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 Overread wrote:
Also just a point for thought - smoking is typically considered affordable by many and yet many who smoke will easily spend more than $10 a week on smokes without it impoverishing them.


Sometimes its not cost its priorities and what you choose to spend your money on.

that is 33 packs of cigarates in 7 days. One would have to be a hard smoker to go through that many. Technicly possible.

to me 520$ is a huge amount of money. people make around 460-470$ per month. That is more then a month of salary of an adult person.

$10 a week is variable depending on a persons income and situation - for some it will be a fortune, for others they could just stop going out to eat once a week at a restaurant and save that much and for others they regularly lose that much down the back of the couch and don't notice it at all.

Fact is any hobby has a base-line cost and whilst you can work around getting in cheaper (eg secondhand), the new product will have a generally fixed price of entry. You can argue about it as much as you like, but so long as the parent company is earning a healthy income and generating profit, they wil continue to charge that much.

I understand that. I just hope that GW warned people that an army is going to cost 600-700$ or more. Because right now to a new person that never played table top games, it is shown to people as if a start collecting was a full army, and a box of troops and an character was enough to start playing. which is not true, because basic size games are 2k pts.

If you are making less than 500 a month you are not going to have ANY hobby that costs money.

We're getting a bit of a disconnect here because a Polish $ isn't equal to a USA $.

That said 3seconds of googling suggests that a typical pack of 20 Cigarettes is $3.92 so $10 would get you two and a bit packs, which if we round it up a bit would let you get 3 packs a week. That's a long way from 33 packs.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings?itemId=17

That said there are likely cheaper brands and options on the market. Of course if your country has exceptionally cheap brands then, yes, you can argue that you wouldn't spend $10 a week on smoking. However that's sort of missing the point in that I was more identifying how there are things we do in life (smoking, drinking, gambling, eating out) which are "not essential" parts of life. If one wishes to take up a new hobby (like wargaming) then sometimes one has to sacrifice another luxury in order to entertain the new one.

Of course if you're earning only enough to just cover your monthly expenses to live then, as Amisphrn says, you are simply not in a position to take up a hobby which has higher costs. Even though long term wargaming is cheap, it still has a cost.

AT that point you either have to wait; go for secondhand; be content with a very slow growth of your collection or try something else until such time as you can earn more and thus be able to afford the hobby.

Cigarettes are cheap as sin in Poland, it's not uncommon for Germans to drive to Poland and return with a trunk full of cigarettes. Mind you, those are usually none of the big brands but ones that look very similar, so using Malboro which tend to be one of the most expensive brands to compare might not reflect the real numbers.

That said, 33 Packs for $10 would mean .33 cents per pack and there is no way for that to be true.

Also note that Poland has law defining a minimum wage of ~$620, which roughly corresponds to what people around Karol seem to be earning. I don't think anyone living of minimum wage is able to afford 40k anywhere. You can't have a hobby that costs money if you have no expendable income.

Karol wrote:
I understand that. I just hope that GW warned people that an army is going to cost 600-700$ or more. Because right now to a new person that never played table top games, it is shown to people as if a start collecting was a full army, and a box of troops and an character was enough to start playing. which is not true, because basic size games are 2k pts.

2k points basic? Not where I am. 2k points for competition, perhaps. But to play the game you really can do it with a box set & a character. Or either if you don’t want to play CP. It really is that flexible.

Looks like smoking is a much cheaper hobby in Poland than Warhammer is!

In the UK a pack of 20 cigarettes is £10 or so. In comparison, a Start Collecting box set is between £50 and £60...

That said, 33 Packs for $10 would mean .33 cents per pack and there is no way for that to be true.

Maybe if you try to buy cigarates at store. If you buy them on the market from belarusians, like more or less everyone does, then it is 0,50$ per pack around 1$ if you want to buy mentol. But cheapest is buying tabaco in bulk.

Well, clearly we need GW to open duty free shops at airports.

Karol wrote:

That said, 33 Packs for $10 would mean .33 cents per pack and there is no way for that to be true.

Maybe if you try to buy cigarates at store. If you buy them on the market from belarusians, like more or less everyone does, then it is 0,50$ per pack around 1$ if you want to buy mentol. But cheapest is buying tabaco in bulk.

You would have to compare prices for bootlegged cigarettes to prices of illegally re-casted 40k miniatures though.

And I'm very sure that large parts of those cigarettes are not tobacco and would make a regular Malboro look as healthy as salad in comparison.
Source: multiple polish friends funding their vacations back home through cigarettes.

Karol wrote:

the_scotsman 788009 10791322 wrote:
Can you maybe see how enforcing a level of non-competitiveness by all players involved purchasing a wide variety of units can help to insulate a play group from all but the wildest of balance changes and lead to everyone feeling less pressured overall to continuously buy new models to stay competitive? The most common cause of a "Casual at all Costs" attitude within a gaming group that I've seen has been literal, monetary cost associated with keeping up with the competitive joneses.

The whole entire castellan meta completely bypassed our 50+ person gaming group because nobody, not one person, bought a castellan. The one guy who bought the kit built a valiant. Same with the tau drone spam meta, same with the loyal 32/soup meta in general.

It isn't perfect, obviously, current meta is an ideal case in point example of how Games Workshop continually finds ways to outdo itself in creating bonkers imbalanced crap. But the costs of not being able to push the game to its competitive limit have never seemed to outweigh the actual cost in dollars of not buying 3 of whatever the new OP thing is whenever the meta shifts in its favor.

Only that requires people to be really rich. If people have, on avarge, problem with aquiring a 2000pts army, then they are not going to buy 5000pts of stuff, and even if they do, the chance of them starting with the bad stuff is really small. They would have to be tricked in to buying bad stuff, or the stuff they bought had to suffer some drastic nerfs. Plus if someone does buy 2000pts of an army, and it is bad, and by bad I mean it feels worse then what people localy play, it is really hard to convince someone to buy more stuff. specialy as buying more stuff doesnt asure a better quality of gaming.



Also I have the question, how the 20 year thing work, when your under 20 years? I mean in 20 years there maybe no GW or models. How many people that started 20 years ago still play? I mean the majority of people at my store were people that were 20 or 30 plus, but am not sure how their number compare to the number of people that started, but left. I have my doubts, and no data, that my area always had the same 20 something people playing. specialy as out of the 7 people that started with me only 2 were still playing after two years.

I mean it's objectively just the opposite. I fully understand the sentiments of some folks who gripe about how annoying it is to have a clique of people enforcing a casual meta (And boy howdy believe me I have experienced that in its most extreme form. In 7th ed I played one game with a group that told me to not come back because my imperial guard army, one of the weakest at the time, had 3 identical Leman Russ tanks in it and I was seen to be "spamming"....I had an all-metal vostroyan army with 3rd edition leman russ tanks, which only had one gun at the time which is why they were identical lol) but where I disagree with them is in the motive.

Almost all the time, a whole group keeping a meta casual is not because "they can't handle losing", it's because keeping it means people don't have to spend money. The only balance swing of the competitive meta that affected our group at all this entire edition was the crazy space marine bs that's been happening the last few months. INDIVIDUALS who try to impose casual restrictions on INDIVIDUAL opponents often do it because of scrub mentality.

Guard meta? We have three guard players: one plays a tank company, one plays scions in valkyries, and one plays catachan veterans in chimeras. Throughout the whole entire "guard are so OP waaaah too many guardsmen conscripts OP no wait infantry squads OP" meta, all three of those guys held perfectly steady in terms of winrate, and nobody had any problems playing against them with armies like necrons or dark angels, which were bottom tier at the time.

Same story with Eldar - our two eldar players had an all-wraith list and an all aspect warriors list, so the whole Eldar being super strong competitive meta thing...just didn't touch us at all. And knights - very few people use em, the ones that do either use 2 armigers or 1 regular knight. Nobody's got a knight army, nobody had a castellan.

The marine meta torpedoed our group hard because even the super casual iron hands player with all tactical marines in rhinos, vindicators, predators and dreadnoughts suddenly had a far stronger army to the point where people couldn't compete with him.

Part of this is a degree of privilege - there are two game stores fairly close by, so one of them is able to cater to competitive play while the other is more of a hobby store where most of the customers are old war veteran grandpas. So we get a lot of our players with old people coming over and going "Warhammer? I used to play warhammer 15 years ago - I still got my old space marines in the attic! Can I still use them?"

The end result is that people have to buy far, far, far fewer kits to keep up. Most people I play with own 2,000 points exactly or less than 2,000, and an even greater fraction play with existing collections and haven't bought anything at all for the current edition.

Okey but this means you more or less need 20+ people and a store to play the way you want, in an odd way which isn't the norm for your countries income or way of playing. May as well say that someone need to have a personal jet to play in location all around the world.

What you are telling me sounds like stories. When castellans were the thing, everyone here could could afford and get hand on one had one. when loyal 32 was run by everyone as fuel, everyone that could afford it or could run something similar run it. Sure maybe not every eldar player run a 11 flyer mege tournament list, but 5 flyers were in every eldar list I have seen at the store. I have never seen or heard about someone not using rules that were creating an adventage for them. the only different thing was probably the no FW stuff, because the store owner didn't want people to play with models that were 100% recasted.

And people here own 2000pts armies, mostly too, some quit the game before they have an optimised 2000pts.

And stuff like letting someone play with illegal stuff is a no go. The store was full WYSIWYG. A guy at my school made a primaris librarian with a force staff, and was not allowed to use him, because the load out was illegal for a primaris model.

You would have to compare prices for bootlegged cigarettes to prices of illegally re-casted 40k miniatures though.

not bootleged, those are normal cigarates made in a normal factory. they just don't pay the 260% tax rate there is on cigarates. Everyone who lives in smaller towns like me or in rural areas does it, same with gas , earth gas, imported cooking oil which is actually gas . only people that buy cigarates at stores are truck drivers , real hardcore addicts and belgians. But belgians are just strange.

Karol wrote:
Okey but this means you more or less need 20+ people and a store to play the way you want, in an odd way which isn't the norm for your countries income or way of playing. May as well say that someone need to have a personal jet to play in location all around the world.

What you are telling me sounds like stories. When castellans were the thing, everyone here could could afford and get hand on one had one. when loyal 32 was run by everyone as fuel, everyone that could afford it or could run something similar run it. Sure maybe not every eldar player run a 11 flyer mege tournament list, but 5 flyers were in every eldar list I have seen at the store. I have never seen or heard about someone not using rules that were creating an adventage for them. the only different thing was probably the no FW stuff, because the store owner didn't want people to play with models that were 100% recasted.

And people here own 2000pts armies, mostly too, some quit the game before they have an optimised 2000pts.

And stuff like letting someone play with illegal stuff is a no go. The store was full WYSIWYG. A guy at my school made a primaris librarian with a force staff, and was not allowed to use him, because the load out was illegal for a primaris model.

You would have to compare prices for bootlegged cigarettes to prices of illegally re-casted 40k miniatures though.

not bootleged, those are normal cigarates made in a normal factory. they just don't pay the 260% tax rate there is on cigarates. Everyone who lives in smaller towns like me or in rural areas does it, same with gas , earth gas, imported cooking oil which is actually gas . only people that buy cigarates at stores are truck drivers , real hardcore addicts and belgians. But belgians are just strange.

The only thing I know of that's unusual with my group is the size of it. Most casual gaming groups tend to be just like 5-6 people who don't pay much attention to the competitive scene.

I guess to me, it's crazy that you DONT believe it's possible that for 3 months, a group of people decided not to drop 200$ on a single big crazy OP model to win a game

Don't you always say that 200$ is like, the lifetime earnings of the richest private jet-owning mogul in poland, and that mothers tell their children stories about that time that someone in town had 200$? How is it so wild and crazy that a group could exist that just doesn't feel like burning cash to win at plastic toys?

Karol wrote:

You would have to compare prices for bootlegged cigarettes to prices of illegally re-casted 40k miniatures though.

not bootleged, those are normal cigarates made in a normal factory. they just don't pay the 260% tax rate there is on cigarates. Everyone who lives in smaller towns like me or in rural areas does it, same with gas , earth gas, imported cooking oil which is actually gas .

That is the very definition of bootlegging...

 Jidmah wrote:
That would be $520 over a year, that should be plenty to start you pretty much any army you want.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

AngryAngel80 wrote:
Now ? It's a codex maybe every year or two along with multiple splat books you may need lets say 2, at minimum every year and perhaps a new, revised rulebook every couple years. Manageable if you only run one army, run a few though ? That'll cost ya with releases like every week.

The only good thing from this current pandemic is a slow down in new stuff for a bit. I'm actually kinda grateful for that. In the longer term with how long it may be before players can really mingle again, this could be a rough time for the hobby but maybe a time we may see actual deals or lowered prices.

Does it really feel that fast for you? I guess it might feel that way if you are running some variant of space marines, but even for orks I had no trouble just getting all the new stuff and more using my method. The only thing released during 8th I don't own (yet) is the squig trukk, but not for the lack of money.

I have played for a long time so I had picked up a number of armies during the pacing of older editions. Like for instance I have Space wolves, Dark Angels, Deathwatch, some Vanilla marines, Tau, Dark Eldar, Deathguard, Mechanicus, Imperial Guard and just starting a small force for Sisters of battle.

So yeah, it feels like a fast pace for me and if you get and don't pirate the books you are easily spending a good amount every month. The month nothing is dropping that pertains is rare. Like I haven't even picked up the recent DA codex, Tau Codex and unsure on keeping up with the mechanicus PA book, didn't get the space wolf PA book, or the DE one ( which was pretty meh for them anyways ).

If I just played Orks, I'd imagine that would feel fine as they don't tend to get new stuff all the time. Like with my Guard, they haven't gotten new models for awhile and I've got everything you can imagine for them already so all they get is books pretty much unless i want to add a new tank, or buff some units.

Yeah, I guess if you have that many armies and you try to stay on top of all of them, that's a lot.
It also "helps" that my DG have gotten absolutely nothing after their initial release.

Thanks for the answer

 Jidmah wrote:
Yeah, I guess if you have that many armies and you try to stay on top of all of them, that's a lot.
It also "helps" that my DG have gotten absolutely nothing after their initial release.

Thanks for the answer

The marines are really the killers to the wallet. Like DE don't get much new, ever. DG haven't gotten much, by much I mean anything since the first drops. IG haven't gotten new stuff aside from rules since the edition drop ( and no I don't consider yet another commissar to be something new as not only do I have a million of them but they are awful now ). Even Tau are relatively stagnant.

I may however be one of the only marine players who wish other armies got more attention just so they'd stop releasing things for marines for awhile. As back when I started a few of these armies you'd go like 3-4 months minimum between releases related to an army.