect by cherry-picking in this fashion, but instead I just looked at what I had most recently used. There are two reasons that this force is cheaper now than it was in 2004-- first, GW has been packing more bitz into their kits, preventing you from having to buy separate models in blisters in order to get some options. Second, prices really haven't increased that much over inflation across the catalog as a whole.

 Kingsley wrote:

As rulebooks, FFG's books definitely provide more bang for the buck. In terms of artwork, fluff, design, etc. GW's Codexes strike me as far superior. Overall, I consider both products to be worth it and will happily pay full price for GW's next Codex for an army I play. I will also pay full price for FFG's Dark Heresy expansions if they strike my fancy. I do think GW may be making a mistake in raising the quality (and cost) of Codexes to the level that they have, in that I used to buy most Codexes and now only anticipate buying Codexes for armies that I actually play, as I think the new Codexes-- while beautiful-- are too expensive to be bought only on the merits of their fluff and art. If Codexes sold for 30 USD, I would probably buy every new book GW put out.

However, this may be mitigated by the increased prices-- I'm not sure how many people in GW's core audience actually bought every book, but suspect it was not high. We'll see how this move plays out.

Problem there is that Codex is necessary for starting an army, and rising codex prices increase entry cost. For me, estabilished player, a cost of new Codex for my existing army is not a big deal and I'm actually happy to pay more if I get better looking, more durable book. However, some people used to buy Codecii just for the heck of it, to stay in touch with things and who knows, well-written codex might inspire some of them to start a new army. But if the books are so expensive that only dedicated followers buy them, that is potential loss for GW even if they make same money from actual sales.

So though I don't mind new, more expensive army books, I can see that it could be an issue. I think GW should offer "mini-books" in similar vein to mini-rulebooks in starter set. Put them in Battleforces or something and charge extra $10 or so.

Backfire wrote:
Problem there is that Codex is necessary for starting an army, and rising codex prices increase entry cost. For me, estabilished player, a cost of new Codex for my existing army is not a big deal and I'm actually happy to pay more if I get better looking, more durable book. However, some people used to buy Codecii just for the heck of it, to stay in touch with things and who knows, well-written codex might inspire some of them to start a new army. But if the books are so expensive that only dedicated followers buy them, that is potential loss for GW even if they make same money from actual sales.

So though I don't mind new, more expensive army books, I can see that it could be an issue. I think GW should offer "mini-books" in similar vein to mini-rulebooks in starter set. Put them in Battleforces or something and charge extra $10 or so.

I agree with this post completely.

I didn't chose random examples, I chose starters and Codices in addition to some other stuff from the last 3 months, where GW made those 50% price hike.
I agree that there are some old boxes that had other prices, but we are talking about December to February prices that went though the roof.

On the subject of books i do find the massive rule books to be a bit excessive, i am tempted to get back into fantasy but the rule book is £45, which i wouldnt mind but its the size of the thing, like the 40k book i got the dark vengence set as its easier to just have the smaller version.

So to get that i would need to buy island of blood, and as i want to start WoC i would have no need for the skaven and high elves, but i could ebay a copy of the rulebook.

The cost of codexes and army books isnt as bad as it could be, i bought a warmachine rule book, it was £30, softbound, full colour, the GW book is about 1/3 larger, and higher quality paper, but is £15 dearer, however the warmachine book is simpler to lug about, the GW book collects dust.

So if GW offered a slimmer rules only rule book (hard or soft bound) at say £15 that would be really good for people just updating, as it would cost GW little as its just printing the rules section again. But this would mean their £45 big rule books would stack up, the argument then is, cut production to less volume.

I am always first to stand by GW as i love the models and have a lot of good times with the staff and it gives me enjoyment, however i am not blind to the fact its never going to be cheap, but its more of a long burn hobby than it was 8 years ago where you could buy an army in one go, now it takes more thought to spread that cost.

I don't quite understand metal nostalgy. I've seen plenty of problems in metal miniatures, usually things which are supposed to be straight, are horribly twisted when cast in metal (Broadside weapons, BFG ships). I don't know if they'd be better in Finecast, mind you, but they can hardly be worse. Putting together multi-part metal models is a horror and their weight often makes them awkward, particularly if the models are tall. OK, metal does have some upsides: it's more durable to some degree, paint is easy to strip off, and you certainly feel you get "more" for the price because of the weight.

See, I'm on the other side. I don't get how metal models, even 40mm based ones, were so freaking monumentally hard to put together and prep. I can't think of a model where I had to do more than scrape some mold lines with a knife and then superglue them together. Even most of my pinning of metal models was during conversions, rather than stock models.

Every time I have looked at a Finecast model in my LGS, I saw a model that would need more cleaning than if it was out of metal (indeed, some of them are Finecast versions of metal models I previously bought years ago), and with small, thin pieces that not only are as much or more warped as most small metal pieces would be of the same size, but are harder to straighten out and of a material more likely to break. And i can;t remember a metal model with as many pitting issues as Finecast.

For instance, my two Necron Lords variants that are metal have been made in Finecast, and while they came out of the blister with no mold lines and slightly bent staves, I wouldn't pick up the Finecast versions if you actually paid me the blister price, because I'd still have to deal with their pitting and easily broken weapons that look like spaghetti in the package. I saw one that looked like a Shepard's crook- talk about them being Tomb Kings in space, aright!

I don't get it either. Bent (or "horribly twisted") weapons and other parts can be fixed rather easily: you bend them back. You don't even need to heat up and soften the material, just use your fingers and carefully bend it back into place. I did that for all my incubi weapons when I opened the boxes and they're all straight now.

Yeah, if you keep bending them back and forth the metal will weaken and eventually break, but don't be a dumbass and sit there bending it back and forth thinking "Nothing bad could possibly happen if I do this!", just fix them the one time and they should be fine, so long as you have some common sense when handling your precious, ludicrously-expensive models during gaming and don't constantly knock them over or throw them around thinking they're indestructible (or in anger because they performed badly). Sometimes parts can be problematic, like the broadside railguns, but that's more or less GW's fault for designing them that way in the first place and/or poor QC. I fixed mine by getting a pair of tiny needle-nose pliers in between the gaps and spreading them out that way, and then filing/sanding/using GS on any damage that I caused, if any. Funny thing is I would still prefer that any day over buying the same parts in Finecast and getting weapons that can't be fixed, because the material has memory and it reverts back to the bent shape it was originally in when purchased, if it doesn't just snap entirely because it's made of brittle resin. I've found that sometimes Finecast parts are bendy and sometimes they're surprisingly easy to break, guess it all depends on the mix.

 Kingsley wrote:


Er, weren't you the same person who said "I have no idea why people consider metal superior. I absolutely HATE metal miniatures. I convert so many models and metal is a major pita to model, paint keeps going off, it doesn't look as detailed as Finecast does etc?"

Precisely. You can't use the same argument in every case though and that's where your argumentation falls short. I do agree, however, to some point. Having a look at older WD shows that a lot of stuff is roughly the same price as before, maybe 2-3€ more expensive, but considering inflation etc. that's fine. The thing are those major price hikes, especially the one that's ahead of us now - just have a look at the ridiculous price increases in the LotR range, Kingsley, and compare the current boxes to those from ~3 years ago. Terminators now are ~1/3 more expensive and let's not even start talking about the 50€ (!) Throgg model. A single model is roughly 1/3 of what my entire 2.5k army cost me.

I'll be interested to see if there are in fact giant price hikes in the near future. I'm inclined to believe that there won't be, but time will tell. I think Throgg is an outlier and that prices are not going to go anywhere near there for normal models. We'll see what happens in the future.

I will say that there has never been a better or easier time to quit 40k, what with the popularity of many alternate game systems, promising Kickstarters, and so on, so GW had better step carefully...

 Sidstyler wrote:
I don't get it either. Bent (or "horribly twisted") weapons and other parts can be fixed rather easily: you bend them back. You don't even need to heat up and soften the material, just use your fingers and carefully bend it back into place. I did that for all my incubi weapons when I opened the boxes and they're all straight now.

I'm not talking about easily fixable stuff like that. I'm talking about deformations over entire model. For example here: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1YW7aQl1p-4/Tb8V6q4OwtI/AAAAAAAAAC0/vUQ7J8n9k7g/s1600/IMG_3360.JPG

As for putting metal minis together, some minis have very small surfaces which have to be glued together: superglue is not strong enough there. I just painted a Kroot Shaper, which has this problem.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kroothawk wrote:
I didn't chose random examples, I chose starters and Codices in addition to some other stuff from the last 3 months, where GW made those 50% price hike.
I agree that there are some old boxes that had other prices, but we are talking about December to February prices that went though the roof.

Well technically, those aren't price hikes, since they're new releases which did not have price before

Da Boss wrote:
Man. I've always found Mikhaila to be one of the most level headed posters with regard to GW. If he's posting stuff like this, then that really is a bad sign!

Definitely, the fethers in charge at GW really must have gak for brains if Miks started dripping as well.

 Kingsley wrote:
I'll be interested to see if there are in fact giant price hikes in the near future. I'm inclined to believe that there won't be, but time will tell. I think Throgg is an outlier and that prices are not going to go anywhere near there for normal models. We'll see what happens in the future.

I will say that there has never been a better or easier time to quit 40k, what with the popularity of many alternate game systems, promising Kickstarters, and so on, so GW had better step carefully...

Plastic Forsaken are another good example. They are standard 25mm infantry. A box of 12 Chaos Warriors costs 30€ (2,5€ / miniature). A box of 10 Forsaken costs 40€ (4€ / miniature). That's a difference of 63%.

The chariot went from 26€ to 35€. That's an increase of 25%.

Individual character models went up from ~15€ to 20€. Another increase of 33%.

And again, you did not reply to the LotR changes. Let me fill you in on the details.

Until Dec 2010, each box had 24 models and cost 15,50€.

The new infantry box now has 12 models and costs 30€.

That's a price increase of almost 200 (TWOHUNDRED) %.

It's beyond my rational thinking how one can justify those price increases.

Throgg is not an outliner. Just check the new line.

I don't know why people are saying how resin is terrible, resin isn't bad at all. FineCost is terrible, but I blame that on the manufacturer more than I blame the medium. I've used resin in other models and it looks just as good or better than many plastic ones, and always better than the metal counterparts.

For me, I'll never understand the love of metal from a painter's perspective. The detail is simply not there in comparison to plastic or resin, It needs to be pinned everywhere to hold, weighs a ton, but it strips paint really well. I understand the collector's value, but that comes more from metal not being around anymore.

My experience with finecost has met with decent results. I've only seen 2 models so far that came with horrible flaws. One chaplain with jump pack that had the texture of gravel all over him. (someone didnt prep the mold i guess) and a necron IC that had a few holes. Maybe my FLGS gets only good blisters of the stuff, but the net makes it sound like I won the lottery on finecast models. still I think its an inferior resin cast to PP

I would love to see finecast end, but unfortunatly I can't see it happening, because, GW has been clever in 1 aspect of the whle FC business. They have used it to make the models people need, you want a FUNKY/SPIKEY chaos general here you go,you want that elite unit for your army there you go. Which if like me I make myself from bits, but other less skilled modellers have no choice to buy. The same is with BIG models in Warhammer and flyers in 40K,both are needed to make armies competitive and so they charge more for them and use the rules to make them essential buying. This is especially true with flyers in 40K, if you want to go to competitions you'd better get those 3 Vendettas/Stormtalons/Helldrakes or some equally expensive AA or you might as well not turn up. This is because several years ago GW worked out how to do bigger plastic mould cheaper so they are now part of every army.

Now I'm not a GW hater, I've been playing Warhammer and 40K since they came out and I will continue to play them both, but I can't see myself buying a new army I the near future, but unfortunatly ladies and gentlemen, GW doesn't care, not about me or you, no more than anyother big company. They will reduce their costs, increase their prices and keep selling their products, because they have a target market and we are not it

As a final point about how GW compares to other companies, GW works about 2 years in advance as do PP, which generally means they have plenty of time to sort issues. When PP launched their plastic/resin jacks they actually delayed the realise, because there where issues with casting and they didn't release any until they got it right. Where as GW just went right ahead with FC with all its issues and problems, because they knew they could. You or I will check and its bad send it back/refund,but they don't say this in any GW store. So when little Johny buys that model or mummy and daddy spend a fortune at Xmas, they will not be offered to check the product first and so home it goes and they don't know any different. And if they do say anything they are told it happens and we can sell you some liquid green stuff and show you how to use it. So that the difference in customer care, but as I've said before we are not their target market and what you or I will except/believe is very different from the 'I want one generation'.

Think I'd better get off my soap box now.

Jeff

If Finecast was anywhere near the compound utilised in Forge World casts then I would be happy for resin to stay. As it stands, I am waiting with excited, jittering hands that GW will act on the mistake that is Finecast.

I have yet to receive one model in Finecast which I can say wholeheartedly is sculpted correctly. It has simply been a case of lowering your expectations though, where you seem to be happy with an occasional bubble you can fix rather than half of the body being missing or something. Finecast is without doubt the largest practical joke I have seen played by a legitimate business in a long time. Not only are the return rates through the roof, the name an oxymoron and the practical usage of it in a tabletop setting absolutely impossible to maintain, we are charged significantly more for the pleasure of this 'Premium Material'.

It's unacceptable to sell the crap and I dont care how GW want to dress it up, as long as they get rid of it. More kits like the Empire Battle Wizards would be more than acceptable for most of the community. Multi-part character kits in Plastic are consistent and allow for a great deal of beginner skill and up conversion.

Hopefully if the plastics become the standard, the prices for these absolutely shocking miniatures in Finecast will fall substantially.

Backfire wrote:

 AegisGrimm wrote:
I'm a big proponent of just going back to metal. It was the best of all the worlds, for detail, price and strength, and had few downsides. There has never been a single (normal) figure in the nearly 20 years I've been collecting and painting 40K (not counting large, multi-part monsters) that I ever had a lick of trouble with in metal, where what I've seen of Finecast has scared me off ever, ever buying a single model in that material, and I refuse to pay even more than metal models for those in a medium whose entire reason for being was because the high price of metal made it a cheaper medium to work in!

I understand that Finecast is actually more expensive for GW to produce than metal, even though material is cheaper.

I don't quite understand metal nostalgy. I've seen plenty of problems in metal miniatures, usually things which are supposed to be straight, are horribly twisted when cast in metal (Broadside weapons, BFG ships). I don't know if they'd be better in Finecast, mind you, but they can hardly be worse. Putting together multi-part metal models is a horror and their weight often makes them awkward, particularly if the models are tall. OK, metal does have some upsides: it's more durable to some degree, paint is easy to strip off, and you certainly feel you get "more" for the price because of the weight.

The weight is a fair descriptor of it.

But to say it would "Hardly be worse in finecast" tells me that you haven't seen this stuff in action, yet. Please go see it for yourself, then ask your questions again.

I'm not even going to get caught up in the other .... position that is being taken.

I can tell you for a fact that 3 stores that I used to play at have a fraction of a wall that was once covered with both 40K and fantasy. The tables in one particular store- 12 on a weekend, once had people standing around waiting for a game of 40K. There were at least 1 or two larger scale battles at least twice a month, and there was a good portion of hig end players that have gradually dwindled, if not moved off and found other places to play. Another store almost prided itself in the variety of figures that they had, and wend to hell and high water to try to get anything you needed. NOW?

They have what they have left, and if you really want GW, your going to have to order it yourself.

Thats not just playing around either. That is a fact.

Your saying "Golden Age"?

Thier real "Golden age" was in 94-95. This here now is the dawn of the dead.

Especailly with the outright hostility that is being generated by this company for the so called "Players" of thier games.

If you try any of this stuff in any other job, you can pretty much expect a lawsuit. Price gouging, shoddy products, not fulfilling orders, charging such high prices that they are borderline criminal, substandards throughout, If you did something like this in the service industry, health, or automechanics, you wouldn't last a month.

Even a used car salesman does better then GW has in the past two years in terms of service and support for thier products.

I'll throw it back out there that your talking metal prices for substandard material( finecast .plastic. resin, or whatever you want to call it.)
QAQC is nonexistent, and the prices that you cling to are not exactly across the board.

I was there, I paid the prices, they were reasonable, and you actually got something for your money.

A squad box of 16 guys was around 19 or 20 bucks. A tank was around 25-27. The blister packs were around 5-10 bucks. Metals, by the way for the blisters.

My fears for FineCast going MO-only have been fairly well-covered; if they start doing elites in plastic I worry they might be mono-pose similar to the characters. Fancy mono-pose a la Space Hulk wouldn't be awful, but I just don't see them doing multi-part for most kits. I can see a future where they just don't sell the non-core units in stores anymore so they can squeeze all the profit out of those SKUs just because that's the kind of stupidity they seem like to engage in anymore; maximize profits and to hell with any bridges we burn along the way.

On the topic of the material itself though, I do want to say I've bought a number of FC kits and I've not had any issues. I don't know if my FLGS has someone looking out for them at the warehouse, but other than ridiculous amounts of flash I've not had issues with distorted or miscast details. Even with the flash issue though, it's no worse than cleaning up GW's metals, which isn't meant as a compliment of FC so much as a "wtf?" with some of the GW metals I have. The store might have had the opposite luck with metal that they do with FC, but I typically spend much more time hunting down stray tabs and strings of metal than I've have to spend cleaning up FC.

I think the plan has always been for GW to get the whole range into plastic, and the character models in plastic that are starting to appear prove this to some extent.

Finecast has been a huge headache i think for GW, i like a few others have been quite lucky and usually had good casts, bar a necron IC whose staff was a bit thick, but it was easy to sort with a knife and patience.

However i have seen some shocking stuff, in saying that though GW has never said no to a replacement and my local GW always lets me open boxes and have a good look before i leave incase there is an issue, and they swap it, usually letting me keep the dodgy one for bits (BITS FOR THE BITS BOX!!....sorry).

One thing that is interesting me is that normally i buy in dribs n drabs as i collect stuff for 'projects' usually ebay fully painted armies, so i end up with a lot of spare stuff that i bundle together as an army to play with or sell.

Actually making up an army to play competetively is something i havent done for a few years, and the new fantasy chaos is making me want to sit and go through exactly what is needed to create a reasonably balanced playable army, what are the numbers of models needed since i last played, costs, how much in plastic or in finecast etc, it would be interesting to see how much i can get in plastic over FC, especially since my last fantasy army was wood elves, and the battalion box helped massively keeping everything plastic.

i am meeting my mate tonight (local GW manager) for a chinwag about the new stuff, so will be interesting to see if he has any tidbits regarding FC and how much it may get used or not as plastic takes over.

he may also have shiny things to show me, but i will resist

 Sidstyler wrote:
I don't get it either. Bent (or "horribly twisted") weapons and other parts can be fixed rather easily: you bend them back. You don't even need to heat up and soften the material, just use your fingers and carefully bend it back into place. I did that for all my incubi weapons when I opened the boxes and they're all straight now.

Well, Finecast is very easy to bend back. Just warm it up with some hot water and gently straighten it out. Simple, yet some people seem to think bent finecast is irredeemable (like the bent lightning claw blades in the Sternguard weapon kit). It's a lot trickier with metal. If it's something like a sword blade, no biggie, as you can probably indeed just gently bend it back. But if it's something like a Sternguard Bolter that is bent along the length of the weapon so that it is effectively "drooping", that's quite hard to bend back! In fact I'm not sure how to do it properly, can't grip it with enough strength to do it without tools, at least. And cleaning up casting lines etc from metal is a major pain compared to resin, obviously. The only good thing about metal that I can think of is that it's easier to strip off paint if there's a need to do that.

I bought about 14 kits of finecast in December, having bought none previously. Of those, Helbrecht and Emperor's Champion had broken sword hilts, Sword Brethren kit had two damaged weapons, Thunderfire Cannon was quite a mess (more to do with the mold rather than the individual casting, I reckon)... other kits had some minor flaws that I can more easily work around. Overall it wasn't as bad as I expected from all the horror stories, but still certainly more issues than there should be! Now I'm waiting for whether or not I'll get replacements for these.

 Grot 6 wrote:
Your saying "Golden Age"?

Thier real "Golden age" was in 94-95. This here now is the dawn of the dead.

I have not seen the level of enthusiasm and interest that I now see for Warhammer 40k since the LotR boom. I'm noticing more and more new people getting into the game, friends who haven't bought anything in a while getting excited about new releases, and so on. Fantasy, on the other hand, is much less popular locally and Warmahordes seems to have eaten a big chunk of its market-- indeed perhaps the lion's share.

 Grot 6 wrote:
Even a used car salesman does better then GW has in the past two years in terms of service and support for thier products.

Every time I have had a problem with a GW product they have outright given me a replacement product for free. I have a feeling that if I went to my local used car dealership and said "hey, that last car you sold me sucked, can I have another one?" I'd be laughed right out the door.

 mikhaila wrote:

Well, as some one that runs gaming stores and orders direct from GW, I can tell you this is pretty much already happening. Every week when I re-order, most of the finecast I need "Has been moved to direct". I have less and less GW product on my wall, for the simple reason GW won't sell it to me. They will graciously allow me to pay at a much higher rate, and get the product in generic white label packaging. Somehow, paying more for a badly packaged product hasn't worked well. I still do special orders, but quit trying to keep the whole line in stock.

My blister display is a fraction of what it used to be, and getting smaller. All new releases are temporary. For instance, I got Belial in with the new DA releases, and I already can't reorder him. Finecast is leaving all stores, both independent and GW.

GW used to have a clue. They encouraged stores to carry more stock, so they could sell more models. Now that they have cut what I can carry, they wonder why I'm selling less. I explain the same thing over and over. The higher ups don't care, lower level sales reps have no power.

Less GW on my wall = less sales of GW in the store = more of other peoples games I sell to make up with it.

Here speaks someone who managed to almost totally diffuse my bad opinion on GW over a couple of beers and some events in the past. Mikhaila is an excellent businessman and runs a gaming and comic store that should be held up as an example of 'how you should be doing it'. He sold a ton of GW stuff, even to experienced gamers coming to events, people already 'in the know' for ordering online.

Mike, first I read your response when GW pulled any support for tournaments and now I read this from you. It's a window into how GW are treating the indy stores and why when I asked the nearby geek shop here in Gloucester, he laughed and said 'no way will I deal with that company again'. The upper echelons just appear to have become so surrounded by yes men and a culture of absolute belief that they are piloting the ship directly into the beach with the expectation that the land will retreat before them.

This is a guy who absolutely loved the GW company, as an independent retailer, who explained to me the benefits they gave him, the quality of service and the good relationship they enjoyed. Yet here now is someone pissed with the company and already working out how best to protect his business and promote selling other lines over GW, his post should be being held up in board meetings inside the bunker and serious questions being leveled about the ramifications. There won't be, because the company's culture does not allow for self analysis or critical thinking.

It's like they are just going to push everything till it breaks and then...? Either retreat or sell off the IP and disappear. From the outside looking in, it's a madhouse.