Not saying that I'm old or anything, but I have noticed that my views on this hobby have changed over the years. Where once it was all about how many items I could buy, it's now about adding pieces that make me happy, from being totally isolated, to wanting to venture out and meet my fellow collectors.

Now, I'm much more about talking to my fellow collector and getting to know people more than I ever was. I've always been about helping people out, but it seems more so now than ever before! It may be sad, but I talk to most of my collector friends more than I talk to any of my other friends. Some newbie people grind my gears, but I always think back to the fact that we all have to start somewhere, and that we need to try our best to help them along.

My collection has also seen many "overhauls". From being modern with a sprinkling of vintage, to loose vintage, to variants, to focusing, then MOC, then pre-production (then a really long run on sentence). Now to mainly focus collecting with some different things mixed in, posters, autographs and animation art. I've even now branched out into an previously unknown realm and picked up a lot of HeMan related animation art.

Looking back, this hobby has really seen it's ups and downs and ins and outs. It's been an absolute fascinating ride. And I'm looking forward to many more twists and turns in the coming years.

So that's my story in a nutshell, how has this hobby changed for you?

for me the hobby hasent changed since i first logged in

wich was a year and half somthing ago ,

i was collecting randomly anthing i could get my hands on

it started changing alot since i found out about variations and focusses

dont know if i love AJ for the variation bu or hate him lol

i will say that all the ups and downs the hobby goes true your mentioning chris

did take away my need to be online everyday plus like you mentioned

by time it gets addictive kinda , and you loose interest in your surroundings

special friends ,

yeah i made new friends , great friends for the hobby , not so great ones aswell

and bro's i've met and that i would def hang out with on regelar basis , even outside the hobby

but the last year ,for me personaly to much crap happend that the og guys i grew smarter with collecting wise

either left or got into arguments , and are chatterd all over the forums , and it sucks

wish those chatbox days where still on ,

and thats basicly why iam not su much around these days , so other reasons made me quite posting new items or limelights

but the love for vintage toys collecting aka the hobby havent changed ; i was colllecting long before any forum and will continue to long after

i know this post doesnt sound like someone that is a fan of forums , but i actually really am , the info i have gatherd here is awsome and i would never know a tenth of what i know without it

I going to try and keep this brief but I could write for a few days on this. I really don't know how to sum it up honestly.

Sept 23, 2008 was the first time I posted on Rebelscum after finding out that there were forums where collectors buy/sell and chat. 27 months later I'm honored to be the global moderator on a great site like this. I've amassed what, to me at least, is a pretty nice collection that has undergone a few facelifts (bought and sold complete 2nd gen polish set, complete MOC Droids set, almost complete loose set) and I have items I never knew even existed before 2009 or so (Whats an Uzay?? LOL).

I will say that the friendships are great. I text with a couple of people almost daily and of course PM and chat. I am impressed with the levels of trust I have in people and that people have in me. It's hard to have that in real life, let alone your digital life. Its funny, like Chris, I seem to interact more here and with the SW crew. Nothing against my friends, just access to you guys is much easier and my friends can't debate the virtues of Pruneface like you fine folks!

In short, SW has become a real important part of my life and I appreciate what it brings to me. I just can't believe it's 2 yrs ago when I got into it in more than a casual manner.

Quite a fitting thread Chris as it's going to be my 1 Year Anniversary of joining the online community tomorrow.

If I can be totally honest, this has to best year of collecting Star Wars since I first started and the one that I have experienced the biggest change in. All of that credit goes to me joining this community. I have met some great folks and made even greater friends. The amount of knowledge and collecting thought I have been exposed to is awe-inspiring. Likewise is the generosity and kindness of folks on here. I still get shocked on a daily basis with folks going out of their way to help me out.

Not only have I picked up some great tips to enhance my collection, but belonging to such a great group has made me take some really big changes in the way I collect. I sometimes wonder if I didn’t take up Shawn’s invite to join TIG, I would I still be picking up U-grades or collecting in an unsustainable way.

Thank you guys looking forward to 2011 and onwards.

I used to only be a modern collector and then stumbled across TIG on a google search. I checked out the modern classifieds and bought some stuff from James. I continued to hang around reading the threads and gaining interest in vintage. I took the plunge and bought a vintage loose Fett (since my modern focus was Fett). When I got it I started looking at compared to the modern stuff and ow much cooler it was. It made me nostalgic back to my days as a youngster. I started picking up a few loose figs here and there and loved them more and more. I've since almost completed my loose set, have a nice moc collection started, and have seen so many things I never knew existed.

As far as this forum is concerned - I love it. I feel this is much more of a community than RS and much more welcoming and friendly. I still read RS posts everyday but rarely post there. Since I live waaaay out in a rural area I'm far from my friends and family and I really feel like a part of something here. I look forward to getting to know everyone better and to keep learning new things everyday. It's great to be a part of the discussions here as most of my friends don't understand collecting or think it's silly. I've tried to seek out fellow collectors via facebook but not too much luck. It would be great to meet some collectors near by.

Long winded diatribe for saying I love this hobby and value the great connections I've found here.

- Dallas

Its been a rollercoaster few years for me really, started off joining the forums and loving it, then it started to become too much and take over my spare time. Especially with all the U grading, undercutting and scamming

Ive made some cracking cyber friends through all the forums and ill always be around. and as for information well, you cant get any better for info and helpful advice.

I too venture into the world of other figures and i have quite a large collection of other vintage lines. so ive filtereed my time to a little bit of everything, i dont think ill ever go back to being a forum regular but im always available to everyone and so is my wife for a small fee.

Community spirit...

Andy

This could get as long as the interview John did with me.

When I started,it was pre internet, Toy Shop magazine and toy shows were king. Things that commanded a premium and were considered rare at the time are far different in many respects than today, a good example is that the giant albatros of a game "X-Wing Aces" could at the time easily command $1k. Today you'd be lucky to get $300 for a decent example. Personally I started collecting loose then moved up to carded figures,and boxed vehiclles and playsets. I started by buying collections to resell,and deciding to keep them. It was very pure, and nostalgic. I at the time wasn't making much $ so I made the hobby pay for itself.
No prototypes or bootlegs at the time for me. Traveling hours for a big toy show was very common practice. The Hobby was much more hands on. Foreign (non US) carded were viewed as inferior to US by many collectors.
Then when I got on the internet (around 95) I joined RASC, then RASCV which were usenet newsgroups, they were the equivilant to an un modded forum. I met many collectors there that I still consider good friends to this day and thru RASC/V I found the Archive. That spurned my initial fascination with prototypes and the production process, it also taught me a lot about the toy line in general as well. Around the same frame time I'd also bought my first bootlegs. Also of note from that time frame were the New England Collector club meetings that Ron Salvatore initially set up. The first meeting was at a mall in Conn.
(Danbury? I believe) I met a bunch of the CT guys then and am still great friends with them. It was my first in person social interaction with other collectors, other than people I'd met at toy shows.

As the usenet groups gave way to site based forums, I migrated to them with the friends that I had at the time.
The hobby stayed the same with me for the most part for a few years; with me collecting licensed, unlicensed, US and non US, as well as prototypes. My monthly toy budget at the time was more than my monthly income is these days. Some of the first bumps in the road for me in terms of the hobby and taking the rose colored glasses off was seeing the very real cliques in certian segments of the hobby and how they operated and only let those in that kissed the right asses. I'm not very good at that, so I just maintained the friendships that I felt were genuine and spoke my mind more than once in situations where "politically" it really wasn't likely in my best interest to do so. This eventually lead to my,for the most part, giving up on collecting vintage prototypes on a grand scale, and putting a LOT more of my effort,energies and funds into bootlegs,which at the time very few collected on a serious level. Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven IMO.

Around this same time I became friends with John Alvarez. He (at the time) was just seriously getting into bootlegs. We ended up shareing some sources and working as a team bought many "lots" of both Polish and Brazilian figures in quantity. That worked great for a few years and my bootleg collection grew by leaps and bounds during this timeframe. In that time we easily had well over 1000 Polish figures go thru our hands. As well as a few major finds of MTs. That was a really enjoyable time for me in the hobby.

It got soured a bit by Kim Zoll and his attempts to make me out to be the asshole in 2 deals gone wrong. One of which went wrong because Kim lacked patience, and the other because he tried to sell me items as prototypes of Polish figures that weren't and refused to refund my money when I determined that they were not what he made them out to be. I actually was so furious over his slander that I left a bootleg mailing list/group that John and I founded because while he agreed with me that Kim was wrong, he refused to kick him out of the group. I also took many months off from posting on RebelScum,as Kim essentially stalked me and continued to try to push me out. His posting more lies are what eventually lead me back to posting on RS more regularly and rejoining the bootleg list. Funny thing is that I used to consider Kim a friend. That changed the hobby for me in that it made me less trusting of my fellow collector and much more jaded.
The monopoly John and I had on Polish figures came to a halt in the mid 2k's as more collectors found the Polish source for our bounty, and pushed the prices thru the roof for a while which lead to them eventually tanking.

The next big and major change in how and what I collect came in 2006 when my business burned to the ground in a fire caused by a chef at the restraunt in the space next to ours. That put me out of the hobby completely for a few months and still effects my
spending as I'm making about 1/3 the income that I used to earn. It has essentially made it so I've had to sell off other parts of my (luckilly vast) collection in order to keep the bootleg collection growing. While I had already decided that the bootlegs were all that really mattered to me and didn't actively work on any other parts of my collection beyond making sure that it was displayed nicely, I still would have prefered to keep everything. I still have lots of stuff that used to be part of my collection packed in storage totes to sell through,and as I need $ for bootleg purchases, it'll all gradually get put on the chopping block. It's been hard to get used to my current budget constraints, and I certianly don't expect or want any sympathy as I was fortunate enough for a while to be spending at a level that many dream of being able to, but trying to get used to my current hobby budget has put me in a bind more than a few times. I'll relax and think that money will be coming in OK enough for me to spend on the level that I was formerly used to and then things will tank, putting me in the hole for a few weeks and listing stuff to sell to level me back out financially.

Other than payment plans between other collectors and in the late 90s/early 2ks some big deals that required payment plans to Tom D. I've at least stayed away from the pitfall of incuring credit card debt to fund the collection. I've just gone back to being a bit more shrewd in my dealings and working the hobby to get the pieces I want. SO while I'm far more jaded and bitter to the politics of the hobby, I also in some ways have come full circle, in that I'm back to making the collection pay for itself, something I'd lost sight of (and didn't have the time for) when I was busier in my work schedule.

Sorry if it's rambleing at times and timelines do overlap, but these experiences and life events have changed the way that I collect, what I collect,and my life in general.

Cheers
Joe

Great timing for this thread for me.

I started buying vintage toys late 2007.

I was all over the place, snapping up stuff off of ebay that I had when I was a kid.

Action Force, He-Man, Transformers, Star Wars, A Team, Zoids etc.

But then I realised it was Star Wars that I wanted to concentrate on and I joined SWFUK and I knew absoultely naff all.
Didn't know about Last 17, Ledy's, PBP's...Palitoys but I started to learn a lot.
I used to be trawling through ebay daily for 2 years just buying and buying and buying

2009 saw me concentrate on some focuses, Takara items, bootlegs, Ledy and MOC's leading on to my Palitoy run.

Then at the beginning of 2010 I started dressing up .
This drew my funds away from toys but I was still checking the forums every day, like I still do.

I've had a bad start to the year which has resulted in me having to sell of some of my collection for the first time ever.
I've sold off doubles before but never part of my collection and it's been a wrench.

I've realised that I need to reign in the spending and I just can't be adding to my collection for the forseeable future which is
really hard for me. Jason over on RS has 7 Trems that I desperatley would love to buy from him and a year ago I would have done
but I just can't do it anymore.

I love this community, Star Wars is a huge part of my life and all my friends and family know that.
I will be on these forums for a long time to come and I will not sell off my whole collection. I started this as a hobby and also
to leave a piece of history to my kids.

I've made great friends on these here boards and I look forward to events where we can meet up again in the future.

I'm taking a break from buying, but I look forward to coming back and adding to my collection again at some point in the future.

Love you guys

Geek out!

1. Kidslife and youth...the beginning
Well I started collecting....I think in 1986/7! From this point on I was a kid which spent every saturday on fleamarkets with my father who is also a collector! This was the base I think. I gathered a near full set of figures and some ships! Everything was played with, also played from me! :bball: :bball:

2. 2000....EBAY
I think the first big change in my collection life was joining ebay in 2000. This was like getting overfloaded with rare stuff I always searched for.....like beeing in a vintage store at 1985!!! And best of it...I earned my first own money and had my first own apartment.
First things I bought was a Tie Fighter....I never had one . Second was Blue Snag and a Luke Stromtrooper and the first set was complete!

3. Time before the forums
So I searched ebay for years and learned and read from theswca.com. I upgraded all the time. First I started to buy repro weapons to complete my figures...then I bought originals and threw away the repros I once bought. I think in these times I bought my first 2 Uzays....and looking at the prices today I should have bought more! I also started with my Ledy collection without ever speaking to another collector! Lucky me I wasnt duped. I got my burgundy Bib, jawa and fett loose rocket...what a start! I also was able to pick up a complete galsslite set at this time plus ships! And some Top Toys Mocs for 40 USD each....what great times!

4. Joining the forums
I joined RS in 2008! Well I had a respectable amount of figures and rare stuff at this time...but waaaay to less knowledge to mess with the big ones! So I had the badest start you can have on RS! I got smashed even by i.e. Jay . Yes dude...i think you called me a troll! LOL
Well from this time on everything got more intensive. I spend waaaay more time and muuuuuch more money then ever before! I mainly was always mounting or creating some pics for the forums!
I was lucky to meet Mike and Uli on RS. These guys made me collect and know every strange variant I never heard of before!
The Jay asked me for help to build up this site! So I helped as good as I could these times.....and I still think the gunnery weapons guide is the best someone will ever do! At this point I also got deeper into wepaon variants!
I also started my own project to build up a huuuge variant guide. This was my heart and soul....I put every free minute in this project for years! The changes all the time: layout, more varaints apperaed, more coos...etc....made me nearly insane!

5. The break
Well I think I dont have to tell what Ive done in october in 2010. This was a huge break for me....to think about how collecting has involved my life, my personal character and my budget! I stepped away from everything for a month! I think this was important for me...the signs were already there half a year before all happnd...but of course I didnt recognized them. Well long storry short end: collecting and beeing in the forums will never be the same again...not for me...not for other people who knew me before or a damned to hang around with me here

Yes I think thats it. 5 huge changes...and every step changed everything. The only thing that was always the same:
I collect loose vintage star wars stuff!


eidt:

I forgot to mention: The first month here on TIG were the best times in my collecting life! So thanks to the first 12 (I always call them so, but it probably were more) and I still miss Rob (thank god Jimster is back).

Cheers

Wolff

My journey began somewhere around '92. I had some cousins who were really into the West End Games SW RPGs and they got me involved on a visit. I had such a good time that I ended up buying the main guide and sourcebook to try and soak up all the SW info I could. Somehow I managed to get some friends involved and we started playing too. That was really where the SW spark came from and I started buying what I could that was available at the time (Thrawn books, Soundtrack anthology, etc)

One day while checking out the latest SW Book I found Sansweet's From Concept to Screen to Collectible book and it brought back the vintage memories of my childhood and the 2 page spread of all 93 figures just blew me away. i thought it would be cool to get a few of them, but had no idea where to start. A friend and fellow fan at that time managed to get some figures from his cousin that were well loved. He had quite a few duplicates, but he offered them to me thinking they were crazy money so I passed.

At some point shorty after I picked up a SCI FI magazine because it had an article on SW. Flipping through I ran across ads for vintage figures! Quite a few of them in baggies and some MOCs. At $6 a piece I ordered one of each of the baggies and gasp I did open them for the start of my loose set. To my defense this was before I knew about multipacks or the significance of baggies. I just thought they were packed that way as overstock. I started picking up any magazine I could find that I thought might have ads. Quite a few of them asked for Self Addressed Stamped Envelopes to get their lists, so I start mailing them out and finding all the sources I could to work on my loose set. Around this same time period our family went on a vacation to Florida and while on the trip I flipped through the Yellow Pages and found an ad for Intergalactic Trading Co. I was able to convince the family to make a stop and couldn't believe what I saw. It was a huge store completely dedicated to SW. They had all kinds of boxed vehicles, MOC figures, etc. Being still in my early teens and not having a lot of money I just bought a cut card Royal Guard, a loose Boba, and a few other misc items. I got on their mailing list and received their catalogs for several years.

It was around mid '95 that a friend got "the internet" hooked up at his house. He gave me a demo and that same day by fate I found the archive. Him and another friend were playing around while I was nerding out and soaking up every piece of information I could find there. After that experience I knew i had to convince my dad to get the internet. Luckily, he is into tech much like I am, so I made a deal that I'd buy the 14.4k modem and he'd pay for the monthly service. I found out about rassc and would read it pretty much every day, but only made the one post that I've shared a few times.

In the summer of '96 I went to my first convention in California as part of a road trip with a friend. I loved the dealer room, looking around and seeing vintage all over the place. It was there that I picked up my canadian Jabba playset and a few more loose figures. I saw Sansweets presentation on Shadows of the empire and there was a brief mention of the special editions. It was a lot of fun.

Not much else changed for me the rest of the 90's. I took a few breaks here and there, so that loose set took my quite a while to finish. It wasn't until the early 2000's that I got to the POTF figures which were quite expensive for me then and I started using ebay regularly. I don't remember when I found out about RS, but I started reading there after RASSCV pretty much died. It wasn't until 2005 that I finally registered and came out of the shadows. I made it to my first celebration for IV where it was a bit closer for me to make it, but after that I didn't want to miss one ever again. It's just an amazing feeling being around so many fans and other collectors. It gives you such a SW high.

Since joining a few of the SW forums, I've finally gotten into the social aspect and glad to have made some great friends. I love helping other collectors and had no idea of the kind of help I would receive back. Like some of the others, I'm in contact with them more than any of my local friends. It's great to have people to talk to about the various aspects of the hobby and even just about what's going on in life in general. I'm also glad to have been able to help with the starting of TIG and to see how far we've come in just over a year.


So there's my history in collecting and I hope it shows how the hobby changed for me over the years. And here's to many more.

I started collecting vintage SW in Nov. of '09. When I was a kid I "collected" SW until sometime after ROTJ. I never even knew POTF was around till two years ago. Through my early teens and into my early twenties girls were FAR more important than any collecting. Somewhere along the way I picked up a POTF2 Boba Fett. I know I did because he's there in my display case as I type this. I have no idea when I did though. That was all through the 90s. After my wife and I got together back in '98 the collecting bug hit because she was into The Beatles and The Who. I started getting the odd KISS figure and other stuff. Jason, Michael Myers, Dracula etc. if I liked it I'd pick one up when I could. My wife alos collects Coke stuff so i got into that a little.

So my "collecting" was a mismash of things for years. I thought we had alot of stuff but it turned out we had a small apartment .
Strange as it sounds to many I'm sure, I didn't get my first computer until 2008. Pretty strange huh? Anyway at that time collecting anything was really on the back burner. Facebook and email were pretty much all I used the thing for. Then somtime that year I tried ebay and got some Hulk figures.

One night I was on Ebay and decided to look at some "old Star Wars figures". The term vintage wasn't known to me yet. I think the first little lot I bid on had an FX-7, Dengar, Death Squad Commander, and a really loose DSD in it. When they came in the mail it was really cool. That was sometime in Nov. of 2009. In Dec. of '09 I somehow found RS and joined Christmas eve I belive. It was the first board of that type I had ever joined. It took some time to learn how things worked and for awhile had the "noob" feeling that new guys weren't welcome. I feel I fit right in now. I just found this board last week and love it here too now.

I've gone through some changes in my collection in the last almost two years. Loose vintage figures and modern were bought at the same pace at first. The focus has now shifted to almost strictly vintage with the very odd modern that catchs my eye. I want to finish my loose set and that isn't something that I need done tomorrow. Bootlegs have grabbed my soul. I've started to grab the odd cheap MOC (Beaters). I have a focus on IG-88 as well. Vehicles are not a huge priority, I just don't have the space. But lately I've wanted a Y-Wing for some reason.

Mainly lately I've been loving the friendships I've begun in the last couple of months. Finding and making friends came with not buying so much on ebay and buying more off the boards. Now I feel as though I fit in.

That's my story in a rambling nutshell.

Personally, I think this is one of the better threads in a long time. We as collectors should consider ourselves lucky to have the opportunity to collect awesome toys, but also meet people from all over the world in a hobby we enjoy. I have met and hung out with people from different parts of the world and each experience has been enlightening and eye opening.

I am not sure if the hobby has changed me, but I think we as collectors change the hobby. As times goes by and the toys get older (us included), we can look back and reflect on a special time in our life. From the old AOL forums to the Racciv forums to Archive Forums (yes, they did exist at one time) to the current forums of today, each collector has forged their own path and touched others in the process. Though my family is very important to me, so are collectors I have met or chatted with over the years. When I get the opportunity to meet them in person, I feel honored. Some of the best moments from each Celebration are the room sales and having Dinner with fellow collectors. The moment I walk in the hotel, it has hard to believe three or so years have passed since I last saw them.

The hobby is a part of me and will be when my toys (except one) are long gone. A time for reflection and joy that I met and immersed myself in others lives is a great feeling.