One of my previous posts about the moments when collecting made me sad and frustrated truly got me thinking. I've read numerous bad experiences from other collectors, not just among those who collect Confrontation mind you, and many of those make my lows completely pale in comparison. There are horror stories out there and I'm glad that I've managed to evade them in a rather wide swing.
But it did get me thinking regarding why that is. I don't consider myself all that lucky, persistent and patient more than anything else, and I'm also not one to toot my own horn above anyone else's misery and imply that they were careless and dumb and I was not. But I guess there simply is something that I'm doing that's reaping me rewards or at least making me not lose sleep over bad shopping decisions.
Contemplating all this got me behind the keyboard again, so here we are. Before delving deeper though, Drunes and Acheron galleries are done now as well!
I've mentioned a couple of times before, I honestly think that the Confrontation market is pretty stable and healthy, a fact which warrants to be repeated. When you consider for how long the game has been dead, it is surprising to find a lot of product circulating around at decent prices. Sure, you get some crazy spikes for some models or just clueless sellers on eBay trying to rip you a new one, but for the most part the community is keeping it normal.
As time goes on and product truly becomes scarce, some models do stop appearing so often, thus you either have to arm yourself with some extra patience or you have to bend the knee and go outside of the community for your purchases. Most people don't have the patience since life moves fast nowadays, so going out into the wild in search for loot is where accidents happen.
It's worth noting that I've been collecting various things ever since I was a kid... Card games, RPG books, board games, the list is long and one might say that I have a problem, but all those hobbies have more failed stories than what I wrote about before. I lost money many a time, though never spectacularly since I've always been careful with spending, but all those failures gradually accumulated some worthy experience for evading monetary disaster.
Without further ado, here's the survival guide for the rabid collector, or simply how to be safe when venturing outside of the community safety and stepping into the world of various obscure online stores and websites.
Spend some time and do research. I think I spend a considerable amount of my time browsing the market, keeping tabs on past sales, active auctions, current offers, and then you kind of get a good sense of health when it comes to the state of the market. This is especially important if you are new to Confrontation and you learn what is rare and what is common. Similarly, the below image is a good guideline of the prices within the community, but venturing outside warrants some price increases unless you're lucky and the seller is generous. However, as I said, knowing the market and its past, you'll get a sense of what is rare and what is justified to be more expensive than what the list says.
On a similar note, and probably the most important piece of advice, stay calm. Rare things are out there. Rare things that are cheap are also out there. But often times if you see a rare thing for a low price, to the point where it seems too good... that's when you need to be careful. It's easy to be trigger happy, but it's also easy just to take a breath and think about it: either you're lucky and the item is just sitting there waiting for you, in which case congrats, or it is there because it stinks and others saw it and walked past it leaving it for the next sucker. In order to not be the sucker, keep on reading and thank you for the continued attention.
If you're on renowned second hand market websites (such as eBay or the French Leboncoin), always prefer ads with actual photos of the item in question, not just a "stock" photo. Stock photo auctions rarely end up being NIB or legit product, but if you do stumble on such ads which tickle your interest some of the points below will be helpful to verify it. Similarly, non-stock photos could as well be taken from other places on the internet and reposted, in which case it is an obvious scam. You'd be surprised how often this happens. If you are insane like me spend a lot of time browsing the market eventually you'll end up semi-recognizing past ad photos, so you'll get your sixth sense tingling when these reused photos appear.
Read the ad description of the listing carefully. I've had friends collecting "Oldhammer" get burned millions of times buying loose miniatures which end up being recasts, simply because they haven't read the ad description which clearly stated that they are recasts. It did also happen to me once on an auction for an RPG book which stated in its fine print that it is a print-on-demand copy. That one is on me. Just read people, please.
Engage with the seller. If you have any doubts about anything, contact them. Ask for a photo of the actual item or ask some follow-up questions regarding the description if they can't provide an image. No photo for me is usually sus, but sometimes I might cave in either if the price is low enough or the seller is good with communicating.
Similarly, if the seller doesn't sound any alarm bells in your head and you end up buying from them, always ask if they have more product and make an offer regardless. In my experience there's always a high chance that they do and they just haven't listed it yet cause they are still debating whether to sell or they are going through a backlog of items. This obviously applies to sellers you consider legit.
All that said, if you're shopping on these second hand auction websites like the aforementioned eBay or Leboncoin, you're somewhat protected as a buyer and you usually have rights to file a claim or report the seller if you feel like the seller did you over when it comes to delivery or item condition, etc. These are things worth keeping in mind cause technically you can be a bit more relaxed on those markets.
The real hazard is on random stores on the internet and unknown low traffic online shops.
Always check if the store has other items from "live" publishers, especially those that are currently considered new. By this I mean whatever is fresh in other games that are currently in print. For example, at the time of writing this the Thunder's Edge expansion for the Twilight Imperium boardgame is popping up on most active websites, or if the store sells GW product it is easy to quickly check online what is their newest release and whether the store has it. This is a good indication that the store is still operational, since a lot of the stores where Confrontation or any other older game pops up are sadly defunct and haven't been updated in ages. A good tip for easy inspection is to check the copyright stamp on the homepage of the store, you know one of those "© 2017-2025" for example. If that latter year is like 2012 then I have some sad news for you.
Additionally, go into a bit of a stalker mode and check the social media of the store. If there are no socials for the webstore, that usually ends up being a red flag. If there are, check if they have recent updates. If they do have socials, but the last update was from some years ago, this could mean that they just stopped being active on there, yet other times it might indicate that they have shut down their operations and the store is no more.
Further into the store stalker mode, you can also check the store's contact page. If there is no phone or address listed, red flag in my book. If there is a phone, good, though I don't recommend you ring up international numbers, so be weary of the store's country of origin. Phone usually isn't the deal breaker, but having a physical address scores major points. If they have an address, Google Maps Street View is your friend and many times that can help you verify the authenticity of the vendor. But, keep in mind that many smaller stores did move to being fully online during/after the great plague of 2020, so the address could just point you to their warehouse or otherwise weird looking location where it is hard to imagine a store or gaming club. In the end, it never hurts to send the store an email, if they have one listed.
If the store has a lot of rare product, chances are that it is no good. Either a dead store from back in the day, some kind of scam, or just a recaster. The latter category has some pretty notorious or famed websites, depending on who you ask, so if you want to see a list of the known ones you can find that list on the "7 Hills" discord server. Personally I dislike recasts and just don't want to give them traffic from here, so I'm not going to list them.
Last, but definitely not the least, interact with the community. Chances are that you can find someone who lives in the country or state where a particular store is located, the player map is helpful for this, and just ask them if they've heard about the store or if they've shopped there before. This can obviously save you a lot of trouble verifying all of the above yourself.
And I think that is about it. This wasn't a super exhaustive list of all the things that you can do to be 100% safe, since technically there isn't a completely foolproof method for hunting rare things. You do need some luck, but some of these tips listed above are just little things you can do to minimize going utterly unprepared. It might seem like a bit of homework, but it'll keep you happy in the long run and at some point you might even end up enjoying the whole process of investigation, like I do. It's fun looking into the bowels of the internet and seeing what pops up.
Do you have any special tips and tricks for hunting those rare pesky minis and avoiding traps? Drop a comment, I'm always interested in new tools of the trade.
Thanks for reading and remember, patience is a virtue. Happy hunting!
No comments:
Post a Comment