Please forgive me if this topic is being discussed, I did not see anything.

When you buy your x-wing miniatures, do you care about the condition of them in the packaging? Do you only buy them in-store to make sure they look as good as possible? For example, at the Target next to my house, they have a bunch of the starter sets, but all the X-wings in the packages are bent or warped, which is preventing me from buying them. If you buy online, I guess you get what you get also. I am unfortunately one of those people that like to have my miniatures as close to perfect as possible. Just wanted everybody's thoughts.

Yeah, I mean I'm not crazy about it, and if there aren't enough to be choosy, meh ah well.

It's easy enough to fix most of the warped plastic if you give them a quick dip in hot water (VERY quick, or even hold just above the water) to soften them up a bit, then hold it in place until it cools/dries. The key is not to bend anything until it has been softened up a bit, or it'll just snap.

I definitely inspect mine before I buy if possible. I recently passed on two HWKs and grabbed another at the FLGS because one had a broken/bent antenna near the engine and the other was missing some of the red paint on the panels. When I picked up core sets I looked for the X-Wing with the straightest guns.

If it's in really rough shape you can always get it and submit a ticket and they'll probably replace it for you. FFG has great customer service generally. But yeah I've definitely eyeballed minis and grabbed the one that looked a bit straighter, or had a bit better paint job or cleaner wash.

I also almost bought a TIE once because it was packaged backwards, and I thought it was hilarious it looked like it was trying desperately to fly away.

I bought 2 Y-wings online that both had noticeably dented cockpits. It is annoying but doesn't really distract me while I'm playing the game. I kinda make those pilots generics and then give really retarded voices to them.

When I purchased my second Firespray I compared what was available and chose the one with the best paint job. Not all minis are made equal but fortunately for my experience the level of quality control has been good.

However, the Lambda-class Shuttle looks prety aweful. I don't like to risk melting plastic by stripping for a repaint, but this ship looks like it was painted with white-wash using a barn painting brush. I plan on getting a second one and am almost certain to use an airbrush to repaint one. The mini it's self though is just plain incredible. Thank you Jason Beaudoin and FF for all the hard work you do.

I purchased several figures at once and submitted a claim for pegs. They sounded really great and that they could replace them.

I also bought 3 x HWK-290 and on one of them, one of the four blasters on the wings is missing. That seems too trivial to turn in but being OCD it really bugs me. My fault for not looking more closely.

However, the Lambda-class Shuttle looks prety aweful. I don't like to risk melting plastic by stripping for a repaint, but this ship looks like it was painted with white-wash using a barn painting brush.

It reminds me of the Borderlands artwork.

I played Mage Knight back in the day so the level of quality is amazing to me. I don't think i have found too many drastically misshapen ships though.

I haven't seen too many issues with the models themselves. I have had issues with the base being slightly bent or warped so it won't sit completely flat. I also have a TIE that the post seat is a little off, so it isn't straight with the base. That one drives me more crazy than anything.

Be glad you're not playing Attack Wing. I picked up the starter to check it out and had to put in a service request to replace 2 of the 3 minis in the starter. Which reminds me, I still haven't actually heard anything back - thanks WizKids!

The Klingon one is merely bad, tilted at a weird angle. The Romulan one is so awful it looks like they've lost engine power and are getting sucked into the gravity well of a planet - nose down AND rotated halfway on its side. Whoever attached the post receivers was drunk.

Be glad you're not playing Attack Wing. I picked up the starter to check it out and had to put in a service request to replace 2 of the 3 minis in the starter. Which reminds me, I still haven't actually heard anything back - thanks WizKids!

The Klingon one is merely bad, tilted at a weird angle. The Romulan one is so awful it looks like they've lost engine power and are getting sucked into the gravity well of a planet - nose down AND rotated halfway on its side. Whoever attached the post receivers was drunk.

A friend of mine got me into Attack Wing. What a $h1tty game! Wizkids is so bad. The miniatures are painted extremely poorly, the scale is completely random, even the rules are goofy and unbalanced. Unfortunately, I'm still enjoying it. And I wouldn't think so poorly of it had I not played X-Wing first and gotten used to the awesome quality of the minis and fidelity of the scale, and nearly precise balance of the ships and upgrades.

I'm swiftly becoming a Fantasy Flight fanboy.

When I bought my first starter and took a TIE fighter out of the box the wing literally fell off. I jokingly said that these figures really are realistic. They show how fragile the TIEs really are! I was tempted to leave it as it was (a battle damaged TIE), but decided to fix it in the end. A dab of super glue later and everything was fine.

I only purchase online, so I do have to live with what I receive. There are some figures that if I were in a store I would have spent the time to analyze each package carefully to find the perfect one, but when playing you barely notice these things. Overall, I have been extremely impressed with the way these figures have turned out. I did however recently receive a Lambda shuttle where the guns were broken/missing on one side. They were nowhere to be found in the box either. Hopefully that one can get replaced...

Be glad you're not playing Attack Wing. I picked up the starter to check it out and had to put in a service request to replace 2 of the 3 minis in the starter. Which reminds me, I still haven't actually heard anything back - thanks WizKids!

The Klingon one is merely bad, tilted at a weird angle. The Romulan one is so awful it looks like they've lost engine power and are getting sucked into the gravity well of a planet - nose down AND rotated halfway on its side. Whoever attached the post receivers was drunk.

A friend of mine got me into Attack Wing. What a $h1tty game! Wizkids is so bad. The miniatures are painted extremely poorly, the scale is completely random, even the rules are goofy and unbalanced. Unfortunately, I'm still enjoying it. And I wouldn't think so poorly of it had I not played X-Wing first and gotten used to the awesome quality of the minis and fidelity of the scale, and nearly precise balance of the ships and upgrades.

I'm swiftly becoming a Fantasy Flight fanboy.

Here's the sad thing - I actually LIKE some of the rules they modified. Disabling shields? Genius. How they handled stealth and sensor echos and such? Very clever. Being able to disable a torpedo and reactivate it later, rather than having it be a one shot weapon? I would KILL for such an upgrade in X-Wing.

But yes, they recycled cheap, poorly made, more poorly painted HeroClix miniatures that have little to no sense of scale (little sense of scale, NO sense of scale in consistent relation of one ship to another), that look and feel like cheap plastic kid's toys and not real miniatures. I opened that thing up and realized X-Wing has spoiled me BAD.

I agree. The rules for cloak are mechanically super cool (disabling shields, sensor echos etc). Unfortunately, I don't know if the game is very balanced. All the torpedoes basically suck (when you can take a ship with 4+ primary weapon dice), and cloak currently has very few counters (except for getting lucky). Meanwhile projected stasis field can cause a very reliable one shot on any non-cloaking ship.

X-Wing is so vastly superior. Still, I'm pleased that FF licensed out the system to Wizkids.

I agree. The rules for cloak are mechanically super cool (disabling shields, sensor echos etc). Unfortunately, I don't know if the game is very balanced. All the torpedoes basically suck (when you can take a ship with 4+ primary weapon dice), and cloak currently has very few counters (except for getting lucky). Meanwhile projected stasis field can cause a very reliable one shot on any non-cloaking ship.

X-Wing is so vastly superior. Still, I'm pleased that FF licensed out the system to Wizkids.

Oh yeah, I mean again - we quibble over whether this ship is slightly overcosted, or why that pilot doesn't have access to elite skills, but the ships all FEEL right. The X-Wing is incredibly well-rounded. The A-Wing is overpowered and undergunned. Interceptors are vicious but fragile. A B-Wing can dance in the hands of a good pilot but is slow and awkward to learn to maneuver. Stats all seem pretty well balanced.

The stats on the Trek ships seem kind of all over the place - exacerbated by the complete lack of a sense of scale. You wind up with the tiniest ship, the old Enterprise, having more firepower than ships that look like they're four times its size.

I don't know. I hate to rag on them, I just feel bad for the designers of that game because it seems like they took a real shot at trying to make the game stand apart and distinguish itself with some really nice touches and mechanics, and are completely cut off at the knees by cheap WizKids product. And even that wouldn't bother me if they were selling expansion packs for like $8-10. You want to release cheaper budget ships? Sell them at a lower price point and everyone wins. It just feels like a slap in the face paying the same for an Attack Wing miniature. I'll put up a pic tonight of a side by side with an X-Wing mini and you'll laugh.

Here's one thing that sums up that entire game for me in a nutshell. The movement dials. The game designers put some extra thought into them and the front and back sides of the dial both have the class of ship and a picture of it. Just a little touch, but a cool one - you can see at a glance "ok, that's a Galaxy class dial, that's a Miranda class dial..." It's nice. A little easier to pick out in the box, a little easier to identify on the table if the ships are in a big cluster.

But take a careful look at how deeply they cut out the piece that reveals your maneuver: http://scifanatic.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/necawing-1.jpg

You know how the X-Wing dials are occasionally a bit of a pain to snap together? Well now imagine that the wedge they cut out was half again as deep, leaving so little room between the bottom of the wedge and the hole in the center of the dial where the peg goes through, that you can actually pretty easily TEAR that little strip, trying to force the bottom of the peg up through the dial. Yeah. For no discernible reason, they took an extra chunk out of that little bit of cardboard, and made it twice as fragile when you're trying to assemble the dials.

So once more you've got this very clever design touch - ship dials where the graphics are unique to each ship - completely undercut by cheap cost-cutting design. That, my friends, is Attack Wing.

The miniatures are more than half the reason I am buying into this great product. Thus far I have only had one X-Wing with issues, to be fair this was the first model I purchased ( last year) before FFG redid the models.

The miniatures are pretty much THE reason I buy the game, but though I get them through the Internet i can't say i've had even one real gripe.