Warhammer is not a cheap hobby.
In the long run, if you play it for a long period of time, and are fairly dedicated to the game, it's easy to say that it's cheap because the investment can last a long time. A $400 investment has kept me busy painting for almost two years now. That's two years, for only $400? That's a cheap investment compared to other things like gaming. If you're doing gaming, that's a $60 investment for every single game that you're paying for, which you're typically going to be going through at least once a month if you're serious about the gaming hobby. But, still, I digress, it's not cheap.
The real not cheap part about the hobby is if you're buying anything new. ANYTHING new is stupidly expensive, and it's only second hand things that make it anywhere close to manageable pricing. For example, I was trying to price a harlequin army that I wanted. I was getting the new model itch, so I sat down with the GW web portal and decided to fill up the shopping cart with an ideal list of harlequin that I would like to play, that wasn't just one 1850 point list, but rather a good list with a few bonus redundancies just in case I wanted to mix things up and try out something slightly different. That one army ran to being almost $800. If I wanted to minimize that as much as possible, play the exact same list every single time I played, have no diversity of options, the price range doesn't go down by too much. That's just for 1850 points! (for a point of reference, I can field three 1850 point armies with my mob that I spent around about $500 for, the reason for the price change is the 400 is what I bought used, the extra 100 is what I bought new).
Just for the sake of curiosity, I tried to sort out what I would need to spend if I bought my lists that I used today new, instead of second hand, and for only 1,000 points (most tournaments are 1,500 or 1,850) it would have cost me $460 to show up today.
The point to all of this is that today I was at an event. At that event there was a person that I had seen before who was a total min/maxer. This is the type of person who bounces around to whatever is fashionable in the tournament lists and is always trying to min/max his army because he wants to win at all costs. The crazy part about it, is that a while ago when I met him for the firs time, he had a different army. I pushed him about it this time that he still had a new army and he let out that he had changed armies a few times.
A FEW TIMES!?
Now, rough estimate here, but I'm guessing that if you're buying new models (like he does) that each time you pick up a new army, it's a $500-$600 investment for just the bare minimums that you need for your army. That's not including anything bonus or any auxiliary things that you run into, that's just the bare minimum to field something. That means that in the past year, this guy has bought multiple armies, and then gotten rid of them (for typically around 50% market) just to buy new armies all over again.
I don't get it.
How in the world is he able to do that? How do you just walk away from an investment of $500 and just give it up, ALL TO BUY IN AGAIN!? If you were getting out of the hobby because it just wasn't your thing and you didn't like it any more, that's one thing. But to sell out and try to liquidize your army, just to turn around and spend that much money again, that's a death sentence.
In an off topic - I was happy today that my army was painted. I can't tell you how many armies there were there today that were running the grey blob force where they weren't even primed. Seriously people? I'm lazy, but at least I'm able to prime my models. I've said it once, and I'll say it again, but if I'm going to spend that much money on something, I'm going to try my best to at least make it look half way decent. It boggles my mind that someone would spend $140 on something as epic as the leader of an entire army . . . and then field it as a jumble of grey plastic. I mean, come on! The most frustrating part about some of those grey armies was that people were talking about having them for a long period of time. How do you own something that s going to be your main army, the main focus of an entire game and hobby to you, and then not decide that maybe, just possibly, you don't want them to look like a grey blob? /rant
No comments:
Post a Comment