It's good for a company to be optimistic - but it can also cause problems when that company bases its decisions on over-estimating their ability to make things happen the way they envision.
Thunderball and Piledriver are both good figures and it makes sense that they share the same body, but we still don't like Hasbro's way of making new characters into variants; the distribution just isn't good enough to make it work the way it's supposed to. Heck, the only reason that I have Piledriver (and Viper) is because I traded for them with a fellow collector in Los Angeles - while I was failing to find Piledriver and Viper, he was failing to find Thunderball and Madame Masque, so a direct swap helped us both out. It's great that the internet can bring fans together like that, but it's a shame that the only place(s) either of us could find the figures we needed to complete Series 2 were 3,000 miles away from where we were actually shopping. This same "variant character" thing is happening in Series 3, so our suggestion is that you start making friends in different time zones.
