New Miniatures... Info?

[Pbartender]

Look at the pictures... I'll wait to see with my own eyes before I'm totally convinced, but really... $3.00+ a minis is steep... it is a piece of plastic

You don't buy many toys for kids, do you?



Compare to Scheich plastic figurines... They are a much larger scale (about 1:20) than D&D and are "hand-painted", and so they can have much more detailed sculpts and paint jobs. They are also not random. However, a single mounted knight costs $15.00, and a pack of three generic foot soldiers costs about $18.00. A single animal, such as a dog, a horse or a tiger, costs about $6.00.

And of course, as with D&D minis, the ones displayed on the website are the best of the bunch. The actual models you find in the store suffer from all the same weapon-bending, and misaligned details in the paint that D&D minis suffer from.

 

[Jhaelen]

Masterwork Goliath as sample was misleading and unfair. Wotc should never use a masterwork as example of things to come.

Yup, that was a bad move. Maybe all they had available at the time were the masters.

Full Plate Tank was right.

No, just no.
FPT is the epitome of everything that is wrong in this world.

 

[Brown Jenkin]

It's not greed; it's Merric's law. Plain and simple.

Randomization reduces cost. Period. Remove randomization and cost goes up. Period.

So they can also reduce the costs on the rulebooks by randomizing which ones you buy. Sign me up.

 

[catsclaw227]

Full Plate Tank was right.

No, just no.
FPT is the epitome of everything that is wrong in this world.

I don't get this. Who or what is Full Plate Tank?

 

[Drkfathr1]

I'm more than willing to pay higher prices for higher quality...

But what we're seeing so far is not higher quality.

 

[avin]

I don't get this. Who or what is Full Plate Tank?

Full Plate Tank was a guy at Wotc that constantly pissed moderators. He complained all the time and took forever until he got the ban hammer.

He always said that the promised "increased paint steps" won't make difference, miniatures would stay the same. If I record well he said we would never see that Goliath, but I may be wrong here.

From what we can see so far, on Common and Uncommon minis, unfortunately he was right.

 

[Vocenoctum]

No, the greed is not evident. Unless you consider the simple desire of a company to turn a profit greed.

The original sales model for D&D Miniatures, completely random packaging, worked well for years . . . but its time had come. Not only were production costs rising, but interest in the skirmish game was dying and sales of the minatures was going down with each new set.

While sales may have been decreasing, just focusing on the random aspect was a bit odd for me. WotC sort of ignored:
1) the drop in quality
2) the change to DDM2
3) the switch to D&D4e

There were a lot of changes around the same time, and they used sliding sales to justify killing the line while it was still profitable and move to a new model.

 

[catsclaw227]

Full Plate Tank was a guy at Wotc that constantly pissed moderators. He complained all the time and took forever until he got the ban hammer.

He always said that the promised "increased paint steps" won't make difference, miniatures would stay the same. If I record well he said we would never see that Goliath, but I may be wrong here.

From what we can see so far, on Common and Uncommon minis, unfortunately he was right.

Thanks. I didn't get the reference.

 

[CharlesRyan]

So they can also reduce the costs on the rulebooks by randomizing which ones you buy. Sign me up.

If the rulebook product model was similar to that of miniatures (scores of individual items; average consumer buys many individual items), then, yes, randomization could reduce costs.

People think product cost = materials + labour + R&D/overhead. Yes, that's correct, but there's one other big factor: sales efficiency. If you only sell 80% of what you make, that remaining 20% that you landfill is part of the cost of the 80% that did get sold.

Randomization increases sales efficiency. When you only produce 3 booster releases a year, you only have to get the numbers right 3 times. (And product similarity makes it pretty easy to get the numbers right every time.)

When you produce, say, 42 separate miniatures SKUs in a year, you have to get the numbers right 42 times. (And since the products are distinctly different, getting them right is a real challenge. Guessing which of the Heroes SKUs is going to be insanely popular and which is going to languish in the shelf is virtually impossible on a regular basis.) Every item that doesn't sell through 100% is a tax on those that do sell.

It may be counterintuitive, but it's not greed. Reduced randomization = higher cost.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Well... quality would also increase sales efficiency.

Good miniature selection would also increase sales efficiency. (We've got this new core race but you know, let's forget about actually making a few commons of it. We need those slots for dwarves and elves because they're core races...)

Keeping the figures in scale to each other would also increase sales efficiency (halflings, dwarves, hobgoblins, bugbears, ogres, etc... I'm looking at you.)