I'm not sure if you were directing this at me or not, but I was offering some suggestions based on the fact that nz17 was asking for them. I wasn't trying to step on any toes or anything like that.Originally Posted by stonic
The fact is, I personally don't have much time to devote to much of anything nowadays. It's why I post relatively rarely on here. I spend my free time raising my young son, running the GOAT Store, and organizing the Midwest Gaming Classic. I'd love to have a bunch more hours of free time, but I don't.
I will say this though -- I learned a long time ago and still believe it to this day, the best projects that you can do are ones that you feel really strongly about. With the MGC, there have been times where other organizers have come to me with things that I don't necessarily agree with doing. If by challenging them, they can come back with a better plan and they are still convinced to do it, usually I end up agreeing with them. If by challenging them, they drop the idea right away, it means that it wasn't that great of an idea to begin with. I can sit on the phone and have discussions (or 'debates') with other organizers that from an outside standpoint would look like we were fighting, but at the end of the day, it makes for a better show and everyone knows that.
Even when I first started posting here, I thought that the price guides were off. That isn't a knock on anyone -- it's just that prices fluctuate like mad, so trying to put a price on anything for a year at a time is a tough proposition, I think. I still appreciate that the rarity guides are there, and sometimes I will use them to try to better figure out the price or rarity of a game that I just picked up for putting it up on the GOAT Store. But, if the goal is to make the DP guide the standard for pricing, I think it needs to be stepped back from and looked at.
From another hobby I have, pinball, there are some people who put out a price guide every year. In looking at that guide, there are almost always games that seem to be grossly either underpriced or overpriced. It's tough to get a guide that really works for everyone and everything, and it is something that I don't envy anyone for trying to do. Having said that, in today's day and age of Amazon, eBay and the Internet in general having seemingly one of everything for sale at any given point in time, it makes me wonder if price guides are even something you really can do any more.
Before the rise of online sales, I feel like the Funcoland papers were a great way to price things -- you could pick one up, and theoretically at least find that game for that price at a Funcoland. But, with the online marketplace being a free marketplace, it makes it a lot more difficult. A rarity guide I think is a lot easier to do, and potentially more useful too.
Having said that, I see a lot of games go through my hands every year, and even I don't think I would be comfortable trying to write up a rarity guide for many consoles. It is a massive, massive task, and one which sadly I do think lends itself more to having people challenge each other to figure out which things are wrong and slowly working itself out right than anything else.
I'd love to help improve those guides -- I've talked with Joe in the past about how I'd like to eventually have the DP rarity on each product page so people knew right there, and I do for the most part feel like the rarity is pretty much spot on -- but I really don't know how much I would feel comfortable doing.
Again though, I like the idea -- but if it could be tweaked to be a rarity guide with checklist, with the option for me to make the checklists custom to be the things that I am interested in collecting, it would be awesome for me. I have not (and don't want to) spend the time to add the PAL Dreamcast games to my PDA one at a time, but I'd be all over it (and paying for it!) as an app for a device, if I had said device. I hope we can use constructive criticism to make the device even better.
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