Anasazi37
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Everything posted by Anasazi37
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That's exactly why I use a "travel" card for these purchases
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I think there's enough demand for a more general "fix issues with current and upcoming releases" decal set. I floated the idea about 30-ish pages back and got a positive response. Ejection seat markings, skull markings for behind the canopy, correct modex numbers for vertical stabilizers, and now Hikaru's name for the VF-1S. Did I miss anything? Easy for me to do that and the entire set shouldn't cost more than $5 to make, depending on the printing method you use. Did you outsource the decals for your Roy conversions? What method did you use?
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I didn't intend it that way, but it will probably work out that way. I secured two POs: one from Nin-Nin Game in their very first round and one from Amazon Japan. I know the second one is fine, but I now have serious doubts about the first one based on the experiences of other MW members and the fact that Nin-Nin did several more rounds during PO Madness with increasing prices. I currently represent little to no profit for them, so why not just cancel my order close to release day and relist it for a lot more? They've done that before and they risk little by alienating me. If they do honor my order, I'm giving it to another collector at cost. He's never secured a PO, so paying it forward is the least I can do for him. Many other MW members do the same thing. BTW, it looks like AE just ran out of TV Super Parts. That didn't take long. Still available at NY, though. I placed an order with a second proxy early yesterday morning and they've yet to confirm or cancel the order. It's extremely frustrating, as I'm seeing other opportunities to get them come and go while I wait. I normally use FromJapan, but that seemed to be a lost cause within minutes of the PO window opening. I submitted my order with them before getting caught up on this thread, so quickly realized that it was a waste of time and just waited until they responded so I could cancel my order and move on. First time trying this other service. So far I'm not impressed.
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Theoretically, yes. I say "theoretically" because depending on where you live, they might have to hang onto your item for a while. Looks like you're in the US like me, so it's really down to when Japan Post can start shipping here again. They normally send you an email saying your item has arrived, at which point you can combine it with other items they are holding for you (if applicable) and select a shipping method (some form of air mail, including an EMS option). You'll then be charged for the cost of that shipping. It's similar to HobbyLink Japan's Private Warehouse, but not as sophisticated and several MW members have noted that the longer items stay at AE, the more likely they'll disappear and the store will stop answering your emails. A lot of stores catering to international buyers are hanging onto purchased items and doing so conscientiously. The alternative is to stop accepting orders, which would kill their business. Many of those stores do offer private courier options like DHL, FedEx, and UPS for an additional fee, and all three can still get items here pretty quickly. In some cases the option is advertised, in others (like Nippon-Yasan), you have to ask. AE is an outlier. They're using some weird off-brand local courier that is both expensive and requires you to provide lots of personal information. No thank you. There is sometimes a "ferry" option as well, which can take 2-3 months. Right now that's actually a decent timeframe if you're not in a hurry. I've had a small EMS package sitting at the Tokyo airport mail facility since mid-April....
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NY quickly sold out of their Roys at ¥35,000. That's not a good sign. Although, technically, this is only their second round, which they normally roll out during PO Madness, so they could come back with a third round at ¥40,000. I think it took three rounds for the Hikaru 1S and the YF-29 Durandal Full Set Pack to stabilize to the point where stock was available for days/weeks. With third party seller prices on AJ at ¥38,000, and most of them only shipping domestically, I could see NY coming back in a little higher to see how far they can push it. That seems to be their pattern.
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I've learned with FromJapan that if they let you submit a request for quote, they'll let the first payment round happen even if they can't actually place the order, so I don't get my hopes up. They don't check to see if they can place the order in advance of the payment request, so for TWE items they usually end up refunding your payment with an apology unless you happen to submit a request--and pay--within a short time window after the item becomes available on the P-Bandai site. It's only marginally less stressful than full PO Madness. Enough people had their orders cancelled yesterday that by the time FJ asked for payment from me last night, I cancelled mine since I knew it was going to happen anyway. That's in line with prices from third party sellers on Amazon Japan the morning after PO Madness, which then climbed to ¥38,500 before dropping to ¥37,500 today. So, NY is "competitively" priced, but it's still a lot to pay. Prices on release day should be more reasonable.
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You mean I'm supposed to honor that sign and the gigantic red "Japan Only Item" image on the product page? After putting up with Bandai's shenanigans for so many years, my brain just filters that stuff out like those "DO NOT REMOVE" tags on mattresses. I don't even see it anymore....
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Several of us have tried and failed to order directly from P-Bandai from outside of Japan. It doesn't work. Bandai really doesn't like Tenso and Buyee, and will block orders when you use that address. They also put a bunch of other countermeasures in place, which include rejecting credit cards issued in Japan if they determine that you don't actually live there. I think @DYRL VF-1Sgot the closest, only to have his order cancelled after initial acceptance.
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They'll probably post it for sale at the same time they post their second batch of Roys for ¥40,000.
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^^^^THIS^^^^ I thought to myself, "Bandai will reveal the TV Super Parts set, but won't release them for sale online for at least a few days. Who posts anything for sale on a Sunday night?" So, I get a good night's sleep (still recovering from PO Madness on Friday), make a nice breakfast with my wife, sat down in front of my computer with some coffee to get caught up on Macross news and HOLY $#!T WTAF JUST HAPPENED. Scrambled to place a proxy order through FJ, but not long after hitting the submit button, I saw in this thread that they're already cancelling requests. So, I'm trying a different proxy. If that doesn't work, I might have to go with AE. Again. I can't live my life wondering if/when Bandai might put something up for PO in the middle of the night over the weekend. It also looks like I won't be bothering with FJ anymore when it comes to TWE releases, much like I don't bother with HLJ anymore when it comes to general releases. They're just too popular.
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And even that was hard to secure outside of Japan because most of the proxies hit their limit quickly, which is a new thing. We used to be able to relax if something was TWE, but not anymore. Maybe scalpers found them. Maybe Bandai is cracking down on proxies. Probably both. I ended up not being able to get a Hayao via proxy and refused to pay the scalper markups at AE and NY, so will wait for release day, but what about next time when it's something *everyone* will want? The first round of SSP sets sold out fast, and Bandai did do a second round, but we can't count on that. And I couldn't even secure second-round Missile sets through a proxy because they had reached their limits. Had to go with AE. Well said! My wife is watching Independence Day in the next room (family tradition on July 4th), so your speech has particular resonance right now. And a soundtrack.
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The Roy listing on Amazon Japan is now up to ¥38,000. This is getting ridiculous....
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Yeah, that worries me a little. If you look at the HMR releases for Max and Milia, they have the color-matched super parts, so the probability is high that they'll go the same direction with the DX line, but we've yet to see any "gift set" releases by Bandai where everything is included. My money is on them continuing what they've done for Frontier and Delta, where everything is sold separately (the recent YF-29 Full Set Pack being the exception). Sure would be nice to get "full set" Max and Milia releases, though. Same with a grey goggle GBP. Buying accessories like these in an attempt to anticipate what Bandai may or may not do with future valk releases is frustrating....
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I ended up just biting the bullet and buying one through Mandarake, after watching them come and go for months at roughly the same price. Got mine through the SAHRA branch for ¥21,000 in Dec 2018. Bundled the purchase with Max (¥9000) and Milia (¥12,000) because all three were available and combined shipping would be cheaper. See what happens with this line? You can't buy just one. Prices on all three of those valks have been remarkably stable since then, but I did notice that Mandarake has the GBP for ¥17,000 at a few locations right now. For anyone thinking about getting one, I don't think you're going to do better than that.
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Well, shoot. It does look like a TV Super Set, complete with red-tipped RMS-1 missiles. I'm now grappling with two dilemmas: Do I slap the current SSP and Missile sets on the TV Roy and call it good? Who knows if/when we'll see a DYRL version. Do I buy 3 of these new sets to cover Roy and the (fingers crossed) eventual Max and Milia releases?
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Congrats on getting that Monster and welcome to the world of HMR! Just be sure to clear some shelf space....
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Especially if you dress it up in armor. No one will ever see it. Nice work!
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AJ and Nin-Nin, one from each. I got Roy drunk, grabbed a few hours of sleep, managed to secure the POs (maybe being Roy drunk helped?), topped up on some single malt to celebrate/commiserate with everyone here, then went back to sleep.
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Just finished reading through the last seven hours of posts. So many highs and lows. I'm relieved that I managed to secure one at Amazon Japan (retail price) because I'm now worried about my PO at Nin-Nin. I was one of the "lucky" few that secured it when Nin-Nin was selling with a 10% discount. The fact that the discount went from 20% to 10% before they started taking orders was a warning flag for me, but I pulled the trigger anyway. Now to read that they kept ratcheting up the price through successive later rounds makes me think that those of us at front of the line will get screwed because we represent the smallest profit margin for them. Luckily I paid with PayPal using a credit card that has aggressive overseas fraud protection because it's meant for international travel, so I should be able to get my money back if I need to. I'm hopeful that everyone's orders are honored, though. I expect to see a second wave from NY later today. That's what happened with the Hikaru 1S, I think. They didn't immediately start a second round after the first one, maybe because they're currently trying to secure as much stock as they can. Will they be north of ¥35,000? I wouldn't be surprised, but I'd like to be wrong. I had already resigned myself to going on the hunt after release in November and paying about $300 for this valk, so the fact that I managed to get PO last night still hasn't sunk in. I never, ever, ever get POs. This will probably be the one time it happens and I'm okay with that because it's Roy. I saw a few questions about the "PayPal Exchange Fee" that Nin-Nin charged. It gave me pause as well, but hesitate for too long during PO Madness and you lose out, so I just plowed forward since it was only $8.85. I'm betting that's how they recoup the standard PayPal transaction fee so they get the full amount. Some quick math shows that the fee is about 5% and PayPal normally charges around that. I also noticed that they only added it to the price of the toy, not the combined price of the toy and shipping. At least that's one small positive thing.
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Heh, yep. Welcome to the slippery slope. Took a bit longer for me, but not that much longer. I got the Monster and put him on display, but he seemed lonely next to all of my 1/55, 1/60, and 1/48 valks, so I decided to get him a friend (VF-1A CF). I noticed that several other HMR valks were also available and combined shipping wasn't going to be too bad, plus they don't take up a lot of shelf space, right? Then I figured that I should get the rest of the Destroids and the enemy mecha to balance things out. I sometimes use sites like FromJapan as a meta-search engine for Japanese auctions and online marketplaces to get a sense for prices when Jungle and Mandarake don't have an item on sale. Of the two, Jungle's prices tend to be a bit higher, by the way, but not by much, so between them you get a decent read on the current market. Right now Rakuten has one for about $160, but it appears to be damaged. They also have some for north of $600!
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That is exactly why I stopped working on one last year after getting burned by the VF-1S Hikaru PO and many others prior to it. The black box nature of the sites, and their performance under extreme load, was on full display last night for the Roy PO and any bot designed to work with them would be extremely brittle/fragile. By the time you fix edge/corner cases that pop up in real time, the PO would be over. I've built large systems before, designed to handle a lot of traffic, and came to the same conclusion as you: it's not worth it. To do it "right" would be really expensive and would require a small team of people to monitor/update the bots during PO Madness. Unless you're trying resell Macross toys as a business, it doesn't make sense. And even then it doesn't make sense. You'd have to employ this strategy across multiple categories/genres/etc. to turn a reasonable profit. Thanks for sharing your experience. I think it's a sobering example of what deploying a bot would actually entail.
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Congrats!!!
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Damn, HLJ went fast. Was able to add it and then was immediately cart-jacked.
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Not a terrible markup. That's what my total was, with shipping to the states, when they first opened up. Almost guaranteed to be lower than whatever NY is going to post when they open up their second round.
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No secret that I'm aware of, they just sometimes don't permit items to be shipped to the US. I keep two addresses on the site: my US one and a Tenso one. The latter is useful for items only sold in Japan. You still have to pay Tenso to ship the item to you, and they aren't cheap, but sometimes it's totally worth it.
