Like the person above said, vote with your wallet.
An unfortunate side-effect of the growth of the community is that there are more people willing to pay high prices for lower quality items.
It looks like every new maker is selling out every time they post a sale for a crappy sculpt with some bubbles in their resin at $50/each, so while a small group of people may choose not to participate, it isn't affecting the market at all. Since there's always financial support from people excited to grow their cap collection, new makers will continue to include the startup cost and R&D in their pricing and that devalues established artisans that are clearly on a different level.
I vote with my wallet when I buy from a community member but every time I opt-out, there's someone else to take my place, meaning my individual vote doesn't really mean anything in the greater scheme of things.
Oh totally, I agree with you. I think that comes with entry into the scene though. I remember when I first got started earlier this year and I had seen an artisan for the time, I was amazed and intrigued( I like to collect stuff by nature.). There could be no wrong because I didn't know any better, so I entered many raffles and got to see the differences between many makers. A lot of new artisan makers are popping up this year, and a lot of new mech users as well. Both are cutting their teeth in that area right now. Some are finding their sculpts are not up to par (Seeing them resold almost immediately) and participants are seeing the difference in quality slowly.
It is however rather difficult to see the contrast between qualities when all the good raffles are less than easy to get into, especially when the trend is micro batches. Then to further that, the method of sales have been generally flash sales which adds another degree of difficulty for the average person. Hell, I don't even know how to get into a GAF raffle.
Getting those quality sculpts isn't particularly hard if you don't mind aftermarket prices, however to a person fresh on the scene it can be a little steep. Even then, a majority of the time I would venture to say you'd be purchasing older versions, whose quality might not be up to the maker's contemporary standards.
I don't want to spread salt, because I don't have a problem with any of this actually. It's just kind of a given in economics and anything worth collecting.
However, I do think it's really annoying that brand new makers have popped up with retail valuations at what these long time makers have priced their caps at with sub par (Below comparable quality) caps. Rather than say that it devalues the higher quality artists sculpts, I would argue that it devalues our purchasing power instead and makes an argument for higher quality artists to charge more. You can see evidence for that in these ebay sales. So it's kind of a big **** you to the consumer in my eyes. I mean obviously you want to break even, but do you absolutely need to do it on the first raffle at the cost of the customer.
Yea, it can feel like your vote doesn't matter, I don't care much. I wouldn't go so far as to say be vocal about negative feelings, however definitely be speak up when you have positive things to say; in hopes that people will want to emulate the person you're speaking positively of.
These days I'm mostly entering raffles based on my keyboard colors, all red, black, and gold. So, my wallet has been pretty happy (sort of) since there are so few artisans with those colors.
