I was not criticising, its great to see a guitar that is obviously being played a LOT, enough to cause that wear in a relatively short time. However, that does make it look as if that guitar has had a 'hard' life thus far - a 'workman's' tool which is superb - but from another perspective, you could argue that its become 'damaged' due to that, not necessarily a fault of manufacture which is what is covered by warranty.
(...)
A gig? LOL. I cannot even properly play an F chord.
A understand your perspective and tend to agree. I don't have the urge to be compensated for the broken bird neck, I was just wondering if in such cases warranty is worth anything.
On the other side, I have always dealt the guitar with the highest caution. Never tossed into the wall or any other furniture, never dropped it, treated with much care. I regularly maintain her, clean the body, the frets. I keep it on a guitar stand. I always use it at home. I am not an ignorant player. What is a 100 percent sure that the damage is not the result of ignorant use or an accident.
There is one thing (among many other :-D ) I need to work on when it comes to posture is to try to loosen my grip. A tighter grip however will never be able to inflict such pressure on the guitar neck that makes the bird's neck snap.
As I said, I am a novice player. Started to play the guitar barely a year ago. This is my first decent guitar. What I do with it is what all beginners do: learn and play the open chords, play scales, mainly chromatic and pentatonic, and riffs from my favorite music, mainly Iron Maiden and Metallica. I don't even have the knowledge to damage the guitar by "hard play", as you say. I wish I had!
In some cases I find myself pressing the strings against the frets harder then I should, but this is again typical beginners fault. Frets wear out by time, but again, in my opinion, it has nothing to do with the inlay.
Having said that, my assumption is that the damage may be due to material fatigue of some sort.
I can live with it, no question as it is barely visible by plain sight.
I'll keep you posted once I got the feedback from the seller.