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 Kanluwen wrote:

 Coenus Scaldingus wrote:

SeanDrake wrote:
GW are terrified of repeating the SC box fiasco so we will not be getting any warning about price hikes in future.

Could anybody fill me in on what happened? I see a few references to it in this thread, but haven't a clue what exactly occurred.

The Start Collecting sets went up in price, anywhere from $5USD to $10USD.

Not sure how it's a "fiasco" but basically it was in response to the fact that some items were effectively 'free' for some of those sets.

You need more quotation marks on free. Cause they're only free if you consider that GW doesn't already overcharge all their gak.

stratigo wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 Coenus Scaldingus wrote:

SeanDrake wrote:
GW are terrified of repeating the SC box fiasco so we will not be getting any warning about price hikes in future.

Could anybody fill me in on what happened? I see a few references to it in this thread, but haven't a clue what exactly occurred.

The Start Collecting sets went up in price, anywhere from $5USD to $10USD.

Not sure how it's a "fiasco" but basically it was in response to the fact that some items were effectively 'free' for some of those sets.

You need more quotation marks on free. Cause they're only free if you consider that GW doesn't already overcharge all their gak.

An $85 Carnosaur set came with Saurus Warriors and Knights in the SC.

You can whine about the prices all you like, but an $85 Carnosaur plus extra items equals free.

 Kanluwen wrote:

stratigo wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 Coenus Scaldingus wrote:

SeanDrake wrote:
GW are terrified of repeating the SC box fiasco so we will not be getting any warning about price hikes in future.

Could anybody fill me in on what happened? I see a few references to it in this thread, but haven't a clue what exactly occurred.

The Start Collecting sets went up in price, anywhere from $5USD to $10USD.

Not sure how it's a "fiasco" but basically it was in response to the fact that some items were effectively 'free' for some of those sets.

You need more quotation marks on free. Cause they're only free if you consider that GW doesn't already overcharge all their gak.

An $85 Carnosaur set came with Saurus Warriors and Knights in the SC.

You can whine about the prices all you like, but an $85 Carnosaur plus extra items equals free.

No it literally doesn’t. Like in the actual definition of free, it isn’t free. REMOVED - BrookM, but if you are paying money for something, eg the start collecting box, then you aren’t getting anything free. This is marketing. It is like a product on sale that is never not on sale, put the word sale is a positive psychological motivator to buy a product. Over charging for a product and then offering a bundle where something is offered “free” is an extremely common marketing tool because it manipulated a person’s comparative ability, and comparing gak is one of the biggest functions of the human brain.

Did you pay for the additional products?

No? Then they were free.

stratigo wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
Did you pay for the additional products?

No? Then they were free.

“I said sumthin and I are smrt, so thing is right.”

Look up the definition of words. Also, like, do some research on marketing. This is 101 level gak here mate

He’s not wrong though. There was a time that GW just started sending the SC kit when people ordered a Carnosaur. People paid $85 for the Carnosaur, and GW gave them an upgrade to what they ordered, which included two additional units for no additional charge. This...they were free. And most people buying the SCs knew the value saved. ALL people had access to see the value. So yes...free is an appropriate term. So is “everything in the box discounted heavily”. But the insults because you don’t understand what Kan is saying don’t help your case. They make you look foolish. Technically you’re both right and neither is fully wrong.

 timetowaste85 wrote:

stratigo wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
Did you pay for the additional products?

No? Then they were free.

“I said sumthin and I are smrt, so thing is right.”

Look up the definition of words. Also, like, do some research on marketing. This is 101 level gak here mate

He’s not wrong though. There was a time that GW just started sending the SC kit when people ordered a Carnosaur. People paid $85 for the Carnosaur, and GW gave them an upgrade to what they ordered, which included two additional units for no additional charge. This...they were free. And most people buying the SCs knew the value saved. ALL people had access to see the value. So yes...free is an appropriate term. So is “everything in the box discounted heavily”. But the insults because you don’t understand what Kan is saying don’t help your case. They make you look foolish. Technically you’re both right and neither is fully wrong.

That isn’t what free means. Start collecting boxes contain no free models. Not a one. You are buying a product. It contains more models than a different similar product. That doesn’t mean start collecting is free. It means that it is a better deal, but that doesn’t also mean it is a good deal. Savvy.

 Just Tony wrote:

stratigo wrote:
This whole price rise thing is a bit of a snafu and we really need gw to say something about it

Overpricing isn't a bug as far as GW's plan, it's a feature. They will push prices as high as they can as long as people are willing to spend it.

This is true, i wish the consumers of GW products in the USA, or Austrialia or typically both would do what normal consumers do when prices are too absurd and boycott the company until prices come down. I think the USA accounts for a large enough amount of sales, would be interesting to see how much, but if we boycotted purchasing GW products for a few months or one financial quarter, it would be great to see what came from this....

but this is but a dream as there are too many that would pay the price reguardless of what is costs... so the question I believe needs to be asked is.... What is cost that would make you stop buying GW product outright.


I have asked myself this many times. For a single model kit for me it is $100 USD. So all the kits that have come out that are over that amount I have bought second hand or have 3d printed or got recast. All FW stuff I have been getting recast for awhile because FW prices are rediculous and FW quality sucks recasters can do it just the same. In a way it is almost like buying generic products, i know certain people will not see it this way but at the end of the day why pay double for the same thing when you can get it for half and get the same product? GW themself have created recasters, as GW prices have enabled companies to produce the same product cheaper. If there was no profit to be had by recasters then they wouldn't exist. Between recasters and 3rd party suppilers a larger percentage of my money has been going toward them.

In the past a boycott would not be practical or could not be done large scale. With social media nowadays, a boycott could effectively be done. Would it hurt business yes, could it potentially cause GW to revamp their prices, with enough support yes. At the end of the financial quarter when stockholders would see a signifcant drop GW would need to have answers. Luckily 6th and 7th edition 40k sucked so horribly bad it allowed me to not purchase any GW products over this time and redirect my gaming budget toward other companies.

Will it ever happen, i would have better luck playing the lottery then to get people to quit the GW plastic crack addiction. I would be willing to support any boycott that anyone will post as I feel GW has been taking advantage of customers for years and something should be done.

stratigo wrote:

 timetowaste85 wrote:

stratigo wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
Did you pay for the additional products?

No? Then they were free.

“I said sumthin and I are smrt, so thing is right.”

Look up the definition of words. Also, like, do some research on marketing. This is 101 level gak here mate

He’s not wrong though. There was a time that GW just started sending the SC kit when people ordered a Carnosaur. People paid $85 for the Carnosaur, and GW gave them an upgrade to what they ordered, which included two additional units for no additional charge. This...they were free. And most people buying the SCs knew the value saved. ALL people had access to see the value. So yes...free is an appropriate term. So is “everything in the box discounted heavily”. But the insults because you don’t understand what Kan is saying don’t help your case. They make you look foolish. Technically you’re both right and neither is fully wrong.

That isn’t what free means. Start collecting boxes contain no free models. Not a one. You are buying a product. It contains more models than a different similar product. That doesn’t mean start collecting is free. It means that it is a better deal, but that doesn’t also mean it is a good deal. Savvy.

It both is and isn't free depending on your point of view.

Saurus Guard 35
Saurus Knights 55
Carnisaur - not sold individually

Start Collecting set 90


Those are the numbers, from the customers perspective the Carnisaur is free because the price of Guard and Knights without buying the start-collecting box, is the same as buying the start collecting box. Therefore if one were purchasing both knights and guard the better deal is the start collecting box because it does give you the better deal, it gives you a free model that you otherwise would not get if you bought the two boxes of troops on their own.


From the perspective of the company its not "free" its simply pricing the three kits as a group rather than on their own. Therefore resulting in the price of the troops outside of the start collecting set, being higher than they might otherwise be to cover for the fact that they are also paying for the cost of the carnisaurs' production and distribution as well.



The customer has no alternative (legal) source of those models. Therefore within their shopping window the carnisaur is "free" because there are other options (from GW) where they can buy the models in the SC without getting the carnisaur.



So yes its not "free" in the strictest of senses of the meaning, but so long as GW offers other purchase options for the other content then free is a perfectly fair casual way to describe getting the carnisaur in the start collecting set.

As for the "value of their gak" that's something we can debate until the end of days and in the end because GW is a luxury product they are free to charge whatever they want.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

angel of death 007 wrote:


Will it ever happen, i would have better luck playing the lottery then to get people to quit the GW plastic crack addiction. I would be willing to support any boycott that anyone will post as I feel GW has been taking advantage of customers for years and something should be done.

The problems with social media however can cause additional issues

1) It's VERY fickle. You might get everyone whipped up into a frenzy on a Friday and by Monday they have moved on. Ergo many internet campaigns fizzle out on their own and often as not the company doing nothing or taking a very "wait and see" approach to their communications during such a time can simply serve to let the thing burn out. What tends to cause it to burn for longer is when a company panics and starts doing anti-consumer daft stuff (or a hotblood staffer/CEO gets on twitter and makes a fool of themselves).

2) It's not unified. Yeah everyone is there, and everyone wants to be a chief. You can very easily wind up with a lot of chiefs, a lot of sub groups and a lot of alternate agendas all competing with each other.

3) Perception of value is not uniform.

4) Perception of value from a customer point of view does not take into account anything but a companies declared "profits" at a most basic level. Ergo they are not going to consider future investment finances; covering overheads; covering emergency savings; bonuses to staff etc... Heck many might even just look at a companies profit before expenses to make the number look bigger. Therefore you can very easily end up with a boycotte that fails to work because it demands the impossible of a company.

Heck lets not forget the record profits GW reported last year allowed them to spend over £9 million building a new factory to improve consumer support of product supply; that's something which had to come out of their profits.


In the end it can be complex and it can be hard to draw a line on where values should be. That isn't defending GW's practics and some of their choices on exchange rates are questionable - then again tey are not the only company making such odd translations of currancy. Ergo it might be hidden costs consumers are unaware of (eg commercial shipping costing more to supplement cheaper consumer shipping fees); taxes; import tarrifs etc.. and that's all before we've got to the amount of "excess profit" at the end of a year that people think is "fair".

SeanDrake wrote:

Munster wrote:

SeanDrake wrote:
Seems a good place to ask but is there a good budget SLA printer?

.

It depends... I'm having fun with an Anycubic Photon S and it does very high quality prints, but many prefer the original Photon due to the better community support (and you can almost modify it to S structure)

The Epax X1 is considered the correct version of the Photon S (shares the operating system with the Photon)

The Mars is ok but has a small community.

Not much out there about the proposed Prusa, but that will likely be the most expensive of them all

Thanks for the advice, so the Mars is ok is it? Because at £220 it is way cheaper than the others and is like 1 months hobby money so I could give it a try.

I'm aiming for the Mars. The Photon is the no brainer answer, its been massively successful, there's a massive community, it isn't too expensive and it performs well. Without having spent a huge amount of time researching, I wrote off the S because apparently a lot of the structure is now plastic instead of metal. That's less of an issue with an SLA over an FDM printer, where flex of any kind can impact significantly on your prints, but nevertheless my instinct is that I'd rather have a steel frame than plastic.

But having seen a few test prints and watched a few videos, I'm sold that the Mars is at least good enough.

But I am looking at it from the perspective of already owning an FDM with a reasonable print volume (Anycubic I3 Mega) so the realtively small print volume of the typical hobbyist level SLAs isn't so much of an issue. If it is going to be your first/only printer, think carefully about what your use is going to be, anything other than minis and the odd bit of scatter is going to be a faff.

Similar money to the Mars will give access to several models of well regarded FDM, so if you're happy to spend the £200 ish it is worth taking a minute and looking at all the angles.

Okaaaaaaaaay people, dial down the hostility please. I've done some cleaning and warnings have been handed out, now stick to the topic and remain polite.

 Overread wrote:
I wasn't a fiasco - GW just got lots of orders in before raising the price on the boxed sets when they announced the rise approaching. If anything it likely did their sales a really good turn in generating a load of extra sales even if it put production under increased load stress (which honestly until their new factory comes online appears to be pretty normal for GW at present).

While all that is true it also had some other unintended issues the main one being that while yes it was a nice bump in sales it had the obvious downside of tanking SC sales to the point that there are just starting to increase again.

Turns out most SC’S were bought by existing players and giving them warning to panic buy was a bad idea this combined with some people deciding there not worth it for there army when you have the other army boxes coming out results in really low sales.

I'm not sure you can exactly call it a "bump" either. Somebody buying something now at a lower price rather than in 3 months because they'd intended to buy it all along doesn't really represent an increase.

I mean, I guess a certain percentage might be purchases that were never intended until the news the price was going up landed, but I can't imagine it's a statistically significant number. Especially when you consider that only a relatively small number of the customer base will have been aware of an impending increase and taken action as a result.

Yeah a short term sales bump followed by a short term sales drop that evens out to basically not much shift in volume by the end of the year. It would only have "failed" if they were hoping on making an increase in sales at the higher price point, which basically would never happen. Of course once sales settle down they will likely make increased revenue off those items because of the rise in the set cost - that is at least assuming that the rise isn't eaten up by rising costs elswhere in the company.

I think people claiming GW are 'too big to fail' on price hikes need only take a look to Fantasy. What happened there? Well when you end up pretty much requiring x4 Core boxes per unit at £20 each, most people are going to turn away pretty quick. Now with most AoS 5-model boxes costing around £25 that you generally want to maximise to at least 20 for some of the more elite factions, it's like history repeating itself.

Let's also not forget that GW's strategy for years has always been to suck up the pocket money of teenagers. Unless pocket money being given out to kids also rose with inflation, Lil Timmy can no longer put his £6 for a blister pack character or x3 metals a week, but he's looking at about £20 just to add that character.

Honestly I think price was a lesser issue for Fantasy in general - it contributed but there were bigger issues considering that the price for armies in that was comparable to 40K.

The real issues were:

a) It didn't scale down well and got progressively worse as you kept scaling it down. A 500 point or less fight was very odd to see and didn't work very well for most armies. So there was less enjoyment potential as you were getting an army up and ready and progressing into the game.

b) GW didn't heavily market smaller scale versions of the game. Rather like how 40K had killteam in the back of the big rule book; what smaller scale battles there were, weren't heavily marketed by GW. So newbies might be unaware of them and it would rely heavily on established players being aware of and informing them and offering games. Fastforward and today Killteam is heavily marketed and its own thing - Skirmish has come and gone a bit (its in white dwarf right now) but AoS is in a different situation and is still getting itself sorted in terms of battletome support.

c) GW ignored it. Yeah model releases slowed, updates did, general market buzz and remembering these were the dark ages when GW didn't do social media, forums or even much advertising. It was White Dwarf or nothing really. With less enthusiasm and attention from GW itself it also started to erode its long term fans, which cuts down on recruitment potential for new gamers.

And there were other things too. Price was an issue, but more so because of the lack of smaller scale game options which put pressure on people having larger armies to really get into the fun stages of the game. So as a result things like burnout and cost got amplified.



AoS today has several smaller game modes (Shadspire, Skirmish and Warcry) and GW advertises them and promotes them. They just released 1K battle rework points to make 1K games better through their annual rules supplement and update document (Generals Handbook). And there is every likelihood that once AoS has most or all armies with Battletomes, we'll see an AoD Skirmish boxed set of releases like they've done with Killteam. That is unless Warcry fills that niche (we don't really know exactly what Warcry is yet).

So suffice to say that today you can do a lot and have a lot of fun with AoS if you've even only got your Shadspire Team.

new prices are online. ... much more got increased than was on that list

Shas O Ores wrote:
new prices are online. ... much more got increased than was on that list

Oh come on...

Is there any kind of comprehensive list anywhere? Because it looks more like an "across the board" thing than anything else...

Yeah all Necromunda gangs and Ambot got a 2$ increase.

Because "yo dawg those basez aRe NoT FrEe!!!!!!111"

Blood Bowl Teams seem to have gone from 25 to 30 euros, too.

Well, that's a good way of reducing output I guess.

Smaug 380 to 440 Euro... good that I don't play Hobbit/LotR
But it's crazy how expensive the flyers got. Also old character models went from 15 to 20.
And Forgeworld increased prices across the board :
There are even lots of mistakes/not yet implemented increases, e.g. Elder flyer cost as a single unit 50, as an apocalpyse detachment of 3 now 180

Well, that's just peachy. I needed to dial down my purchases anyway.

3 items in basket on FW last night £44 today it’s £50, talk about salt in the wound they even put the lctb stuff up.

 Arbitrator wrote:
I think people claiming GW are 'too big to fail' on price hikes need only take a look to Fantasy. What happened there? Well when you end up pretty much requiring x4 Core boxes per unit at £20 each, most people are going to turn away pretty quick. Now with most AoS 5-model boxes costing around £25 that you generally want to maximise to at least 20 for some of the more elite factions, it's like history repeating itself.

Let's also not forget that GW's strategy for years has always been to suck up the pocket money of teenagers. Unless pocket money being given out to kids also rose with inflation, Lil Timmy can no longer put his £6 for a blister pack character or x3 metals a week, but he's looking at about £20 just to add that character.

This one hits home for me. I just had to turn down joining an AOS escalation league because I can't afford to buy the models I need to get up to 2000 points by the end of it. Even considering that it's an escalation league.

I'm not sure WHF is such a useful comparison.

I mean, you're absolutely right that it cost a bundle to get into, or to start a new army. Especially if you felt drawn to Gobbos or Skaven.

But, much of the issue there was, again, especially with Gobbos and Skaven, was that many of the models one was buying, building and painting just didn't do [/I]anything[/I] in the game. They were there to look pretty, and rarely got the chance to fight. Especially in 6-7th Ed.

8th did a bit more there, allowing additional ranks to fight. And it worked for stuff like Ogres. If I did a Horde of those, up to three ranks could fight - and that was pretty appealing. Spesh with Ironguts!

AoS and 40k? You're far more likely to actually use the models you've bought - barring a truly disastrous enemy shooting phase!

For clarity, this isn't any kind of 'shush and pay up' sentiment. I ain't gonna tell you how you should feel. But WHF was a unique beast, and the problems it had don't really exist in GW's other offerings.

Honestly, I'm not sure that problem is not actually present in current 40k... how many units are there to just die in droves, or to fill requisites? I look at current 40k armies and they're kind of fething big, nowadays.

SeanDrake wrote:
3 items in basket on FW last night £44 today it’s £50, talk about salt in the wound they even put the lctb stuff up.

I love this.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I'm not sure WHF is such a useful comparison.

I mean, you're absolutely right that it cost a bundle to get into, or to start a new army. Especially if you felt drawn to Gobbos or Skaven.

But, much of the issue there was, again, especially with Gobbos and Skaven, was that many of the models one was buying, building and painting just didn't do [/I]anything[/I] in the game. They were there to look pretty, and rarely got the chance to fight. Especially in 6-7th Ed.

8th did a bit more there, allowing additional ranks to fight. And it worked for stuff like Ogres. If I did a Horde of those, up to three ranks could fight - and that was pretty appealing. Spesh with Ironguts!

AoS and 40k? You're far more likely to actually use the models you've bought - barring a truly disastrous enemy shooting phase!

For clarity, this isn't any kind of 'shush and pay up' sentiment. I ain't gonna tell you how you should feel. But WHF was a unique beast, and the problems it had don't really exist in GW's other offerings.

It's funny. I absolutely agree about the wound counter nature of most of a Fantasy army. I got that feeling a lot myself. Now, I think it actually looked cool to have the regiments decrease in size due to casualties (or increase again in some cases), so there's that. But I couldn't help but think that all the work that went into building and painting those back ranks was wasted because they didn't really do anything. It's why I always preferred the way 40k presented things, and why I like elite armies better than horde armies.

I will say though that modern 40k or Aos doesn't feel much better to me. GW upped the army size for 40k so you buy more models. To keep the game viable everything got deadlier so more stuff just dies. And "stuff just dies" is not my idea of fun and very reminiscent of Fantasy's back ranks to me.

So i have to disagree with the notion that old Fantasy is not a good comparison. The real difference now to back then is, as Overread mentioned, that GW isn't exclusively trying to get everyone to buy gigantic amounts of models for full sized games again and they additionally offer smaller and what they hope are gateway games now.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
AoS and 40k? You're far more likely to actually use the models you've bought - barring a truly disastrous enemy shooting phase!

Just yesterday I dropped 30 GBP on 30 models that do absolutely nothing but generate CP and get shot because my army doesn't function properly otherwise - gretchin, to be precise. They went up by 6 GBP today.

Yet they're still fulfilling a function - and can, in a pinch, sit on an objective, making your opponent work slightly harder for it (and ever so slightly harder).

But Night Gobbos Nos 21-60? Yeah. They literally played no point in any battle, ever. 11-20 (assuming one had armed them with Spears) only ever provided 2 pips of Combat Res, for maxing out your Rank Bonus.

So whilst similar wastes of pounds exist in 40k and AoS (there's always something there that just gets annihilated), they are least fulfil some function - even if it's Loyal 32esque CP Tax.

In summation? I think the problem is lesser in games other than WHFB. And how much of a bugbear it might be will depend largely on the Codex chosen, and the army chosen from within said Codex.

For instance, anyone complaining that Loyal 32 went up can probably just do one, as that's entirely self-inflicted

So what else went up? Was it all Forge World?