Not to mention when was the last time we got a mainline G1 Ironhide that actually was actually good AND looked close enough to how he did in the cartoon. *Universe 2.0 starts raising it hand* Get back in your dark corner you damned poor excuse of a figure.

 

It's not recently. Maybe you just became recently aware of this. I missed out on some figures 10 years ago which went for pretty markups soon afterwards and have been pre-ordering everything since then. Safest bet to get your stuff. Pointless to go into stores who barely hold anything interesting. I also order anything online for the past 20 years or so.

 

Exhausted. At the end of the day, I don't have to have it right away and the stuff always turns up a couple years down the road be it second hand stores, online retail or private sellers. If something better doesn't come out in the meantime. Basically it's companies using fear as a motivator to buy stuff. Seems greasy to me.

 

I am so tired of this, it’s so frustrating. I understand that seeing a couple dollar price increase is normal, if it’s a couple years then around $10. But Studio Series Bonecrusher and Lockdown sell at double retail. Siege spinister is $14 more than MSRP. Netflix Nemesis Prime is sold for a minimum of $150! Thrust is at leader prices, and studio series overload goes for almost $100! Collecting becomes such a pain nowadays. More than anything, even more than pulling exclusives and stuff onto Pulse, I just want Hasbro to make more of figures and send them out.

 

I hate it and it is making collecting not fun for me. I've cut down on a lot of what I collect and started thinking I'm ok with this core group of figures because I cant stand it. Another thing I really hate is the 1 time small window for preorders. I know unicron had a big window if you wanted one ( I didn't) but the NECA Tokka and Rahzar come to mind they had a window of like a week or 10 days. I didn't even know they were a thing before I missed out on this one time chance to pre-order only.

 

I'll preorder books. I'll preorder toys that I know are going to be limited runs, like Good Smile Da Garn X. I don't preorder mainline toys unless it's a major part of my collection. Like the Dinobots. If I miss SS Jazz or yet another Bumblebee, oh well. It's just a toy.

 

It killed my interest in Generations. I never saw the Skywarp/Thundercracker two pack and don't even get me started on Prowl/Ironhide and Dirge/Ramjet.

Masterpiece is so much easier to collect albeit at a higher price point and fewer characters.

 

I pre-order anything I know I want for sure. If something comes out and reviews sway me then I'll see if its available for RRP (lol) but if I didn't care enough to pre-order then clearly I wasn't that bothered about it.

Paying anything above RRP just doesn't work for me and it's not happening. If that means I miss something then so be it. SS Ironhide and Jazz were never available in this state, so I sold off my SS Autobots rather than overpay to complete the team.

Also, Waves are terrible and the hobby is worse off for them. Yearly assortments solve all the distribution issues and frustration.

 

It's one of several reasons why I'm going to quit being a completist (except for Botbots) once Kingdom and Cyberverse are over.

 

Siege Ironhide was apparently hard to get from the start and had been selling for double retail before Earthrise Ironhide was announced. I'm pretty sure everything connected to that mold is cursed.

 

Same...I'm really trying to avoid preordering mainline stuff. It's just (for me personally) not a healthy way of spending my money...and I don't wanna fall down a slipper slope of irresponsible spending.

 

(Still looking for Huffer at retail, too... to no avail.)

 

I thought I saw it and Ratchet around for a while back when they released. I know SS Ironhide was hard to get and quickly jumped in price. Maybe Ironhide is super popular, beyond the fandom's understanding?

 

I don’t really feel that need. I mean most of the stuff that goes to crazy prices usually I will preorder beforehand but lately I have learn to let go... only collect what I like and appeals the most to me, not common characters

 

I am blow away at how little stock stores have recently. You have a buy a figure the first time you see it or pay higher prices later via Amazon or Ebay to get it.

 

Rather sick of it too tbh, it’s super annoying, and if you don’t live in Japan (even then you’d had to gamble whether or not Takara feels like releasing it), Asia or the States you’re just at the mercy of importing and praying that it’s not in a godawful price online. I’m in Australia atm and it’s such a pain asking my friends fo get exclusives because they don’t collect transformers.

I knew Earthrise would be hell the moment the Walmart ER stuff got shown off.

 

It's bad but not as bad as Target exclusives (particularly anything NOT Transformers).

I know people who picked up TFs as a hobby again because they're easier to collect than Classified, Black Series, or even MOTU Origins, which has been easy ONLINE at least until they went and did a Target exclusive.

The hardest to get TF is easier than G.I.Joe Cobra Island exclusives or a lot of Star Wars, if you ARE willing to preorder and hunt stores if necessary. I never found a Thrust but the eBay prices are at least better than most Target Joes.

 

I'm Canada and it's a similar gamble. Will my TRU get 20 of these in and they sit for 2 months or will this be the one exclusive we don't get up here and I have to hope for Takara?

...and then there's amazon who just today (Apr 30) sent me a "we're still working on it" e-mail about the Coneheads 2-pack.


At the end of the day, I don't need toys, there's a lot of worse things happening right now than toy shortages, I can get 70% of stuff without issue, and I personally have the money/credit to drop on pre-orders when they happen out of the blue - so all in all I'm not too stressed personally. But on the other hand, my fun-time hobby ought to be 99% stress-free fun.

 

It depends on the figure, but there are certainly more cases of figures getting harder to find after release than three to five years ago.
And it sucks.

There are a lot of things in the world that have always sucked, and many of those things are rarely talked about or aknowledged.
Things that are far more important than anything that's going on right now.
But it's clear that we don't have as large a window to collect our favorite figures as we used to.

 

The get it now while it's hot mentality definitely applies out here in China. Retail figures like ER Sunstreaker and Siege Sideswipe have gone up ridiculously in the aftermarket. I got Sunstreaker on pre-order and suffered the aftermarket sting of Sideswipe prior just to get the two together. Quite a hassle. Do you want to know what practice really ticks me off? Separating figures into retail or exclusive parties.

Take Netflix Soundwave. Comes with Laserbeak and Ravage. You can stop there if you want but some of us may want to pick up the other cassettes to 'complete' him. One would have to pay Generation Selects prices just to get Frenzy and Wingthing. Want Elita-One reunited with Optimus? You'll be paying way more for her than you did for the retail leader class Autobot now that she's a Netflix exclusive.

On top of buying things while they're hot, suffering just to get various characters united by getting them exclusive was very, very annoying in 2020.