Missing parts - am I the only one?

Thing is - I've been buying and playing for four years and had no misspacks until latelly. And it's extra aggravating that we're talking about very expensive models. So this is why I wonder if things went bad as of late or if I'm just really unlucky.

I've had it happen a number of times over the years, from Dahlia missing her flute to Reivers not having any bases to getting 2 right arms on a solo. It unfortunately happens. I give lots of credit to Privateer Press and their parts replacement policy - I've never had a problem getting a replacement part from a mispack.

Just unlucky.

For the last 4 years I have been a quality engineer at a car assembly plant where there are 350+ people hand assembling parts onto cars. I am also a Six Sigma Black Belt, which in manufacturing and assembly is a bit of a certification all about leading quality improvement efforts. A lot of times when you dig into the root cause of a pervasive quality defect it will often boil down to: "Who screwed up and how?" Human error is typically the single biggest source of variation from your finished product being different from what it was intended to be.

Something to keep in mind is that all of these boxes are packed by people and they do make mistakes. Some people make more mistakes than others. Sometimes good packers will be interrupted in their work flow and screw up. There are a lot of methods that PP could employ to make sure that all of their blisters and boxes are packed properly - whether they use them or not is a different story.

Saying that Privateer Press is "selling models for money they do while giving NO damn about quality is really dishonest" is a bit of an over-reaction and taking your bad luck a little personally. From one gamer to another I'm sorry that you've had the bad luck that you've had. I bet that almost everybody of the people at PP care a lot about quality. Based upon what I have seen over the 25 years of experience in working in manufacturing, I bet that many in PP think that they have "a good handle on their quality problems" when they can actually do better.

Some want to do better but don't know how.

There *might* be a very rare few low-level, under-paid, under-educated bottom feeder jerks here and there in the company that don't give a damn about quality simply because lightning strikes are not as random as they need to be in life.

You *might* have fallen victim to one of these people who needs to have lightning strikes re-distributed in their direction. Maybe. Regardless, I am sorry for your luck.

You think that's bad, my "Deathjack" had half a old Seether inside instead.

And it's not like they get more money for incomplete models. They end up paying for shipping the missing parts. And that's the right thing to do, of course. But I'm sure they try to have as few misshaps as possible.

Just to add to the chorus I've had 5 huge bases in the past two years or so (Xerxis2, Mammoth, Desert Hydra, Lylyth3, Prime Axiom) and none of them had anything wrong. My Typhon was missing his feet though. In any event I don't think it's anything new or related to the big kits specifically.