Jhiaxus arrived and the head/knee joints aren't super loose thankfully. However I got one of the batches with the slightly greener hip joints, though they all seem to have that to varying degrees.
I also got some minor at a glance but really fucking clear at close up paint defects that bother the shit out of me.
some of the paint on the head is scratched, probably due to the windowless packaging shit they now do, combined with the silver on the chest being misaligned, and I didn't notice this till looking at the photos I took, but it's got some glob of excess paint pooling on the little shoulder cannon/scouter thing he has that's severe enough that if I tried removing it it'd just fuck up the paint.
I also got a bit of discoloration on the outer right leg, something I've seen on other copies talking about being "yellowing" along with the green hips, but i think this specific case is so frequent that it's some kinda factory oil stain.
The constant QC issues and degradation in plastic quality are the main reason I've just stopped bothering with current Hasbro stuff. I did order a Lio Convoy this week just because I needed something to reach 50$ for free shipping. hoping its not a disaster, I'll probably have to paint the lion face because it looks so fucking weird and dead.
The constant rising prices make it worse. within the span of a few short years we've gone from 25 dollars to nearly 40 dollars without discount for fucking voyagers, most of which are now the height of a larger deluxe. Their reasoning for this was better quality control and collector focus shit, and then the cheapening of the packaging was to "save the environment".
I've noticed in the most recent batches of preorder listings for studio series stuff it's shifted from that thing talking about collectors and making the definitive versions of shit to constantly slapping "8 YEAR OLD BOYS" everywhere the other nouns about fans or collectors used to be. It's really weird because while yeah transformers is a thing that's mainly marketed to kids their whole thing was they split up their design teams to have one doing the explicitly kid focused stuff and one doing the stuff for a mix of older kids and longtime fans. I haven't noticed anyone else talking about this but then again I don't really go too deep into places where people normally talk about this kinda shit lmao.
It's still odd, they're making heavily engineered figures with cheap plastic, and are now trying to retroactively frame ALL the figures they're putting out aside from the fucking 500 dollar figures under the same age bracket of recommendation in their product descriptions.. We've come so fucking far from beast wars and armada in terms of articulation and engineering, yet gone so fucking ass backwards with plastic quality, gimmicks, and QC that it's a joke. The company's higher ups, manufacturing, and actual designers seem to be at odds with each other more than ever.
Tarn update that ties into this all: Haven't gotten it shipped yet, but from reviews I found out it has a space that'd normally have rolling wheels, but it instead has static knubs in the SHAPE of rolling wheels, meaning they were going to give the tank the "fake treads with rolling wheels" thing they do all the time but then removed it last second so they didn't have to pay for the production of fucking tiny plastic rollers. The cheapness is bordering on nonsensical lately. Kinda rambling again but that's what happens when I'm multitasking trying to give an update on shit as well as opinions on the weird fucking state of things with these figures.
