GWS 2025: Are collectors different?

By Jon Freitag

From the Great Wargaming Survey, we know that wargamers enjoy different aspects of the hobby. Some hate painting, and love gaming, some prefer the quiet time with paints and a model, and some lucky wargamers like every single thing about this hobby. Collectors, those who enjoy buying and painting the miniatures but don't play much or not at all, are one sub-set. Do they dislike other things about the hobby than the general wargaming population? This question came up after the previous analysis about what wargamers liked least about the hobby: The things we love to hate. Methods and approach can be found in the previous analysis in the link above.

First posed on the Society of Ancients forum by Gavin and then again on Facebook, he posed the question: "what do those whose primary interest is collecting find are their barriers to wargaming?"

To identify the population of collectors, I choose only those survey respondents who picked "Collecting the miniatures" as their top choice in the question on what is the best part of the hobby. Out of the more than 4,000 entries, 512 respondents fell into this sample. Undoubtedly, a large enough group to work with.

As a reminder, the responses of the entire survey population fell into four groupings (clusters) when asked about their least-liked aspects of the hobby. This can be seen in the Figure 1 Principal Component Analysis (PCA). They were related to painting and hobby; cost; opponent behavior; and finding opponents.

When we narrow down the group to those who chose "Collecting the miniatures" as their favorite part of the hobby, the 512 responses produce the following PCA (figure 2).

In both analyses, the same keyword tokens rise to the top and four clusters emerge. Interestingly, for collectors the PCA analysis sees some group shuffling compared to the clusters seen in the analysis for the entire population. The four clusters and their typologies in the Collectors Only analysis are shown in Figure 3.

This keyword cluster in the upper right quadrant gathers those respondents who do not like the challenges of finding miniatures, opponents, or useful information along with feeling weighed down by the labor and material demands needed to produce armies for gaming. Perhaps gaming, itself, provides challenges? Respondents in this group tend to struggle finding hobby things which time pressures compound. Preparation and painting backlogs can be frustrating. Notice that "time" migrated from the painting/miniatures burden cluster in the overall analysis into the "find" cluster for Collectors Only.

In the upper left quadrant, competition and people are closely aligned. Rules-lawyers, while part of this cluster, produces less correlation (shown as a shorter vector) that remains closer to the origin. Respondents in this group seem more dissatisfied by interpersonal friction, overly competitive play, and argumentative rules culture. Notice that while gaming is included in this cluster, gaming is distinct and somewhat distant from competition and people. The close proximity to the Dim1 axis suggests that gaming is a common pain-point to both the Social/Culture and Access/Time clusters.

In the lower right quadrant, the close alignment of miniatures and painting in this cluster highlights the positive association between this pair of keywords. This distinct material / preparation cluster suggests that respondents in this cluster see assembly and painting, figure quality, and even a massive backlog of unpainted figures as the main source of pain. It is interesting to note that there is a direct opposition along the vertical axis between Social/Culture dissatisfaction on the left and the Burden dissatisfaction on the right. In this collector-first group, wargamers who mainly object to competition and gaming culture appear statistically distinct from those mainly troubled by the burden of painting and miniature accumulation.

Again, cost arises as an independent factor. It does not align clearly with any one cluster suggesting that financial aspects are common and secondary to all of the groups' least-liked aspects of the hobby.

Examining this subset of responses suggests that collectors’ least-liked aspects of wargaming fall into three broad concerns. The first sees a difficulty accessing and finding time to pursue the hobby. The second sees the burden of painting and owning miniatures. The third focuses on dissatisfaction with competitive or socially challenging gaming culture. Cost is recognized as a complaint but appears less decisive than the other three components.

The clusters in Figure 3 generally mirror the clusters in the original PCA which examined the whole population. Having similarity between clusters lends weight to stability of these data. Seeing migration of some keywords among clusters is especially interesting. For the collectors' subset, gaming becomes less of a dividing issue in any one cluster. That inference makes sense if your focus is on collecting rather than on gaming; it's simply not as important. In the Collectors Only analysis, gaming appears a common thread to both Access/Time and Social/Culture clusters. Rather than finding "people" in the Access/Time cluster as in the broad population study, "people" migrates to the Social/Culture cluster. Seems people are no longer sought out but to be avoided! The strongest contrast is between respondents bothered by the hobby’s social/competitive environment and those bothered by its material, preparatory, and practical demands. How does the hobby lessen these two extreme pain points?

While the Collectors Only group has much in common with the broader hobby results which attempt to qualify the least-liked aspects of wargaming, there are a few subtle but important differences. If you consider yourself primarily a collector, does your experience align with others who put collecting miniatures first?