Worried about new minis?

[Krug]

I'm hardly worried. I think WotC wants to hit a market that doesn't play D&D but likes the gambling nature of these things. Imagine how much a 'chase' version of Drizzt will fetch.

 

[kenjib]

Heck, I've even taken all the labels off all my canned food. Could be green beans, could be chilli, could be cream of mushroom soup. OH THE EXCITEMENT!

Hahahahahahaha! That's great. I think it is bad service for a company to sell me something on the basis that I am not allowed to know what I am buying. Screw that and nuts to the company that does it.

I think pre-painted plastic miniatures where you can buy what you want would be a great idea though. Unfortunately since the creatures' likenesses are not OGC nobody else can do it either except for the most basic creatures. Convenient, eh? Note the approximate date at which they first started asserting this/reminding us about the creature likenesses and also the lifecycle for projects like this miniature line. Add to this how they recently rescinded some creatures from the gentleman's SRD. My hunch is that at some point they decided to go forward with this project and then decided to find ways to manipulate the d20 license post-facto to prevent competition. If another company was able to release a similar product but without the randomness, these miniatures would fail completely.

Consumers do not enjoy being forced to buy things they don't want. They do so only due to the artificially limited supply of monopoly. That's how MTG made it's money. It's the primary operating principle behind WotC business strategy.

 

[gunter uxbridge]

I have been playing Mechwarrior: Dark Age from WizKids for just over a month now, and my experience with the random packaging scheme has been a positive one. Now that's not to say that I haven't went to some secondary marketing sources (about 40% of my collection was bought off of eBay), but getting a fresh pack of minis and seeing what you got is all a part of the fun. If they fit in with the faction/factions that I have chosen, then cool beans. If not, then I have units for friends to play or trading fodder.

As for the Wizards side of this lucrative market (and lets face it, this is going to make them a load of money), I'm all for it. I DM mostly and hate having to use the same set of 10 year old crappy painted minis that fight the "dice gollem." Even if the paint job is only one-half the quality of a custom job, its still better than anything I could do myself, and $1.25/mini is a steal IMHO. I'm going to start by buying the intro pack and a booster, check it out, and decide if I continue from there.

Between the 3.5 books, minis, and other stuff coming out this summer/fall, I plan on taking out a second morgage, but if the quality is there I'll be in heaven. WizKids really hit a home run with their MageKnight and other combat dial games, and I have been constantly amazed at the ease and elegance of the MechWarrior game. I keep hoping that they dust off the old FASA Star Trek license and come out with a new Star Trek starship combat system based on the combat dial system. Just a dream I guess.

 

[jgbrowning]

For instance, in the Forgotten Realms game I played this past sunday, the party faced off against a Digester. Who the hell makes a Digester miniature? I'd have to say no one. And chances are, if someone were to make a Digester mini, it wouldn't really sell, as it's not a monster people commonly use. Sticking a Digester in among a pack of random miniatures (Likely as an Uncommon or Rare), though, would make it more likely that it'd sell. And so it'd be worthwhile to make a Digester in the first place.

I thought about it for a while and I can see the merit of your point guys, more than any other point brought up so far. But there's a catch to it that you might not have thought about.

Most people don't want a digester so when they get it they still don't want it. So they sell it on the secondary market to someone who does.

ie. WotC is going to make more of a product (digester mini's in this example) that the majority of people don't want and they're going to sell it sight-unseen to people who don't want it. That's not a selling point for me.

Why not just make the mini's that are less in demand "order from our website only" or some other form of direct delivery that reduces the main expense of the product: distribution?

There is no advantage to the randomness for the consumer that couldn't be done by allowing the consumer to pick exactly what they want at the initial purchase while allowing the consumer just as wide a range of selection as randomness may. They're doing it to make more money by selling people what they don't want. And then saying they're doing it to make the person who buys it on the 2nd market happy when they could simply make that person happy by selling the product on the 1st market to begin with.

Course, I don't play magic either

joe b.

 

[MerricB]

Most people don't want a digester so when they get it they still don't want it. So they sell it on the secondary market to someone who does.

ie. WotC is going to make more of a product (digester mini's in this example) that the majority of people don't want and they're going to sell it sight-unseen to people who don't want it. That's not a selling point for me.

Why not just make the mini's that are less in demand "order from our website only" or some other form of direct delivery that reduces the main expense of the product: distribution?

The main expense of the product is not distribution.

It's storage.

Under your suggestion, the digester would never be made at all. It costs too much, and too much risk - if it were sold, it would be extremely expensive.

Look at it this way: you have bought 7 miniatures for a low price with an added extra digester rather than 8 miniatures you need for a higher price...

Cheers!

 

[jgbrowning]

The main expense of the product is not distribution.

It's storage.

I was under the impression that distribution usually takes around 50% of the MSRP of the product for WotC. If I'm wrong, let me know.

Under your suggestion, the digester would never be made at all. It costs too much, and too much risk - if it were sold, it would be extremely expensive.

Not so sure. They could easily package similiar groups and sell the more rare figures in varied groups. ie. orcs, gobbies and hobbies in an 8 pack, ogres and giants in an other etc.. monsters that often come together would be set standard packages.

You'd then package the more exotic monsters in variable packages. Ie mind flayer + drow + digester in one set while the beholder + vampire + digester would be another. You'd make packages that have the more common "rares" and each package would have 1 or 2 truly rare monster like a digester. This way the customer could chose which package to buy.

This way people could buy the commons together easily and make decisions about what groups they'd prefer to have about the less commons. You can bundle in that manner and still have the same effect while allowing the customer knowledge of what they're purchasing. You'd have all the supposed advantages of "randomness" while allowing your customers to chose what they want. Which is want they really don't want to do because they think they'll make less money if they let you choose.

Look at it this way: you have bought 7 miniatures for a low price with an added extra digester rather than 8 miniatures you need for a higher price...

Cheers!

Perhaps. But it may be a bit to much of an assumption about getting 7 miniatures that i want. What if i buy a package and only get 6 that i want? 5?

joe b.

 

[Green Knight]

The main expense of the product is not distribution.

It's storage.

Under your suggestion, the digester would never be made at all. It costs too much, and too much risk - if it were sold, it would be extremely expensive.

Look at it this way: you have bought 7 miniatures for a low price with an added extra digester rather than 8 miniatures you need for a higher price...

Cheers!

Yeah. Who was it who said that you can't really expect a company to turn a profit off of selling their products solely online? I don't know who said it, but I know it was someone in the business. Possibly from a smaller press company? Wish I could remember.

But yeah, for $1.25 a miniature, getting a couple that you don't want isn't really a big deal. Look at it this way:

The average Chainmail figure was $3.99. So for $10, you could only get 2 blisters, and pay half the price of a third blister (For the sake of argument, let's say it's a blister containing two small creatures, like a Gnome Infiltrator, and that you can buy one of those small creatures for half the price of the blister). Ok, so you get 3 miniatures for $10, 2 medium-size critters and 1 small.

But with this, you get 8 miniatures for $10, ranging in size from small, to medium, to large. Miniatures which A) Are already painted, so if you're not one to paint you've been saved a load of time right there, and B) Even if they do come in more than one piece, are a LOT easier to glue than pewter figures, so you don't have to spend hours gluing figures together.

Now, would it be a safe assumption to say that, for the most part, people are likely to find at least 3 miniatures in each expansion pack of creatures that they normally use? Personally, I think it's a likelihood that people will get, on average, at least 3 miniatures of monsters that they would normally use. So how is this worse? You end up getting 3 miniatures you normally use (Which you can get by buying those 3 Chainmail figures for $10), and 5 others essentially for free. And hey, even if you've never used a Digester before, who says you can't use one in the future? I certainly can see a lot of DM's who've never used certain monsters getting the miniature for it, and then getting an idea of how they can integrate the critter into their next game. If nothing else, it'd throw the players for a loop, the DM getting unpredictable and using monsters he's never before used.

And at the end of the day, if you just don't want that Digester, then just trade it for something you do want from someone else.

IMO, I don't think the randomness issue is a big deal. They're cheap enough that I can live with getting the occasional dog here and there (Like that Azer. The paint job on him looks like total crap). And I fully expect a Secondary Market to spring up at my local game stores, which'll allow me to buy any specific miniatures which I want at Dirt Cheap prices. Assuming the first expansion pack doesn't scare me off with crappily painted miniatures and bent plastic weapons a la HeroClix, I expect to have a couple dozen of these guys by the end of the first month of their release. Some bought through expansion packs, and others bought loose from my FLGS for a quarter a pop. My DM will likely do the same. He'll also probably take special notice of any monster miniatures which he gets but has never seen used in a D&D game before, and start coming up with ideas of how to use them in his campaign.

 

[jgbrowning]

IMO, I don't think the randomness issue is a big deal. They're cheap enough that I can live with getting the occasional dog here and there (Like that Azer. The paint job on him looks like total crap). And I fully expect a Secondary Market to spring up at my local game stores, which'll allow me to buy any specific miniatures which I want at Dirt Cheap prices.

If you had a choice, would you rather know what's in the package your buying or not? Do you think you would spend less that way?

joe b.

 

[Gez]

If they'd let me buy what I wanted, I'd buy them. But they won't, so I won't.

My thought exactly. And I don't care for ebay or second market. You can't order something to second market, and ebay or similar sites are similarily unreliable.

If anyone wants a sig line.....
"WoTC Mini's: Like a Schrodiger's cat you pay for but won't know if its dead until you open the box."

Just to be a jerk : what belong to WotC's minis ? There's a missing word. And you don't know if its dead what ? Unless the real sentence is "WotC Minis: Like a Schrödinger's cat you pay for but won't know if it's dead until you open the box."

 

[Green Knight]

If you had a choice, would you rather know what's in the package you're buying or not?

Well, obviously I would. But would I be paying $1.25 per miniature if that were the case? Would rarer creatures like the Digester ever see the light of day if they were sold in separate blisters by themselves? I doubt it. It'd be nice if stuff like the Bodak, the Lillend, and the Girallon were made into miniatures. But really, if they were to be made into pewter miniatures and sold separately, would they actually sell? And knowing that, would anyone bother making them to begin with?

Do you think you would spend less that way?

Depends what one is looking to get. If you're looking for a SPECIFIC monster for next weeks game, or a PC armed and equipped in a certain way, then this isn't the way for you to go about getting such a miniature, as you'll probably end up paying a lot more. For that, go and buy some Reaper miniatures. Me, I'm looking to expand my monster miniature collection (Been buying all kinds of Reaper figs, lately, just for that. Not because I need them, immediately, but because I want to have a sizeable collection from which I'm able to pick and choose from). And I personally don't much care what I get, so long as I end up with a large and varied stable of monsters from which to choose from for my games. So in this case, yeah, I'll be saving a buttload of cash (Example: I buy an expansion pack which comes with an ogre. While I don't immediately need an ogre, I would've gotten one eventually, anyway. Also, pewter ogres tend to run about $8. So I essentially end up getting the ogre for $8, and the other 7 miniatures for $2). At the very least, I'll probably end up getting a sizable orc horde for less money than what it'd cost to buy equivalent pewter figs of the orcs. And unlike the pewter figs, these are already painted (And I just don't have the time to go around painting orcs or any other monster miniatures. If I paint a miniature, I want it to be my PC or a powerful monster or NPC and that's it).

And again, I'm not discounting the secondary market. I got a bunch of HeroClix figures which I specifically picked out by buying them through the secondary market for no more that 50 cents, rather than blindly opening booster packs hoping to get them. Some others I got by trading away miniatures I didn't want with friends who had what I wanted. In short, if I had to estimate, I'd have to say that over 90% of my HeroClix figure collection consists of miniatures I would've wanted, anyway. And chances are, I got them a LOT cheaper than I would have otherwise had they been pewter. So yeah, while I'd prefer to know exactly what I'll get, at the end of the day I think I'll save money.

But of course, that's just me. I expect to have plenty of people with whom to trade with as well as a secondary market from which to buy specific miniatures which I'm looking to get for a pittance.