Anasazi37

My AE order for the SSP set also shows that it's shipping in April, but I confirmed with them back in July that it would ship this month. Based on what I've been reading here, I sent them an email last night, asking to reconfirm, and they wrote back within a few hours and did so. I placed my order as soon as AE opened up their listing, which was technically the day before the official PO, and definitely before the second batch was announced, so that is probably why they're telling me that my set is coming soon. I'm still skeptical.

One step closer to an actual kit. At least he's thinking about it now and playing around with some ideas.

A very cruel error....

Same here. Shows as available, lets you add to cart, but after logging in, it errors out saying stock not available.

Friend of mine sent me this article today: https://www.smh.com.au/education/vce-authorities-apologise-for-phantom-robot-20121119-29lbl.html HMR Glaugs are showing up in the oddest places....

I confirmed this with Tenso yesterday. I tried to register on P-Bandai so I could cut out the middlemen and they wouldn't accept the phone number provided with my Tenso address, so I contacted Tenso and asked for an alternate number. This was their response:

Looks like 15 Nov at 4pm JST, so two weeks. They might have hit their limit sooner than that, but I'm not sure. Something to keep in mind for the future when ordering through proxies: even if the P-Bandai site says that orders are still being accepted for an item, weeks or months after the initial offering date, you might be out of luck if you don't pull the trigger within a few days.

I know that there's always been a limit, but FJ either hit it a lot faster than usual or the limit has been lowered.

Wanted to give everyone a heads up that if you were planning to order Missile Sets through the proxy service FromJapan, you won't be able to. I placed an order for two yesterday and they cancelled the order today, immediately refunding my payment, with this is as the reason: I'd never run into that problem before with them. Makes me wonder if proxies are caught up in Bandai's response to what happened with the first round of SSP sets, which sold out almost instantly. Maybe Bandai is taking the scalping situation more seriously than we thought? (HA!) Setting the limit low for individual customers would definitely slow down the people causing problems for the rest of us, but it won't stop them. I'm more surprised that FJ is viewed by Bandai as a single customer. You'd think they'd have a bunch of accounts set up on the P-Bandai site, one per employee, to deal with this situation.

I'm wondering if no one caught it on the production quality control side because the first two releases were 101 and 111, so mirroring the numbers was perfectly fine.

As a professionally-trained anthropologist, I agree with this assessment. What makes things even more complicated for us as collectors is when, in addition to this big difference between East and West, you have support staff from other parts of the world who bring their own perspectives and may or may not receive training on how to keep Western customers happy. With that said, how much responsibility do online stores have to keep us happy? I'd argue that if they are directly catering to Westerners, and make a big deal of it, the level of responsibility goes up. For example, HLJ and proxy services like FromJapan know exactly who their core customers are and make sure that they staff and train their support teams accordingly. For smaller operations and/or ones that only dabble in overseas sales, I think we have to set the bar much lower. With all of this said, stores in Japan that cancel existing pre-orders, providing some kind of lame excuse about lack of stock, and then turn around and sell units at marked up prices, are going against the established collectivist norms of behavior in multiple ways. Sadly, greed often overrides virtuousness. Short of finding a way to publicly name-and-shame them in their front yards, where it will actually have an impact because their reputations would be damaged, there's probably not much we can do. Knowing that stores are offering to buy back orders for more than retail, but allowing you to keep your order if you want to, is an encouraging sign.

Mandarake had another one, unopened with damaged packaging (meaning little to no actual visible damage because of how they rigorously rate stuff), for ¥25,000. With average bidding prices at the same level, there's a good chance that this is as low as we're going to see it.

I reached out to him today and he was kind enough to respond. He couldn't recall what he specifically used, but he said it was something standard and, worst case, I could just completely replace the details with styrene rails I modify myself.

Good idea. That will be my plan if SSM can't or won't do an exchange for the part.

Me, too. It might be a few years before I can get to this kit and by then I'm sure SSM will have sold all of their remaining stock, so I'm glad that I checked. I've seen expert MW modelers like @tekeringdo some amazing work in far more challenging situations (@Return To Kit Formcompetition entries, for example), but I'd like to avoid that if I can. The kit itself is really well done and fits together seamlessly with the launch rail, booster, and 1/72 Hasegawa VF-1...all of which I have to build.... @captain americais a true master designer.

Dammit. I opened up my box to inspect the kit and the distinctive vertical details on one of the two main pieces--the top one--are damaged. Those two pieces were not individually bubble-wrapped, so they likely bounced around and hit the sides of the box and other pieces during transit to Starship Modeler or to me. On one side two of them broke off. I found them in the box and can glue them back on. With some strategic sanding, you'll never know. The other side, the one you want to display because of the lineart and how the vehicle is configured, is a different matter. Looks like there were some casting issues and those parts came out mostly hollow due to air bubbles. They crumbled. Making those whole again is going to take a lot of effort. I reached out to SSM to ask if I can exchange this part for one of the others they still have in stock.

Probably not necessary in space, moon as well, but if a VF-1 were on a planet with significant atmosphere and gravitational pull, you'd need a booster. It wasn't until later that valk engines had enough power on their own.

I broke down and bought one

I haven't hit them too hard about the new site, but that's next on my list. Some aspects of it are fine, but the big one impacting us is that crazy-long delay as they query their database for item availability, during which you can't do anything but wait. On PO Madness nights, it's the kiss of death. I have no idea why that is so excruciatingly slow. It's not like they're sequencing DNA, looking for exoplanets, or creating Skynet. It's a simple database transaction. Maybe it's a bot countermeasure.

This is starting to sound more and more like high speed trading, a.k.a., frontrunning

Especially when Bandai is focused on Japan. They likely do their production math with the domestic otaku market in mind and that crowd probably isn't very large. There are several threads in the Toys section that have gone round and round on the issue of whether or not Bandai cares about Macross collectors outside of Japan, which then usually leads to international copyright discussions, etc. I don't want to inject any of that here, just wanted to reinforce your point.

This is exactly my situation. I've been looking into personally developing a bot for several months now, off and on, because the few times I've participated in middle-of-the-night PO Madness over the past two years it had a substantial negative impact on my life for a day or two afterwards and I simply can't afford to let that happen. For example, Hikaru 1S PO Madness hit while I was on a business trip, so there I was, hunched over my laptop on a crappy hotel wireless connection at 1:30am, frantically hitting Ctrl+Tab and F5 across many sites, trying to snag one. I couldn't. And I was wrecked for my meetings later in the day (lots of coffee got me through). It was the last straw for me, so my current strategy is to do...nothing. I wake up early enough that if I can't find the item on PO day--even at NY with their infamous wallet-demolishing markup--I just put it on my list of things to grab after release because I'm patient and eventually one will show up on Mandarake, Jungle, or the For Sale thread here. Having a personal bot running during PO Madness would allow me to sleep and maybe grab one, but if it doesn't work, I'm right where I was, waiting to grab one later, which is fine (but generally much more expensive). However, developing a successful bot, tuned to one or more sites, will be a lot of work and, as @Shizuka the Cat says, it will require constant upkeep as the sites improve their countermeasures. It's an arms race, really, which is why I'm still on the fence about it. The sneaker world has been dealing with this issue for years and there are lots of articles and blog posts about sneakerbots (pros and cons). It's worth reading those before deciding one way or the other. I've been having a conversation with Scott Hards (founder and CEO of HLJ) about this for a year and a half now. I reached out to him after I wasn't able to get a YF-19 Full Set Pack through his site, which was the latest in a long string of failures stretching all the way back to the original release of the VF-31J in 2016. I had stepped away from Macross collecting for about ten years and when I re-engaged, I found a completely different sales landscape filled with ruthless frontrunners and scalpers on one end, Bandai's low production numbers and indifference on the other, and stores stuck in the middle taking most/all of the heat because they are directly customer-facing. I remembered being able to jump onto HLJ, easily find what I want, and be done. Not anymore, and what we have to do now is taking all of the joy out of collecting. I'd been a customer of HLJ for a long time, and I guess you could say that I've spent a lot of money there over the years, but more importantly they do pride themselves on customer service, so I thought they might listen to me if I started asking questions about how the process could be more fair to collectors like us. So, I fired off a note to Scott directly, indicating that I was part of a larger group of passionate collectors, and he replied, kicking off a conversation that's still going. I can tell you that HLJ is *very much* aware of our collective frustration and they are looking at ways to help, but they are also squarely pointing the finger at Bandai, who only gives them a limited amount of stock. I threw a bunch of ideas at him, including the option to do a phased PO across multiple time zones, i.e., release a certain amount of stock one hour, then more the next, and so on, so that their global customer base has a fighting chance to get an item during local business hours--a process that could be easily automated. Right now, if you're in the Americas, you're at a distinct disadvantage despite the fact that we're supposed to be one of HLJ's key target audiences, and I made sure to point that out. He said that their team would add my ideas to the pool of options they are currently considering, but that whatever they decide to do, the biggest problem is limited stock and there will be lots of unhappy customers unless/until Bandai increases their production numbers. Since I have this conversation going with him, I'd be happy to pass along a curated set of comments and ideas. If we can get one of the big stores to change how they handle POs, I suspect that the other big ones will follow suit.

I keep a chunky monkey in my office and when the summer interns first show up, I ask if anyone is willing to attempt transforming it from battroid to fighter and back. If they can do it in under a minute, they can take the rest of the day off. If they can't, their first project will be the hardest and most annoying one we have on the list. Several have tried and failed over the years. Lots of landing-gear-related injuries. A kid this past summer finally nailed it, probably could have done it blindfolded. His dad gave him an original Jetfire when he was young. He had never heard of Macross. I didn't count that against him.

I started by telling myself that I'd only get the Regult because I didn't have any enemy mecha in my collection and it looked like Bandai did a really good job with it. Then I noticed how nice the Destroids looked. A few years later, this is where I am: Regult Glaug Regult Missile Set Defender Spartan Monster VF-1D VF-4 VF-2SS + SAP VT-1 VE-1 VF-1J Max Super VF-1J Milia Super VF-1J Hikaru VF-1A CF VF-1S Roy Strike GBP with VF-1J Hikaru Missile Effect Set (used with Roy Strike and Max Super) Glad to know that I'm not the only one who has artfully arranged the boxes. And I wholeheartedly agree that the non-transforming entries are the real stars of this line, but the valks are still a lot of fun to handle.

Man, that's tempting