As well as making the world go round and being the root of all evil, money allows us to purchase models, attend gaming events and acquire vital hobby supplies. I can't speak for the rest of you, but I never seem to have enough of this magical, mythical substance.
So, my question today is how do we determine if we are getting value for money on our hobby collection? example:
Player A likes 40K and spends 4000 yen on a box of 5 minis.
Player B likes historicals and spends 4000 yen on a box of 40 minis.
So how do we decide who has gotten the best value for their money?
GW do make lovely models, which come with a plethora of bitz. Most of said bitz will reside in a bitz box gathering dust in most cases. (I have about 100 bolters at home). Their models are full of detail, large and fantastic. The historical figures don't come with many extra parts, are smaller and maybe don't have as much eye-catching swoosh about them as GW. But you get more of them in the box. Lots more!
So there is a quality/quantity argument to be made.
But there are no doubt other factors as well. Do you count assembly time as time you enjoy? I like building plastic minis and will happily spend a few hours knocking a Tamiya kit into shape. For me that time is adding value. I despise working with resin. Any time spent cleaning, bending or filing the toxic stuff is decreasing the value for me.
Do you enjoy painting? That time can either add or subtract again to the perceived cost performance. Batch painting or Golden Daemon standards? If you are time poor doing 40 minis may not be a good idea, but 5 figures will fit into your schedule much more easily. If you want to produce a really stand-out paint job, maybe one larger mini is better? On the other hand, there is something to be said about the spectacle of having hundreds of fully painted minis on the table.
How do we determine cost performance from a tabletop point of view? In a game like Malifaux where you have 5 guys on the tabletop, each of them can be very influential in a game. In Black Powder where you have 200 minis minimum, the presence or absence of any one of them probably doesn't matter all that much. Can we rate value by how often we use a model? Something we use every week is a better investment than something that sees the light of day once a year, isn't it?
Is prestige important? Being the guy who owns a fully painted Warlord Titan must be worth something, even if you never use it. Having a carefully converted, unique and well painted army should be worth more to the owner than a force of unpainted, straight-from-the-box models that everyone has, shouldn't it?
As box contents shrink and prices rise, is cost performance something you care about? GW is rapidly approaching the point where centerpiece models cost 100 GBP for a single figure. Is that something you see as being a good use for your hobby funds? For a similar price, you could get 200 mono-pose napoleonic figures with all the mass production and batch painting that that number implies. Is the most efficient way of using money somewhere between the two extremes?
Or are you just going to buy what you think is cool because you like it and damn the actual cost?
