Ground assets missing from online store

[fudblinker]

I was looking through GW's US online store and saw that the ground assets are no longer available (as well as several other items for several of the boxed games). Does anyone remember these hitting Last Chance to Buy recently? More and more lately It seems boxed game products are disappearing without warning before they are gone.

[Beaky Brigade]

I can't speak for the other items, but the ground assets appeared to be the shiny made in China plastic like some of the base and terrain kits. I don't know whether this is done for cost reasons or because of UK factory capacity, but these products have to be produced and shipped over in batches, so I guess when they sell out they have to decide to order more or not and allow for the lead time.

 

Clearly these and the board selling out well before the next expansion indicates they didn't make enough!

 

 

Gw are aware of the problem in some form, they offered paper ground asset tokens at the WHW event for players who couldn't pick one up before they sold out.

 

Who knows if they'll pop up again in the same form, or if they'll do individual faction sets. A Tau vs Imperial one would seem duplicated effort unless it's new types of assets.

[fudblinker]

Ah, that makes some sense; I know a lot of manufacturing in China has been delayed from both corona virus mandated closures and the usual shutdown for Chinese New Year.

 

I would think they would just mark them as temporarily out of stock (assuming they will order more), but who knows what their decision process is about this sort of thing. A similar thing happened with the Legio Morris titanicus transfers, they disappeared for several months then suddenly were available again about a month ago. I also noticed some other oddities with the store like the Blackstone Fortess Escalation pack not appearing in the BF section, but can be found using the search bar. This sort of thing seems to happen more often with the boxed games than the primary game models (as far as I can tell).

[Firedrake Cordova]

I was looking through GW's US online store and saw that the ground assets are no longer available (as well as several other items for several of the boxed games). Does anyone remember these hitting Last Chance to Buy recently?

I don't believe it did.  I had a "notify me when in stock" request on it when it was marked as "temporarily out of stock" some time ago - it seems to have just been dropped.  As you say, a few other items have done a similar disappearing act (although they generally go "direct only" first). :(

 

Who knows if they'll pop up again in the same form, or if they'll do individual faction sets. A Tau vs Imperial one would seem duplicated effort unless it's new types of assets.

My guess is we'll see something with the Taros box, although what form it'll take is a good question ... I guess we probably don't have that long to wait to find out!