The reason I don't collect official and just stick with 3rd party is purely cause QC and material quality is just generally shit. I love most of their designs (especially Hound and OPV3), I love the cartoon aesthetic, I can justify the price for something really good, I love complex transformations (kind of brings a puzzle aspect to it and is super satisfying when you've finnished) and I don't care about availability cause I live in Australia and you have to buy everything transformers related online anyways  

It's really quite ashame, I wanted that Hound pretty bad until it came out and just fell to pieces in people's hands. I've thought about getting the KO but I personally don't agree with buying KO's. Still holding out for a Hound reissue where they have plastic instead of play-doh!

 

Yeah, that is a bad example but look at say Skywarp and Thundercracker which are 240 and 256 respectively for their pre-orders on bigbadtoystore. That's a lot of cash.

 

I'm mostly done with MP for a few reasons:

- I prefer the OG Hasui designs and my collection of that is pretty much complete for the era I want.
- Everthing's too toon now, which I know is a market, just not my market.
- Price, QC, and the fun factor. MPs often are too pricey, have a risk of bad QC especially for that price, and they're just not fun to transform. Although that last part is mainly a 3rd party thing, but HasTak isn't completely innocent there either.

We're in a good spot now though because the mainline has been giving us an alternative option to MP.

 

it’s always amusing when collectors arbitrarily decide what the masterpiece line is supposed to be.

 

The price is the biggest reason. I'm not rich enough to collect masterpieces. Another reason is that I don't want to pay high prices for all characters. I'm willing to pay high prices for characters like Optimus Prime and Megatron, but I don't want to pay high prices for characters that are less important in my standards.

 

Why choose to buy from there then if you could have bought each for about 220 USD, which includes shipping even? But yes, these two are expensive. It's because they're TT Mall exclusives unfortunately.

I only paid 170 USD for their mold mate Starscream, excluding shipping, which is a better price.

 

Only $170? Wow, so cheap, lol. Seriously, I'm glad you can afford that but even 170 is outrageous on my pay.

 

If you read back my posts, you will see that I have stated multiple times that Masterpieces are expensive. Collecting them is not for everyone, I know. Masterpieces are the only toys which I buy. I do have a music collection of a certain band, but I hardly buy new items. No other hobbies which cost me money really. When buying Masterpieces from Amazon Japan for example, I can buy gift cards to spread the costs. That helps. Buying from Anime-Export for example helps evading import taxes. But even then, collecting Masterpieces will not be for everyone.  

 

2- 600 for a single figure... then it breaks... Same reason I don't yet own a Camaro. No place to keep an expensive investment safe.

 

I could definitely see it if it's the only thing you buy. Even then it's still out of my range but it does make more sense.

 

I am finally in a financial position to afford Masterpieces, but I find that I am not that interested. I don't think they really scale with my current collection and I prefer deluxe and voyager sizes mostly because I still like to play with figures. I feel like I would just display MP figures and it doesn't feel fun to me. So I guess it is mainly scale and perhaps complexity.

 

Because of their low quality, totally.

If I can buy Metal Build and SOC why to spend money in inferior quality robots?

Really miss the good days of MP-01 and Binaltech, the old good days of Takara.

 

For me its the price. And the major QC issues.
I'm also not a fan of the direction of lets make this as show accurate as possible.

 

I would just like to post as an amendment to this...

I have started collecting MPs since this post. I sold all of my chugs and now I collect 3P with some occasional official figures.

 

Although I agree with you -- I think a line named Masterpiece should be based on the best version of the character, be it toy or art -- TT have decided otherwise. Nowadays MP is as articulated and as accurate to the G1 cartoon as possible. Why? Because they decided that this is what fans wanted because of nostalgia. Apparantly, animation accuracy is important in Japan and Japan is the TT market.

 

I used to but not any more. While I can claim that I hopped off the train after the shift to full cartoon accuracy, its not simply that. In a sense, my reason is that I started to feel that I wasn't getting the same bang for my buck as I used to.

I remember when I got MP Tracks. It was the first (and ultimately only) MP figure I preordered from a Japanese site to get that preorder discount and when it finally got to me I felt it wasnt even worth the cheaper preorder cost. That feeling of "I threw my money away" happened again when I got MP Shockwave at a TF Source Black Friday sale at a very significant discount and yet it still felt so cheap. I can't imagine what I'd feel now with the rampant quality control issues that plague the line coupled with the increased cost.

The thing is, I have many high-end collectibles. Over 20 Hot Toys, the Soul Of Chogokin Voltrons and even a $1000+ non-transforming Optimus Prime. The MP line has never felt like a high-end line to me, especially the current ones.

The mainline "Generations" stuff essentially fulfills my TF needs in a way that the MP line simply can never compete with.

 

I feel the same way as you. My last MP, that I kept, was Sunstreaker. Titans Return up to now, especially WFC, has really made me look away from the MP. These guys look good and are fun. I never once thought an MP was fun to transform. There are several I started and never finished, put them right back into Robot mode. LOL.

The MPs never felt High quality for me and the small issues that started creeping in surely soured my liking of them. My 1st MP with a really annoying issue was Tracks. His crotch area had no paint apps and had spots, it was really weird. Then the last straw was Hound. He was delivered and I was excited until I opened it and it was already broken MISB. Sent it back and never replaced it.

 

Waiting for more Beast Wars figures. If they stop making them then I'm done with anything official

 

With the rise in price, the shift to a more cartoony design, and increasing QC issues,I’m fine with CHUG figures and the rare KO MP.

 

Too big, too complex, too expensive, and low availability.