Has anyone else noticed the collapse of mech prices on ebay?? A few collector's items still fetch a decent price. But, for the most part, uniques and LEs are now in the $5-10 range if they are selling at all.

Why just before xmas is such a thing going on?

Is it due to the CA previews or the metagame in general. SC donars an SS AAs go for $20+ each.

Metagame. The attitude around here seems to be "pay to win" and trade LEs to build your collection. It is much harder to get someone local to trade a donar/balac/AAA to you, with them realizing they will likely be playing against it for the next 2 months. So players resort to picking up the pieces that help them win online.

I noticed this decrease before CA previews + perhaps many players have what they need at the moment.

markets eventually die, it's all a matter of supply and demand. whereas redemption mechs used to sell for $25/$30 on ebay (whatever happened to mailing in for $5? who knows???)...the prices have since plummeted. two reasons:

1) those who are willing to pay the price now have.
2) competition, especially power sellers who buy hundreds and sell them all at a buy it now price that undercuts what all other auctions would end at.

capitalism at it's existentialist. buy now why the prices are low! they shouldn't drop much further.

Two things drive eBay prices -- Supply and demand & Playability. Items like SC Donars and SS AA Arty have playability (and are in demand). Some rare pieces like Mason Dunne are low in supply with a high demand. Then there are pieces like Stefani which is both playable and in low supply.

Items like Stefani will always demand high prices. Here you have serious collectors bidding against serious players for a small pool of pieces.

Items like Mason Dunne will command high prices until the supply chain opens -- Just like Scott Tracyk. Mostly you have collectors buying pieces like Dunne (and some faction-pure players who have to have all from their faction), but there is not a lot of action by players to buy a piece that will sit on the shelf.

Items like the SC Donar will command high prices as long as they are playable. Players are bidding against players. Collectors do not want these pieces.

Other LEs will stay at the top until the next LE comes along. Your prices will be the highest when you have players bidding against collectors. Once the collectors fill there shelves, they move on to the next LE, and the prices start to fall. Soon you have a closet full of last year's LEs that are not worth much -- until a new wave of players arrive and start to look for the older pieces to complete their faction sets.

It's all supply and demand. High playability and popular factions leads to high demand, so you can easily figure out that Basil "The Edge" Kozaka is going to be popular because he's the only Cap3 transport with repair in the popular BR faction. The only factors that change demand are if a rule change makes some units more or less playable (like the proposed arty change), or if a new unit comes along that is better in the same role, or similar but easier to get. (I imagine that Basil's value dropped a bit when the BR Garrot was announced).

Supply is a bigger variable. The value of an LE is highest when it's just been made available and there are only a few for sale. When the market gets saturated prices will drop.

So whenever I win an LE for a faction that I don't collect, I sell it on eBay immediately. Supply fluctuations mean that prices rarely if ever increase, or at least not for a very long time.

I have seen the eBay market fall every month before a new set is released. It seems like people are saving the extra dollars to buy or share in buying a case. It is a great time to snatch up some bargins.

Christmas spending also has something to do with the lower prices. People tend to spend less on themselves this time of the year.

Finally, I think there are several high-dollar pieces available. I doubt that someone is going to bid on some common LEs after spending $100 on Risk Raisho, Sgt Major Cooper, Stefani Ehli, or Mason Dunne.

With the new envoy compensation system a lot more of the LEs have been making their way out in to distribution thus driving down demand cause more and more people are trading to pick up the units they need. Good example was Ric. He was going for $100 and at the beginning of this month he was given out to BMs as compensation for running events ... many got two evidently ... so supply shot up .. thus demand starts to go down which drives down the price. Granted it is still going for $50 or so .. but that's half of what it used to be.

That and it's all about playability. Why spend a mint on a LE when you know you can never possible use it? I have a Dekker up for trade at the moment ... but I'm betting I'll practically have to give it away. There's certainly no way it'd go for anything on ebay. Why? Does that mean everyone who plays MW has one? No. Does anyone consider it useful? Not enough to create any sort of deman that would drive the price for the unit up.

Incidentally .. I DO have a SC Donar and SS DI AA up for trade if anyone is willing up offer anything good for them. :)

Topgun505's story about Ric Raisho is a great example of why to get rid of unloved LE's quickly. Like Gary Metcalf and Viki Drexel and many others, this piece was initially extremely rare and worth a lot. But WizKids never promises that a piece will *stay* extremely rare - sometimes they dump a large number into the pool, as Battlemaster rewards or other prizes. I think the new system gives them tons of flexibility about what rewards they send to BM's, so the long-term value of your LE's is now more unpredictable than ever.

If you had sold or traded Dekker Nova Cat the day after you got it (assuming you got it as a campaign prize) you probably could have gotten a decent deal from a collector.

Bottom line: clix figures seem to depreciate very quickly. This is caused by escalation (newer sets have more powerful figures to continue driving demand), and by the ever-increasing supply.

What nobody has talked about is whether depressed prices could indicate a waning interest in the game on the part of its core customers. The rules of supply and demand apply to entire games, not just to individual pieces - if something comes along that is far more engaging and fun than MW, and more players start leaving the game than are taking it up, then prices will plummet.

I got out of Mage Knight about two months after Mechwarrior launched, and I haven't looked at prices there lately. Is that game in decline? I've heard that the new D&D collectible miniatures are really taking a bite out of interest in Mage Knight, plus the whole 2.0 thing probably makes a lot of older figures less useful.

Anyway, as a result of all this, I have made a self-imposed rule that my entire MW collection has to fit in my carrying case. That way I'm forced to choose carefully what units I keep. I am continually culling the ranks so that when/if I decide to get out of the game, I will be left with a small collection of highly playable figures that I can easily sell.

Playability seems to be the deciding factor at the moment. Most LE mechs just are not really usable. So, with a few exceptions, they don't command much of a price.

SS AAs and VTOLs are in much higher demand. This was definitely the case at a singles sale last weekend. The most expensive piece was the ROTS balacs ($12). Unigues were $4-10.