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 inquisitorlewis wrote:
What a nightmare for both the business, and the customer.

What I notice with small companies is that they need to have both business sense and talent in the service or product to succeed -- and that many business will think they have both, when they only have one. Or neither.

To paraphrase investment columnist Ken Fisher, there's a reason why big companies are big, and small companies stay small.

And it may be handwaved away as a mantra, but this is yet another way KS is not a store. In a store, you hand over your money and get your product. In KS, it's the promise of a product that gets you interested in pledging, but the business which must be competent and trustworthy enough to actually deliver it.

Oh, and another quote from Ken: "Truly great new concepts are financed readily in private markets, not public ones."

I would just lay it out that.

1-the MWG to BTP (and visa-versa) relationship is not unethical

2-MWG's Endorsement of BTP is not unethical

3-What begins to get un-ethical is when MWG begins to seek out only positive endorsements of MWG to add to their own. It moves into questionable behavior.

A positive personal review is entirely valid because MWG is giving the whole story of their own experience, Essentially the whole truth of a sample size of one.

However, as soon as one seeks outside opinions, but filters out the negative reports, one is slanting the truth because you are deliberately misreporting the results from a larger sample of reports.

It's a fine line, but actually a fairly clear one. Despite MWG deliberately trying to bend the line by only soliciting positive reviews, it's a line they have clearly crossed.

I've been following this for a couple weeks now. This is f upped. So I have to say its not a terrible painted army. I just say the BTP video on it has better lighting. However that doesn't change that its a table top standard army. Which if that's what you pay for then that's fine. However I don't think that army looks better then my Beastmen that I painted.
Then I find this. Keep in mind I do not like airbrushed armies at all. This looks well done though.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/594223.page#6811750

I don't know what you paid but if its over 5k you got robbed. Badly. Like criminal bad.

 Eilif wrote:

However, as soon as one seeks outside opinions, but filters out the negative reports, one is slanting the truth because you are deliberately misreporting the results from a larger sample of reports..

This is what pushed me from "not liking it" to "cancelling my gold membership". I don't want to pay for this sort of thing.

 lobbywatson wrote:
I don't know what you paid but if its over 5k you got robbed. Badly. Like criminal bad.

tenebre hasn't said specifically how much was spent (and I probably wouldn't either), but people have guessed somewhere in the realm of twice that much and he's said they weren't far off.

 swampyturtle wrote:
Just wanted to post this here. I posted the video on Facebook and got this back:

Muck-raking scum. You disgust me trying to drag a company's name through the mud like this, just to make yourself feel big. Do you have any idea how many satisfied customers BTP have? How many fantastic commissions they've completed? Do you know how Shawn has built that company up from nothing to a huge organisation employing over a dozen full-time artists and putting food on people's tables, letting them live their dream? No. You don't care. You just want to sensationalise one sub-par project out of thousands and slag it off to make yourself feel superior. Pathetic. I'd love to see you complete thousands of awesome projects and not have a single one slip through the quality control net. But you couldn't, could you? All you can do is hate and criticise.

That is likely Shawn working undercover.

I seem to remember similar posts with similar sentence structure surfacing while their kickstarter was imploding.

Leo_the_Rat wrote:

 M0ff3l wrote:
That said, Im about to place an 800$ painting order on BTP and I know for sure I wont regret it. So have fun talking some more smack while I watch some more MWG and BTP vids, cya guys

Would you be more specific in what your order entails? Also would you please show us how the project is going (after being started of course) and how the project looks at completion? I am genuinely interested in seeing if BTP comes through for you or not.

I'm sending them 1700ish points of CSM in a level 3-5 split.

Level 3:
14 plague marines
3 olbiterators
3 bikes
1 helbrute
2 rhinos
5 terminators

Level 5:
Typhus
Cypher
Chaos Sorcerer

I've converted all of this army from DV/other space marine kits, so when I show pictures I would like you all to remember that BTP didnt assemble or convert any of it. I'm also in the EU so shipping costs a bit more, and I've given them some freehand budget and a bit of conversion budget so they can replace the hunter killer missiles on my rhinos with actual havoc launchers. That said I'm about to make the 65% deposit and will be sending my models somewhere this week.

From what I've seen their level 2 armies are better/tied to how I paint myself, but Im just not motivated enough to paint atm, and dont have the time to do so anyways. And I will be sure to post pictures etc once the army gets back to me, and any pictures they send me while working on the project.

 M0ff3l wrote:

Leo_the_Rat wrote:

 M0ff3l wrote:
That said, Im about to place an 800$ painting order on BTP and I know for sure I wont regret it. So have fun talking some more smack while I watch some more MWG and BTP vids, cya guys

Would you be more specific in what your order entails? Also would you please show us how the project is going (after being started of course) and how the project looks at completion? I am genuinely interested in seeing if BTP comes through for you or not.

I'm sending them 1700ish points of CSM in a level 3-5 split.

Level 3:
14 plague marines
3 olbiterators
3 bikes
1 helbrute
2 rhinos
5 terminators

Level 5:
Typhus
Cypher
Chaos Sorcerer

I've converted all of this army from DV/other space marine kits, so when I show pictures I would like you all to remember that BTP didnt assemble or convert any of it. I'm also in the EU so shipping costs a bit more, and I've given them some freehand budget and a bit of conversion budget so they can replace the hunter killer missiles on my rhinos with actual havoc launchers. That said I'm about to make the 65% deposit and will be sending my models somewhere this week.

From what I've seen their level 2 armies are better/tied to how I paint myself, but Im just not motivated enough to paint atm, and dont have the time to do so anyways. And I will be sure to post pictures etc once the army gets back to me, and any pictures they send me while working on the project.

While I wish your project well...sincerely...I can't help but think BTP is reading this, looking to actually put effort on your models to help silence the naysayers. It probably wouldn't work that way, but at least you'd get your money's worth. Good luck to you!

Why aren't you sending them to someone in Europe to do? There's a lot of Polish painters that will do you a better job, for less, faster, without international shipping.


I finally watched the video and I'm shocked at the results. The fire effect is kinda cool but they look completely unfinished; they've barely even hit the 3 colour minimum standard. I could do better myself and I'm not a good painter, even with 2 hours/mini time budget.

Tenebre

I was looking on this thread closely and I can't take this anymore.

Cause I'm feeling bad to see how much did you spend on this army and how many nerves it costs to you i have an option for u.

You can choose any character or unit from your army. I'll paint them for free on high tt+ standard with unit and showcase standard on character.

We're one big family as painters/gamers. If we'll start doing mess around us there's no option to have normal relationship between us (painters) and you (gamers).

That's why it will be fully voluntary. Don't loose your faith on painting services. There's a lot of normal people around the world doing their stuff great.

On my site you can look on painted minis. Pm me or mail me for details. Only cost you'll have to pay is pp.

Stay strong mate! Don't give up.
Daniel YWPA head manager

 Sidstyler wrote:

 lobbywatson wrote:
I don't know what you paid but if its over 5k you got robbed. Badly. Like criminal bad.

tenebre hasn't said specifically how much was spent (and I probably wouldn't either), but people have guessed somewhere in the realm of twice that much and he's said they weren't far off.

That might be the saddest thing I've ever heard. Ouch. I'm guessing that's 1500-2k in FW models pretty easily. Well I think if the OP wants to burn BTP to the ground he gets a pass. Realistically a court judgement would be for 25-50% of the commission(total assumption). Then from what I'm reading he'd never see due to poor and shady business practices from BTP. Well keep the underground campaign alive. The best way to wreck them is to insure they never get another customer. Too many good services for this kind of shenanigan to go on.

ced1106 wrote:

 inquisitorlewis wrote:
What a nightmare for both the business, and the customer.

What I notice with small companies is that they need to have both business sense and talent in the service or product to succeed -- and that many business will think they have both, when they only have one. Or neither.

To paraphrase investment columnist Ken Fisher, there's a reason why big companies are big, and small companies stay small.

Nepotism? Total absence of ethics? Incestuous relationships between regulators and executives? Some companies are big because they put out the best product using the best narrative and are run by executives with the best management skills - a whole lot more are big because they screwed anyone and everyone they could at every opportunity and, through a combination of pure luck and friends in the right places, got away with it. Of course in some cases, you get many of those qualities in small businesses as well, as evidenced by this thread and the recent turn it's taken.

Oh, and another quote from Ken: "Truly great new concepts are financed readily in private markets, not public ones."

This guy sounds like a bit of a numpty. In the vast majority of cases, the private sector doesn't fund new concepts at all - in most areas the initial research takes place in publicly-funded universities, through direct government funding of specific research, through government grant bodies, or through the huge international projects like CERN or the large observatory arrays. The private sector takes the results of that work and make it possible to turn a profit selling it by reducing the spec to civilian levels, swapping out materials to make the product cheaper, marketing the product in such a way as to convince people it's more necessary to their lives and happiness to own one than it actually is, or some combination of the previous. Sometimes, they'll figure out how to combine one or more things, or parts of one or more things, to use them in a different way, but the private sector is no better at funding innovation than the public sector, and in many cases it's a lot worse since most private companies and investors are not interested in funding the kind of high-concept theoretical work necessary to advance our knowledge as a society or very specific but necessary technologies with limited commercial applications, because it's unlikely those things will make money right away or even within the course of their own lifetimes. There are specific exceptions of course, but they typically rely on companies led by a strong personality in charge who has a specific interest they're willing to support and fight for, and there's nowhere near enough of them around to support the rate of advancement we've achieved since moving away from pure patronage as a source of funding.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with iterative research, all human creativity is iterative(which is why the way copyright and patents law functions is absurd), and in a capitalistic society the part of the process performed by private companies and investors is necessary and useful - but this smug idea that private capital is capable of supporting investment alone and that what they do today is the spontaneous generation of truly new and original ideas is nonsense, and I'd question whether anyone who doesn't grasp how the relationship between public and private capital functions is someone you want giving you investment advice.

 YourWellPaintedArmyCom wrote:
Tenebre

I was looking on this thread closely and I can't take this anymore.

Cause I'm feeling bad to see how much did you spend on this army and how many nerves it costs to you i have an option for u.

You can choose any character or unit from your army. I'll paint them for free on high tt+ standard with unit and showcase standard on character.

We're one big family as painters/gamers. If we'll start doing mess around us there's no option to have normal relationship between us (painters) and you (gamers).

That's why it will be fully voluntary. Don't loose your faith on painting services. There's a lot of normal people around the world doing their stuff great.

On my site you can look on painted minis. Pm me or mail me for details. Only cost you'll have to pay is pp.

Stay strong mate! Don't give up.
Daniel YWPA head manager

Another massive facepalm at BTP's handling of this from the commission painting community, and a great gesture from YWPA. Kudos, Daniel.

winterdyne wrote:
I seem to remember similar posts with similar sentence structure surfacing while their kickstarter was imploding.

It's things like the kickstarter that make me think I am looking at a fundamentally flawed business.

Shawn appears to be very focused with turning his painting service into something more significant. Besides the turboarmies idea (which was the subject of the kickstarter), he has posted publicly about his plans for a clothing line, instructional videos, and even opportunities to go live with him at his house and receive business mentoring.

I don't really have a problem with someone trying to monetize their business, it's what a good business owner should do. I have problems when they are not doing it ethically. You have to get the details right on your core business (painting people's models) before you can introduce new lines of business, and business owners move into a gray area when they try to do too much. Quality assurance is a big part of the equation for any services-based business like BTP, and it's more than what happens when models are in the shop. QA happens from the moment you start an engagement until the final product has been received and inspected by your client.

It seems like there's some line Shawn is drawing in the sand, saying that quality stops when he says it does. When he put forward a list of issues that he sees, and told tenebre that's the only thing he would take action on, he's really saying his judgment supercedes everyone else's. That kind of top-down management style rarely works in a creative enterprise, where success is defined relative to the expectations of a client (you can't just tell people what they want, you have to be a good listener.)

More importantly, however, it's wrong to be acting this way because there's no opportunity to improve the business. PR aside, there more at stake than one dissatisfied customer, there's a question of whether or not BTP can carry out business operations at scale. If the company can't get this one project right (which happens to be one of the most complex projects they have had to work on recently), where's the sense in trying to do a clothing line, training videos, or to set up a hostel and mentor other business owners?

I really don't see it. All the research I am doing on BTP screams to me there's a really serious gap between what they actually do as a business and what the owner wishes they did as a business. It's hard to get consistent, quality results from a company when someone's heart is not in it.

There's also a key difference between simply painting an army, and painting an army to match a client's vision.

Some clients may not have a clear idea (or indeed any idea) of what they want their army to look like (beyond 'it's Blood Angels' or 'Wood Elves, uh, in a wood?').

You could replace the above with any generic terms for an artistic specification - from graphic design to model painting to car customisation to painting something on a leather jacket.

Some clients may have a vague or part-formed, idea that needs tweaking before you even get the brushes out. This could be down to colour balance, theme, whatever. The point is that the service needs to take note when the client has even a partial idea of what they want and work as far as possible to include that idea. Major omissions or additions need to be checked with the client.

 YourWellPaintedArmyCom wrote:
Tenebre

I was looking on this thread closely and I can't take this anymore.

Cause I'm feeling bad to see how much did you spend on this army and how many nerves it costs to you i have an option for u.

You can choose any character or unit from your army. I'll paint them for free on high tt+ standard with unit and showcase standard on character.

We're one big family as painters/gamers. If we'll start doing mess around us there's no option to have normal relationship between us (painters) and you (gamers).

That's why it will be fully voluntary. Don't loose your faith on painting services. There's a lot of normal people around the world doing their stuff great.

On my site you can look on painted minis. Pm me or mail me for details. Only cost you'll have to pay is pp.

Stay strong mate! Don't give up.
Daniel YWPA head manager

Much appreciated. Pm sent.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Reality-Torrent wrote:

 swampyturtle wrote:
Just wanted to post this here. I posted the video on Facebook and got this back:

Muck-raking scum. You disgust me trying to drag a company's name through the mud like this, just to make yourself feel big. Do you have any idea how many satisfied customers BTP have? How many fantastic commissions they've completed? Do you know how Shawn has built that company up from nothing to a huge organisation employing over a dozen full-time artists and putting food on people's tables, letting them live their dream? No. You don't care. You just want to sensationalise one sub-par project out of thousands and slag it off to make yourself feel superior. Pathetic. I'd love to see you complete thousands of awesome projects and not have a single one slip through the quality control net. But you couldn't, could you? All you can do is hate and criticise.

That is likely Shawn working undercover.

I have been blamed for the one posting on FB in some places I dont see how you posted anything wrong at all. Just find it funny when the internet seems to think it knows what i did without me knowing

 YourWellPaintedArmyCom wrote:
Tenebre

I was looking on this thread closely and I can't take this anymore.

Cause I'm feeling bad to see how much did you spend on this army and how many nerves it costs to you i have an option for u.

You can choose any character or unit from your army. I'll paint them for free on high tt+ standard with unit and showcase standard on character.

We're one big family as painters/gamers. If we'll start doing mess around us there's no option to have normal relationship between us (painters) and you (gamers).

That's why it will be fully voluntary. Don't loose your faith on painting services. There's a lot of normal people around the world doing their stuff great.

On my site you can look on painted minis. Pm me or mail me for details. Only cost you'll have to pay is pp.

Stay strong mate! Don't give up.
Daniel YWPA head manager

How awesome are you??? Very!!!

 Eilif wrote:
I would just lay it out that.

1-the MWG to BTP (and visa-versa) relationship is not unethical

2-MWG's Endorsement of BTP is not unethical

3-What begins to get un-ethical is when MWG begins to seek out only positive endorsements of MWG to add to their own. It moves into questionable behavior.

A positive personal review is entirely valid because MWG is giving the whole story of their own experience, Essentially the whole truth of a sample size of one.

However, as soon as one seeks outside opinions, but filters out the negative reports, one is slanting the truth because you are deliberately misreporting the results from a larger sample of reports.

It's a fine line, but actually a fairly clear one. Despite MWG deliberately trying to bend the line by only soliciting positive reviews, it's a line they have clearly crossed.

I'm not really getting into this whole debate, so don't take this as a defense of BTP or anything - it's mostly just because I enjoy debating semantics.

But I disagree, because it depends on how MWG uses the positive stories they receive. It's for endorsement purposes (i.e. advertising), so there is nothing odd about focusing on positive customer experiences. That's a fairly normal advertising strategy after all. It only becomes unethical if they attempt to present the anecdotes as statistical evidence. It's the difference between advertising that "98% of customers report that they are very happy with the services we provide" and "Listen to these people who are happy with the services we provide". Both are very common in advertising, and it's more than a bit of a stretch to say the latter is unethical. You don't expect a Pepsi ad to spend time on the people who say they prefer Coke.
MWG could have written "tell us about your experiences with BTP, good or bad!", sure, but since the intent is to endorse their partner they would obviously have chosen the positive experiences anyway. So they are really just telling the people with bad experiences to not bother wasting their time. It's not for market research purposes.

Now, if Matthew produces a video where he says "we asked our subscribers, and they only had positive things to say about BTP!" then we are definitely veering into misleading behavior. But he hasn't crossed that bridge yet.

If MWG are clear about their ties with BTP and any freebies they get from BTP I don't think it's unethical.

I honestly haven't followed MWG to know, so someone else who has will have to step in and say whether they do that or not.

If they are trying to come off as an unattached and/or impartial customer of BTP or similar but then are ignoring anything bad, that's where it starts to get unethical. That's along the same lines as a reviewer getting a product and often extras for free from the manufacturer and giving a glowing review while never telling you about their potential bias compared to someone who just bought it off the shelf.

Herzlos wrote:
Why aren't you sending them to someone in Europe to do? There's a lot of Polish painters that will do you a better job, for faster, without international shipping.


I finally watched the video and I'm shocked at the results. The fire effect is kinda cool but they look completely unfinished; they've barely even hit the 3 colour minimum standard. I could do better myself and I'm not a good painter, even with 2 hours/mini time budget.

Seriously.

There are tremendous painters and studios in Poland and just when I think I'm catching up, they crank it up to 11. I can't fathom why anyone in Europe would commission elsewhere.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
If MWG are clear about their ties with BTP and any freebies they get from BTP I don't think it's unethical.

I honestly haven't followed MWG to know, so someone else who has will have to step in and say whether they do that or not.

If they are trying to come off as an unattached and/or impartial customer of BTP or similar but then are ignoring anything bad, that's where it starts to get unethical. That's along the same lines as a reviewer getting a product and often extras for free from the manufacturer and giving a glowing review while never telling you about their potential bias compared to someone who just bought it off the shelf.

Their solicitation of ONLY positive reviews was a private email to members. Their public videos made no mention of it afaik.

 M0ff3l wrote:
So people are now punishing MWG for having their own opinion and not agreeing with them? wow.

Yes, Consumers have a time honored tradition of taking their money elsewhere when companies do things they dont agree with. People protest shows, networks, companies and boycott them for their opinions or staying with sponsors.

You really have no idea how the real world works, do you? Happens all the time. Some boycotts work, others however backfire immensely.(chick fil a boycott I'm looking at you for example)

My primary issue with MWG is this push for good BTP stories comes right in the middle of this event, and seems to be a calculated effort to give BTP good press in a time where they are under the gun. Between that and the immediate dismissal of a well documented instance of poor quality makes it seem like MGW is in full cooperation with BTP.

tgjensen wrote:


I'm not really getting into this whole debate, so don't take this as a defense of BTP or anything - it's mostly just because I enjoy debating semantics.

But I disagree, because it depends on how MWG uses the positive stories they receive. It's for endorsement purposes (i.e. advertising), so there is nothing odd about focusing on positive customer experiences. That's a fairly normal advertising strategy after all. It only becomes unethical if they attempt to present the anecdotes as statistical evidence. It's the difference between advertising that "98% of customers report that they are very happy with the services we provide" and "Listen to these people who are happy with the services we provide". Both are very common in advertising, and it's more than a bit of a stretch to say the latter is unethical. You don't expect a Pepsi ad to spend time on the people who say they prefer Coke.
MWG could have written "tell us about your experiences with BTP, good or bad!", sure, but since the intent is to endorse their partner they would obviously have chosen the positive experiences anyway. So they are really just telling the people with bad experiences to not bother wasting their time. It's not for market research purposes.

Now, if Matthew produces a video where he says "we asked our subscribers, and they only had positive things to say about BTP!" then we are definitely veering into misleading behavior. But he hasn't crossed that bridge yet.

OTOH, endorsements imply integrity. When a business endorses another business, it's a way of lending one's own credibility to another.

Before we go talking about right and wrong, here's a mental exercise: let's say 98% of the commissions BTP completes are successful and people are happy with them. Their failure rate is 2%, which might be pretty good for this sector. Now, how many of those commissions are actually of the cost and scope of tenebre's army? I am willing to bet there are only a few, and this was a big project for BTP. I am also willing to bet their failure rate for projects like this is a lot higher for projects of this size, since there's a lot more that could go wrong.

Does that make it any different when someone says they only fail on 2% of their projects? The answer is maybe, and it depends on the point you are trying to make.

For MWG to endorse BTP right now, in light of all that has gone on, makes that fact a little harder to swallow. The problem people have with BTP is not about their failure rate, which could very well be exceedingly low, it's with their business practices. We have all seen the correspondence and it's not hard to understand how tenebre has been wronged here. That correspondence also creates some serious questions about the failure rate, since the owner of the business seems to be the only one defining success and failure.

Changing the focus from business practices to some quantifiable statistic isn't really an honest way of dealing with the issue. Sure, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but when they use it to cover up the harm someone did to another person, that's when it becomes unethical and wrong.

While I can understand why they would want to help out a friend and business partner, I really disagree with what MWG says they want to do. There is all the time in the world to endorse BTP, but putting out a video like this now is really a way of taking sides against someone who has been wronged. There's no upside in screwing anyone.

Yeah, if I am running MWG my response to BTP is along the lines of:

"Lets see how you address the current issue before I give you any more help. Right now you are not living up the standards of a company I can endorse"

It appears that the MWG post to their vault members requesting stories has been removed. I am a vault member but do not have access to the vault forums, is there anything for news there or emails sent out?

Herzlos wrote:
Why aren't you sending them to someone in Europe to do? There's a lot of Polish painters that will do you a better job, for less, faster, without international shipping.


I finally watched the video and I'm shocked at the results. The fire effect is kinda cool but they look completely unfinished; they've barely even hit the 3 colour minimum standard. I could do better myself and I'm not a good painter, even with 2 hours/mini time budget.

That is my thought there are a lot of good commission painters in europe to use. So my thought is that it is a btp fanboy or employee posing as someone from europe since dakka just lets you choose your flag next to your name.

 YourWellPaintedArmyCom wrote:
Tenebre

I was looking on this thread closely and I can't take this anymore.

Cause I'm feeling bad to see how much did you spend on this army and how many nerves it costs to you i have an option for u.

You can choose any character or unit from your army. I'll paint them for free on high tt+ standard with unit and showcase standard on character.

We're one big family as painters/gamers. If we'll start doing mess around us there's no option to have normal relationship between us (painters) and you (gamers).

That's why it will be fully voluntary. Don't loose your faith on painting services. There's a lot of normal people around the world doing their stuff great.

On my site you can look on painted minis. Pm me or mail me for details. Only cost you'll have to pay is pp.

Stay strong mate! Don't give up.
Daniel YWPA head manager

You are a saint.

 techsoldaten wrote:
It seems like there's some line Shawn is drawing in the sand, saying that quality stops when he says it does. When he put forward a list of issues that he sees, and told tenebre that's the only thing he would take action on, he's really saying his judgment supercedes everyone else's. That kind of top-down management style rarely works in a creative enterprise, where success is defined relative to the expectations of a client (you can't just tell people what they want, you have to be a good listener.)

This is so, super important.

If you're working as an interior designer for a homeowner or a business, you (as the designer) do not get to tell the client when the end product is "good enough.'

Either you satisfy your client, or you don't. Yes, it's possible that a person might have a "client from hell" that is impossible to satisfy, but those are going to be few and far between. The long term success of these companies is determined by how well they satisfy their clients, whether on the first attempt or subsequent attempts.