Lol, I love your last idea and I agree with everything you say. I’ll be the first to admit maybe I complain more than I would like but I do see the positives also.

I don’t feel fans/collectors are naturally so bitter, I see it as a case of once you give a dog a nice juicy bone and then take it away you’ll naturally get a more skewed negative reaction just like hasbro has done with the S.A 3.75 figures and which easily garners the most gripes.

Maybe for a lot of collectors it’s time to decide if once the hobby loses its fun factor is it time to move on? Maybe…

I’ll hang in there for a while longer. : )

Well you just hit on the major problem for me with Star Wars fandom these days. Across all the sites the cacophony of bitching and complaining drowns out the joy and excitement. It’s as if “sharing our gripes” is the new hobby. You know there is a problem when every article about a new product is followed with a linty of posts proclaiming what crap it is. Do we even remember how to be grateful for what we have? Now I realize everything is not sunshine and rainbows, but there has to be some balance. I am so sick of the knee-jerk reaction prevalent in the community that there is some great conspiracy of Lucasfilm/Disney and Hasbro against the collectors. There is not. Above all it is business driven. We need to stop thinking of it as some devoted benefactor giving freely to the fans. Has Hasbro fumbled? Sure, what company doesn’t from time to time. The toy biz is a ruthless and ever changing market. Lightning rarely strikes twice, so to speak.

Maybe we need 2 sites? A “light side site” for reveling in the joys that Star Wars brings to our lives and a “dark side site” for the “everything is crap” griping.

All true. I’ve bought some of the 5POA but not have as much as I would have in the previous years. Still, we need somewhere to come and share gripes!
You never know, one day in the future with a new CEO etc the glory days may return… maybe…

Great! They won’t be getting any of my money!

They are beautifully packaged indeed. I think some people are just resistant to change. As nice as these look, I am still finding it hard to adjust to figures not on cards with bubbles. But, this is a new era of Star Wars. The birth of a new trilogy is upon us. Undoubtedly there will be new fans joining the fray. If you’re going to make such a drastic shift in packaging, what better time than now?

I hate to say it, but if you only collect vintage (the original figures from the 70’s and 80’s, the 12 figures from VOTC, 11 figures from VTSC and the 28 figures from the first year of TVC) then you are not Hasbro’s main focus. They have bigger fish to fry. They have made thousands of figures outside of those collections that have done extremely well for their business. So yes, they will continue to chase the larger part of the market.

The price increase took effect before these new “boxed” figures even came out. It is not due to the packaging, it is due to higher operational costs and likely the fact that the market on these has shrunk so drastically (it is much easier to recoup development costs on 500K units of a particular figure vs. 50K units). I realize most of us have viewed these as collectibles for years now. but I get the sense that Hasbro and their retail partners are just now making the full shift from these being fairly affordable commodity items, a.k.a. toys, to being specifically adult collectibles. Also, I don’t have the facts in front of me, but don’t they typically raise the prices in a movie year?

I have finally found these… a month or so after their roll-out to the rest of the U.S! Still none found (by me) here in Oregon, but across the border in Washington, the Walmarts have a case each.

I never expected this Fall would return us to the glory days of 3 3/4″ figure collecting. 2008 is done and over with. I can spend the rest of my life griping about how it used to be or I can enjoy what is available today and going forward.

If you want them, let me know, there are a ton of them in my area and I’m afraid that they will block Wave 2.