'Old' collectors: how have things changed?

[LightingElectricDream]

I recall in 2002 my mom buying me
Sundance
Ivy
And tipsy tulip
From ebay all costing around $15 to !10
And mint in box. Sweet memories. Altho I would have perfered to have g1.. mom did not a prove of buying a used toy. And thought that $20 pony in 2003 was just greedy.

I being 12 years old tried to explain the pony thing to her. But she was suspicious of mlp forms this one and mlptp and high ebay prices.

She told me I'll only get you a G1 if it's mint in box. But they where pretty high even then. But I wouldn't wanna open a G1 so it was a pointless argument.

Actuelly what got me back into collecting was finding a firefly shirt in 2012 i was 20? for $12
Mom said I'm not buying that it's too thin and $12 was too much for a shirt. I has no job at the time :p

Reminded me of another time when I was 10 years old i found a so soft paradise at a yard sale for 10 cents and mom said no beacuse it was dirty. Every G1 everything mom said no to so I got tired of it and Boom!

HI my name is Tirzah I am 25 and I collect G1 ponies.
I have found 100 G1 ponies than less than a year, useing craigs list ebay and etsy. Also a few flea markets and meet ups through mlptp. Unemployed at the time so I sold anything I could on ebay to pay for it. And I did it all myself.

Anywho I do recall my best memories being 9 years old and going to the hand made websites and dreamvally, to try and collect ponies. Never happened until adulthood and all my ponies from when I was a baby where gone.

[goddessofpeep]

I think one of the biggest differences is that there really wasn't any moderation anywhere.  It was sort of like the wild west:p  People just did their thing, and there were A LOT of flame wars.  Dream Valley chat got shut down due to people...misusing it for more "adult" reasons. The Ponypeople mailing list was one of the main places to discuss ponies, and that would erupt into flame wars on an almost daily basis.  The MLPTP eventually became a forum, and that wasn't moderated either.  In fact, the founder of the TP(and the person with all the admin access passwords) just left one day(as in disappeared from the internet entirely), and it was up to the community as a whole to try to keep things under control.  Since there was no way to ban anyone, or do anything but yell at them or ignore them(which was often next to impossible for the really big problem people), the usual way to get rid of the really vocal problem people was to run them out of the community with public and private harassment. It wasn't fun for the people on the receiving end of that.  The Arena was created after a particularly bad flame war raged on the MLPTP for a few weeks.  Eventually the MLPTP moved to a new site entirely so that it could be started up fresh - with brand spanking new moderators that could ban people.  It used to be MLPTP.com, not .net, but they had to abandon the entire thing and start again since the person who owned the URL and everything on it disappeared. 

It sounds pretty bad with all the flaming and stuff, but I think the community was a lot closer back then as there were a lot fewer people.  Almost everybody knew each other, or at least knew of them by name.  Now there are just so many people, I don't recognize most of the people here.  There were a lot of flame wars, but a good chunk of them were started by a small group of people.  The rest of the community kind of knew each other better than now, and kind of stuck together.  Scammer information got passed around really well, and real names and towns were usually posted so it was a lot easier to track aliases.  Some scammers had A LOT of aliases, but once their address started circulating around, it was a lot harder for them to change their name.  There was a real sense of community, and that everyone was mostly looking out for everyone else.  There were personality clashes(a LOT of personality clashes), but there was a general consensus on the values of the community.  Well, for the most part. 

The world as a whole didn't pay much attention to us.  We were just this little niche group of vintage girl toy collectors - not this crazy mass of tv show fans you see today.  We pretty much didn't exist as far as the rest of the internet was concerned.  There weren't MLP youtube channels, or articles about pony fans.  There weren't even any MLP items available in most stores outside thrift stores, antique stores, and flea markets.  No tv show to attract new fans - only people who had the toys and loved them.  There weren't any huge conventions.  Your average pony meet had less than 15 people attending, and they were mostly home grown stuff in somebody's backyard. 

There also weren't any prototype ponies leaked from China, so anything new that came out was a surprise.  You either got your information from backcards/brochures that came with the ponies, or because someone found something in a store and posted it online.  Up until the G3s, there wasn't really any site that concentrated on collecting the new information into one place, so you really had to pay attention and do a lot of the work yourself.  And that also went for "new" G1 discoveries as well.  I was in the community when the first Greek pony hit ebay.  I saw the first Argentina pony be discovered, and pretty much every other Nirvana country after that.  There was a lot of misinformation out there.  The first Spanish "piggy" pony was thought to be a fakie, and several people laughed at the person who "wasted" $10 to buy it:p 

Prices have changed a lot, mostly going up.  Though there are a few rare cases of it going down.  Baby Cherries Jubilee regularly sold for over $300! 

Everything else seems to have gone up, and a lot of it in the last year or so.  You could get a Rapunzel for about $100 at one point.  I paid $8 for Red Roses, and didn't think I was getting that great a deal.  A $50 accessory lot could take you all evening to sort through.  I got a MOC Sealight(Sunshine pony) for $15.  For one glorious summer, the market was flooded with MIB Greek babies, and I actually chose not to buy a MIB Greek Baby Minty for $100, because "I could always pick it up later".

[achab1984]

I love reading all of this! Brings back a lot of memories! I still remember running back to all the ponies when I was little in all of the stores! That was in the late 80's and 90's. Was sad when the G2 ponies came out! And about fell over when I saw the G3 ponies for the first time in the store! I bought them all when I had enough money saved up!
Wish we could go back to those generations. After the G3's came to an end and the G3.5 came and so on ponies have gone down hill.  I am selling off most of my G4 ponies right now. I just cant get into them anymore. Keeping my older ones that I love!

[LadyMoondancer]

Oh yeah, there was a creepy guy who went by "Baby Lickety-Split" who hung around I thiiiink Dream Valley chat.  And by "creepy guy" I mean he tried to get young girls to send him inappropriate photos and cyber with him and so on.  I think he was eventually driven out.

Someone ran an ongoing fanfic that was called "Paradise Estate: The Soap Opera" or something like that.  All I really remember is that all the ponies in a set (for example, the Candy Cane Ponies) were always sisters.

Everyone had their own personal websites, and often the way you found trade partners was by looking at someone's want list or sales list on their website.

Oh, and there was a MLP webring!  Do webrings even exist anymore?

There was also the Ponypeople mailing list, which at first was the most active place to chat with other collectors.  There weren't very many of us, as goddessofpeep said, and everyone knew everyone.

There were about 6 to 8 pages of MLP stuff on eBay at any given time, and people used to go on Ponypeople and post "Please nobody bid on this auction, I really want to win it."  Eventually they made a rule against that, though. 

[kitkatvintage]

Reading the happenings of the last 24 hours on the ponypeople email group was my daily ritual when I got home from high school. I didn't want to join a message board (i.e. the original Trading Post) because it seemed too big and intimidating, lol!!

[Baby Sugarberry]

Ah, the early days.  It was a very different time.

There were no good search engines - mostly you had to get around by web rings and links.  Dream Valley was the go-to place for pony IDs.  Every couple of weeks (or month? I forget) there'd be a new song clip, using RealPlayer.  Was the first time I'd heard many of those old melodies since they first aired, like the sea pony song.

Trading was the place to be.  Buy and sell was far less popular because of the whole money order/cheque/cash issue mentioned already. I'd guess that the bulk of exchange was in pony-for-pony transactions.  Sending stuff was also a lot cheaper than today, for the most part.

I remember the pony name registry!  It's rather funny to think but there were literally far more pony names to go around than there were active collectors.  Setting up your trade list was tedious, because every pony needed their condition described in detail, since it wasn't that easy to get pictures (and there weren't really any places to host them, anyways.)

My Little Pony Monthly was my favourite thing, a news letter with fan stories and amusing articles written by other collectors.  Mostly it was stories, which came in serial instalments.  This is before the days of easy fan fiction aggregate sites.

[Rainbow Dash]

Anybody else remember Kingsley's?

[Shy Violet]

Wow all the fond memories. I was collecting around 1999-2004ish and then stopped when I moved out of home since I had rent to pay and didn't own a computer or anything at that point. My best memories are finding ponies at every garage sale and they'd be $0.20 each. I also liked going to the flea market every weekend and there is a guy there with a retro toy booth (he's still there!!!! but charges waaay more now). So those were my 2 biggest sources of ponies. I remember shopping on ebay a ton and I hated having to get a postal money order for each win. PayPal was the best thing ever once everyone started trusting it and it became the norm. I remember laying my ponies on my scanner to get photos of them for selling. I used to love looking at Dream Valley and seeing all the ponies I didn't know existed. I remember the Argentina ponies MOC that all of a sudden came up and no one knew if they were real or fakies. I bought one and still have it, my only MOC pony. I remember the ebay listings with no photos. I remember being horrified by the first G2 I saw at Toys R Us. Yeah it was a totally different world back then.

[BlushingBlue]

So many memories in this thread! The old pink-and-black MLPTP... the HOOF petition (and then the HORN petition when that "worked")... incorrigible Lexi... The good(?) old days.

Overall, ponies were mostly cheaper 20 years ago. Mainly because they were still considered garage sale fodder and not ~*vintage*~ collectibles. Unless you were looking for variants ("nirvana" had not yet been coined), you were much more likely to grow your collection by picking over the local thrift stores and swap meets. Of course, you were much more limited in what ponies were available to buy when you were relying on cheap local sources. Luck, patience, and/or a lot of early mornings were required to track down that set completer. No passively generated emails from eBay to help you out! On the plus side, most ponies had only been through one childhood's worth of play, so that long-awaited pony was more likely to be in good condition when you did find her.

Once eBay came on the scene, you weren't limited to scouring your local area, but it was kind of a crap shoot if you'd get what you expected. People back then didn't have instant cameras on their person at all times, so there were a lot of written descriptions. (Or no description at all!) Scanners weren't great at accurately rendering colors, so you saw a lot of weird looking pictures even when they were available. Sometimes you'd bid hoping that pony wasn't actually bizarrely colored... and sometimes hoping she was because new variants seemed to pop up all the time!

The highly sought-after ponies were somewhat different. Rapunzel was always spendy, but ponies like Lemon Treats weren't too terribly special. Mimic was going for more than her set-mates, but not that much more. The European babies (AJ, CJ, etc) were really hot items for a while. I seem to recall Baby Crumpet being extraordinarily expensive too. Because there wasn't as much searchable history on eBay prices, ponies' values could swing wildly based on a single auction's bid war.

There weren't handy little pocket computers to store your collection progress on, so you had either know your stuff backwards and forwards, or keep written records on hand while out hunting. I'm sure I'm not the only one who wasted a lot of spiral notebooks and dot-matrix printer paper on checklists. There wasn't a lot of accurate information gathered in one place, especially about non-US ponies, so you had to cobble things together from various sources. And this was before the time of Google, so navigation was done through webrings and link lists and Yahoo/Lycos/whatever searches, which was pretty tedious. Needless to say, there was not a wiki-anything back then.

The community was more... high-strung? But that's to be expected of young people, I think. It was certainly intimidating to jump into the DC/DV chats. There was more bickering and drama... or at least the fights were more visible back then. It didn't help matters that there was very little recourse if a deal went sour. Paypal was a distant daydream, and the US is terrible about bank transfers, so if you wanted to sell ponies, cash that was stolen and checks that bounced were common headaches. Money orders, mainly post office issued, were the safer option for sellers, but they were somewhat expensive and inconvenient to obtain for buyers. And you ran the risk of straight up scammers no matter what you did. Feedback was mostly not centralized, although you used to be able to leave feedback on eBay for off-site transactions. Fiona's Feedback Forum was available back in the day, but it was a much clunkier system than what we have now.

[Delaneys]

There was a true sense of community... any old members of the Church of the Mint on Card Mimic still around?  It was a group of "tongue in cheek" folks who pretended to worship the holy grail - a mint on card Mimic  =o).  Had a website and everything.

I don't remember there being pony meets before we hosted the first 2 Pony Paloozas (I'm sure there could have been though and we just tried to up the ante a bit) at our house in... 2002/2003 timeframe over labor day weekend?  Now they're so large, we had 40 or so people travel from around the world to be here and it was a big deal... people took turns sleeping in the pony room and it was a weekend of fun, game and trading.  We did things like "bobbing for sea ponies" (like bobbing for apples blind folded but you were pulling out sea ponies as quickly as you could), the long fakie drive contest (hitting fakies for distance with golf clubs), lots and lots of trivia, name that pony, art/drawing competitions, etc.  More than trading it was a great chance for people to actually meet each other and spend a few days with one another.  We actually did shuttle services to airports within 100 miles for folks ourselves.  It was a ton of work but it was great fun and amazing memories.

The scammers... non-paying bidders... shipping costs are what I am shocked at.  Could never have amassed what we did trading internationally what with the postal costs now.

[dragonfly]

I've grown a beard.
It is very long.
Now people can't see my bits even when I'm running around without pants.

here is a current picture of me. It was taken yesterday.
visitors can't see pics , please register or login

[Galactica]

I recall finding the Arena in the early days when it basically looked like a list?

But there was some infighting going on, and at the time it didn't seem like a friendly place to be.  I spent my time on other 1980s forums (webrings) ALL of which are now 99% defunct (people migrated to facebook).  The MLP Arena is the only major forum from the early days that is still around.

[BlushingBlue]

I've grown a beard.
It is very long.
Now people can't see my bits even when I'm running around without pants.

[Leave a Whisper]

Wow, the pony community and online community in general sounded pretty rough. Its neat to hear accounts about when the mlp community was just getting started.

[SkyCakes]

I wasn't around either at the time. However, reading these stories has been a eye opener to appreciate the great people on here now. Thanks mods!