Oh hey, this thread got necrobumped! :P

Looking back on what I wrote before about 3D printing characters, it occurred to me that one of the very advantages of it would be less investment cost to set it up, since you don't need to prepare a die/cast/mold that needs to churn out thousands of identical figurines to turn a profit off of it. By it's very design a production run of 1 unit is barely different in preparation than a run of 1000 units. What I don't know is how far along 3D printing is as a technology, if it's actually gotten to the stage where it's easy enough to do the complex shapes involved with figurines (ex. like hair strands hanging down), or for incorporating many colors into a single piece (the videos I've seen of printers are all monochrome). Still, it sounds really promising as a future possibility and with a lot of flexibility to produce not just characters, but any sort of mob/boss/other object like an aetheryte.

All that said, and pertaining to all kinds of merch in general, I think SE is really waiting to see if ARR succeeds as a game in its own right before considering dropping any significant level of investment in providing us swag for it.