To anyone who doesn't collect official MP's, what would Hastak have to do to get you interested in buying some? While I've always admired MP's and wanted some in my collection, I could never justify spending that much money on a toy.

 

Price, QC in relation to stuff like materials, paint, engineering, and the mold choices of figures, and the G1 toon aesthetic being the only real official option are the three major reasons for a lot of people.

 

Its the price. I dont play with them, so I dont need super quality, so KOs at cheaper price points are perfectly fine for me. I gave up thinking my plastic was worth anything years ago. Now I just want for visual, and KOs are perfectly fine for that desire. I honestly dont know which of mine are real or KO anymore. And it doesnt bother me.

 

I did buy Grimlock years back, but sold him on. I couldn’t build a collection around him as he didn’t scale with the other masterpieces. The other thing that turns me off is that they constantly re-do the main characters. So you spend out megabucks on the definitive Optimus,or Starscream or whatever, but then there’ll be some new improved version out in a couple of years.

Seige/Earthrise/Kingdom/Studio 86 tick my G1 need, the quality is great and there’s characters in there that masterpiece will never get round to.

 

For me, it's the increase in price and the decrease in QC. Not saying the increase isn't justified with higher parts and engineering to maintain the new show accurate style but it has put the MP line way beyond being feasible for me to buy anymore. The decrease in QC is never acceptable though.

But realistically, I don't see myself ever buying another MP. Some Generations figures are just as good (if not better) than an MP and I'd rather spend $150+ on several Generations figures vs 1 MP.

 

I’d probably say it comes down to price and being content with the mainline. Mainline for me especially in the last 2-3 years has hit a nice balance of quality, fun, and affordability. This might sound a little quantity over quality admittedly but it’s hard me for me to shake the fact that I could get a ton of mainline figures for the price of say a figure like MP-44.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think a lot of what Masterpiece does is really cool but I find it’s something I can really just appreciate from afar and don’t have the need as much to own them.

That being said, MP Spinout does look really tempting......

 

MP Prowl came out when I was still pretty much a kid. I couldn't afford him. Then I got a job, so I bought Sideswipe, and it felt really good to have all these amazing figures in my price range. The cars were about £45, and the big guys were only about a hundred, so it worked out perfectly. I ended up with a bunch of them that I was really happy with. Then the MPs got more complex. They came with more crap. They got more accurate, I don't know about better. Suddenly Prowl and Sideswipe et al didn't feel but certainly looked inferior by comparison. I always slightly wished figures like Bluestreak and Wheeljack were more accurate to the show, so on paper the likes of these newest releases were a good change. Ironhide, Hot Rod and a few others from that particular time were halfway between the earlier figures and what was to come, and they really satisfied neither niche as a result. Sunstreaker and Hound cost almost three times as much as Prowl, Bluestreak and Smokescreen had back when I was 16. Do they look great? Sure. But... they feel brittle and are decidedly unfun to transform due to overreliance on thin panels. I wish there could be MPs as posable and accurate as Sunstreaker and Hound but as sturdy and fun and cost-efficient as Prowl and Sideswipe, but that's just not possible. As a toy, the first Bumblebee makes the new one look like a complete joke, but in both modes the new one looks and poses more like the show, although possessing dramatic fractures in kibble distribution and construction as a result of this. So now we have very accurate, very posable, very brittle, very compromised and very expensive Masterpieces. They are in some respects leagues ahead of where they were when they made Prowl. But was it worth it? No.

 

For the most part they are not fun to fiddle with. Some of the Autobot cars and MP10 had a decent middle ground, but the newer ones don't lend themselves well to picking up and being absent mindedly played with.

 

For me it’s the lack of available MP figures that aren’t G1 or Beast Wars. I’m waiting for them to start doing other series which is why third party gets my money for that, and Hastak get it for CHUG.

 

Basically, I don't like the toon aesthetic.

MP-27 Ironhide started a trend of very smooth simplified cartoon designs, yet the skirt pieces were really stupid which everyone clamored for an upgrade for. MP-33 Inferno sealed it for me when they wasted so much engineering effort in hiding the ladder, like it was so important to hide a whole goddamn ladder, but you couldn't fix Ironhide's skirts, and again the figure has no detail because it clings to the cartoon aesthetic.

It seemed like they were turning around when MP-42 Cordon came out, reverting Sunstreaker's lack of detail with more toy detailing, but then the whole next year they released a series of "plus" cartoon redecoes of the older designs. Then MP-47 Hound came back with a new toon aesthetic again.

I'm actually interested in Skids, but I have low expectations of anything else.

 

Cost and complexity... I understand the genius of some of the transformations, but if I've done it a dozen times and I put it on the shelf a year later and when I pick it up again I have to look at the instructions, it's too complex.

My favorite TF of ALL TIME is RiD Scourge. It's an Optimus you stand up and pull out the legs. It's perfectly poseable and you don't need an engineering degree. Fast transformations are fun!

 

For me it is 3 factors:
1- They completely shifted vision, and started releasing the same character again. When you get to the third version of Optimus and Seekers, I am out. I want new figures, not rehashes, and not a shift in the lines vision that has to make me repurchase everything I had already bought. MP used to be a nice mix between the toy and the show, but the switch to being show accurate makes some of them not look cohesive with the rest.
2- The price point. If I just spent $200 on one representation, you want me to remove that off my display and put up the new version for $300? So that is $500 for the character? Not to mention when I first started collecting MP, the prices were nowhere close to where they are now.
3- The KOs are just better now. Why buy the official HasTak version, when I can buy the KO and the KO fixed the issues the original had at a 3rd the price.

 

Price, I bought a few back when hasbro was selling them at retail, doesn't help that most of the few I bought ultimately broke even though I barely touched them.

Also the Geewunn toon aesthetic has completely taken over the collectors line so why buy a bigger more expensive version of the same thing, which looks pretty terribly dated to start with. It's pretty sad when I start feeling nostalgic for the Unicron Trilogy just because the designs mixed it up a bit.

 

HasTak priced me out is the main one. They were affordable at $100-$150 for big characters and $60-$100 for smaller. Now, not so much.

Other than that, I really liked the aesthetic of Sideswipe and MP-10, where it was kind of a hybrid of toon/toy, and don't like the new slavish devotion to being completely toon accurate. The transformations got too complex and QC became too shoddy. Plus the mainline toys have gotten nice enough so I don't really need MP representations any more. I stopped at MP Sunstreaker.

It's a shame, I wanted to at least finish the Ark/Nemesis crews. But the direction they decided to go was not one I'm interested in following.

 

I'm just not interested in toon-bland figures that are tedious to transform, and almost impossible to do so without scraping paint. The last official MP I got was MP36+, and I treat it like a giant, super-expensive action master. While I don't regret the purchase too much, I'm better off buying figures I feel comfortable fully playing with. ANd that's not even taking into account the QC problems.

I have Power Baser supposedly due to arrive today (more likely tomorrow) , so I don't mind MP-type figures. I just don't think Takara's offerings live up to the name.

 

I was always more on the casual side of collecting figures myself, so I never dived into the MP line. But I did always admire what they accomplished engineering-wise & felt that they were very well made. I just never needed them.

However I did get MPM-7 Movie Bumblebee from his title film. And I got him at a very affordable & understanding price, so I didn't feel the fear of potentially wasting a bunch of cash on something I might not be that invested in (any cartoon specific MPs, older MPs that all have a mixed aesthetic but their prices have risen due to age, etc).

And I'm incredibly satisfied with MPM-7 (except for the part where the beetle sometimes doesn't tab closed like it's supposed to ^^; ). I feel like I've already experienced what a MP figure should be like thanks to him; high quality, great looks, accuracy up the wazoo & just plain fun to mess with. So I don't really have an urge to get more, I'm good.

 

In general, it's intimidating, especially as of late. Compared to the MP-10 "revival", the line has become so far and away complex and so dedicated to source materials, which for many is good, but I always think of the balance between original toy, character design, and real-world vehicle (if applicable) from earlier releases.

There's also the issue of KOs. Not that I think I would get psyched out by a KO pretending to be legit, no, but that the quality of the officials waver so much that a KO release could reach the level of an official release. It becomes a matter of "why get in on an MP now when a KO will be available for years afterwards and be good enough".

As some people mentioned, price too. I could go on about how my money could be better used on other things I have more excitement for, but that would be disregarding the fact that there's been an across-the-board increase. Suffice to say that I've been left out to pursue my other hobbies.

There is the argument of quality vs. quantity, but I do prefer being able to buy a couple of toys where the individual price doesn't deter me from fixing any potential issues than gambling with something that's meant to be "top of the line". For what they're asking for, there should never be lists of widespread issues and guides for fixing them, nor should there be having to work with the middleman to send it back for another gamble.

I think Skids might be the first time I've been excited about a Masterpiece figure pre-release, but a lot of that "waiting" while other people figure out issues, potential replacement processes, or how fast it gets KO'd still applies here.

The only one I still have is Road Rage, which borders on over-complex (though I understand the MP Tracks design was never all that popular to begin with). The few times I've picked that toy up since pulling it out of the box only makes me think about the more complicated (and risky!) maneuvers future releases since have made.

Experiences aren't universal, of course; for others Masterpiece might be the unproblematic dream they're living, with no issues on their end, and I do envy them. However, my time is better spent on the things I enjoy currently.

 

Price. QC. Too much transformation.

I like a bit of toon aesthetic but given the amount of hinges it takes to make perfectly toon figures, I'd prefer CHUG style faux parts or non-transforming figures.

 

Yeah...Price...Pretty much always was price.

Also, I donno how I feel about the line as a whole these days, originally it felt like MP was the only way to get a modern day G1 Optimus or such...Honestly, I'm happy with the ER figure for that, now.

Maybe some of them would be neat to have, like a G2 Sideswipe, or a Roadrage...I just don't want to pay the prices...Kinda the same reason I don't own anything 3rd Party.