Alert: GameValueNow is Manipulating their Pricing On CIB Games

[O.G. CIB | 415]

3 minutes ago, austin532 said:

Does @Hogie have any say so in this or does GoCollect completely own the site now?

He ZERO say or influence ..... the site was sold and is under sole ownership of the company he sold it to. 

[jonebone | 1,307]

6 hours ago, Magus said:

This was nothing more than a bug/unexpected side effect from a change made this week , and it was just fixed.......but continue to bust out the pitchforks and conspiracy theories lol. I should have noticed it sooner myself i admit, but tbh i am in the middle of buying a house and have been spread a little thin this week. 

There is no secret algorith of future sales or price manipulation. Take all 15 of the CIB sales from Lolo 3, add them up and divide by 15 if you don't believe me. You get $95.03...which is what is currently showing. This was fixed across the board, but if you see any prices that look "inflated" let us know. 

@ThePhleo If you want to PM me which game, i can maybe try and figure out what happened here and why the price changed as much as you say it did. 



 

Goldeneye and Lolo 3 are still showing for exactly the same price as when I made the post.  Maybe at midnight their algorithm busted again, wouldn't surprise me.

I don't know why you support these guys and then act condescending when the community has had enough of their bullshit?  They don't care about collectors they care about money.  They made that clear with NA and they've made it clear by removing VGA sales to promote their own Wata interest.  

They did a Beta for months, and still can't get it right when going live?  And these are paid experts?  

[a3quit4s | 4,102]

I see it from both sides I guess. I do not envy GVN for trying to track eBay prices of thousands of games, especially based on keywords and when every game eBay sale has bullshit keywords in it and prices are all over the fucking place these days. Prices on a few games are bound to get screwed up and then legitimate sales for a game one day are $40 and the next they are $400. An impossible task. 
 

From the “informed” consumer side - like members of this community who are made up a lot of former NA folks and saw how GoCollect came in, said they were going to make things better and at hour zero crapped out an embarrassment of once what was. Now the GoCollect “corporation” has its fingers in WATA and now GVN and are turning something we liked doing into an all out cash grab. While it’s nice to see game collecting being shown as something cool and also incredibly irritating to have it exploited and having redefined as an “investment”.

While there is no doubt price manipulation happening left and right with WATA and HA being in the spotlight in that. As an engineer I don’t fault GVN for having glitches that skew some prices here and there. I think like most software products it’s become about how many features we can add in one day and ignore the issues at the base of what the product is supposed to do. At this point it should be someone’s full time job to look up random games, check the eBay sold/completed, make sure the data is correct, and move onto the next. Is GVN skipping the QA portion of the SDLC?

Edited September 3, 2020 by a3quit4s
To be honest I’m still a PriceCharting user, I like the simplicity of the site.

[RegularGuyGamer | 2,013]

2 hours ago, jonebone said:

They made that clear with NA and they've made it clear by removing VGA sales to promote their own Wata interest. 

Whhaatt? I didn't know they did this. Clearly a red flag considering that most of the grades games out there are likely to be VGA given the length of time it's been around. 

[Jeevan | 8,911]

@a3quit4s I have never really used GVN, Im strictly a pricecharting person!!!!  Mainly because of the takeover, but I got into this late in the game and pricecharting was my first one I looked at for price guide.

[LeatherRebel5150 | 1,056]

3 hours ago, jonebone said:

 

I don't know why you support these guys and then act condescending when the community has had enough of their bullshit?  They don't care about collectors they care about money.  They made that clear with NA and they've made it clear by removing VGA sales to promote their own Wata interest.  

They did a Beta for months, and still can't get it right when going live?  And these are paid experts?  

The tone of this towards Magus is a little harsh. I believe the guy is said he works for them right? And he himself has a passion for video games and probably takes a lot of pride in trying to do what he can to make the site as good as he can within the confines of his position/job. Just because the company he works for may suck, doesn't mean people should give him a negative tone. That's like giving the cashier crap when the grocery store has rotten fruit. 

He may show a condescending tone sometimes (I havn't noticed it), but that can happen when the messenger feels attacked for giving the message. There were times I would give people attitude at my job when all I hear were their complaints while they don't notice or care about the stuff I did/was currently improving.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting your post overall, but I just want to put into out there for Magus because the dude seems to take a lot of complaints about the site and seemingly does his best to influence positive change

[RH | 4,905]

4 hours ago, austin532 said:

Does @Hogie have any say so in this or does GoCollect completely own the site now?

I'm 99% sure he walked away when he sold the place.  I can't blame him.

[guitarzombie | 924]

I love wrestling because you can learn so much.  They're playing the comic book marks to our detriment that people will actually care about these games 20 years from now.  Theres at least one game on that list thats severely undervalued because it isn't collecting data properly, but why should I help them correct it?

[GPX | 1,370]

I’ve never used GVN before, and I’m one of those collectors who buys from my personal observations of the price trends on online stores or forums. 

Is GVN averaging only the items from completed listings? Or are they also including BIN prices that have yet to be sold? If it’s the latter, then it’s easy to imagine why the average would be nonsensical in today’s market of inflated prices.

[Gloves | 11,783]

1 minute ago, GPX said:

I’ve never used GVN before, and I’m one of those collectors who buys from my personal observations of the price trends on online stores or forums. 

Is GVN averaging only the items from completed listings? Or are they also including BIN prices that have yet to be sold? If it’s the latter, then it’s easy to imagine why the average would be nonsensical in today’s market of inflated prices.

Unless they've changed it from when I worked on it (to my knowledge they have not), they do not include games that have not been sold already. It'd be nonsensical to do so, as all it'd take for ANYONE to manipulate the values would be to post up a game at a ridiculously high price and watch it soar.

[GPX | 1,370]

2 minutes ago, Gloves said:

Unless they've changed it from when I worked on it (to my knowledge they have not), they do not include games that have not been sold already. It'd be nonsensical to do so, as all it'd take for ANYONE to manipulate the values would be to post up a game at a ridiculously high price and watch it soar.

I get the sense that market manipulation is at an all time high. So I guess my point/pondering, is that GVN might not be the source of market manipulation, but it’s directly proportional to the amount of market manipulation that’s out there?

I guess this is why forums are still useful, as we can price check with each other to get a general feel of the trends vs BS.

[BlackVega | 583]

Never trust any statistics website ever. Always take them as some sort of reference point with a HUGE grain of salt

[SandbagX | 7]

But what is the solution?  How can we devise a formula to more accurately reflect the approximate value of a game without manipulation?

[Ferris Bueller | 495]

Back when I used to track prices for the Aftermarket Archive, my "algorithm" was if a title had a bunch of sales, average them out. If the item was rarer and sales were say once a year, I would either set that as the new price point or maybe average out the last two.

[arch_8ngel | 1,597]

1 hour ago, SandbagX said:

But what is the solution?  How can we devise a formula to more accurately reflect the approximate value of a game without manipulation?

Presumably you'd need to come up with a distribution curve that highlights the outlier prices as outliers, and shows both the median sale price (over some period of time) as well as the distribution of sale points around that median.

Distilling it down to a single end-all "value" number is nonsensical with sales volumes as small as this (i.e. the market is too thin), and an opaque algorithm is just going to cause mistrust.

 

But you can VERY OPENLY AND CLEARLY -- state:

(1) the "median sale price" (over last x-weeks)

(2) show all sales (over last x-weeks) as a distribution

(3) show the numerical average (over last x-weeks)

(4) identify the "percentile" of various prices/sales

(5) couple that with a time-history of the known sales

 

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are going to look at that and:

(a) , see either the average or median and latch onto that "one number".

or

(b) just look at the last sales price as their "one number"

 

But at least it would be 100% clear what was being presented, for anyone who cared enough to dig deeper, versus what sounds like an evolving algorithm that is overweighting high-price outliers.

 

And you could couple all of that with whatever the population/volume of BIN listings are and their distribution, so that people have a clear "top end" reference for what is immediately obtainable without negotiation or shopping around.

 

EDIT: as an example, go look at how TrueCar shows sales price distributions

 

 

2nd EDIT:  for how upset people are about this -- an all seriousness, if somebody web-savvy is sufficiently familiar with the data-scraping that populates the price information, I would be happy to talk further about how this information could be presented better than what GVN is doing. 

3rd EDIT: is the idea that GVN is monetizing click-through to eBay sales? What is their actual business model?

Edited September 3, 2020 by arch_8ngel

[A_Feisty_Pickle | 244]

Looks like PriceCharting is broken too.

[docile tapeworm | 4,198]

how do you guys feel about ebay/sold/auction/most recent date and then use your brain (edit: aka taking even those sales with a grain of salt and understanding the value of condition)?

Edited September 4, 2020 by docile tapeworm

[Doctornick | 419]

7 hours ago, docile tapeworm said:

how do you guys feel about ebay/sold/auction/most recent date and then use your brain (edit: aka taking even those sales with a grain of salt and understanding the value of condition)?

I only buy from collections with pedigree now to avoid that.  Then I add a 0 to the end of my offer, and call my broker.

[docile tapeworm | 4,198]

1 hour ago, Doctornick said:

I only buy from collections with pedigree now to avoid that.  Then I add a 0 to the end of my offer, and call my broker.

buddy you are in luck. i just happen to know such a fella  

[Richardhead | 2,813]

10 hours ago, docile tapeworm said:

how do you guys feel about ebay/sold/auction/most recent date and then use your brain (edit: aka taking even those sales with a grain of salt and understanding the value of condition)?

Oh man. I haven’t gotten a positive best offer in quiet a while.

WATA is life bitches !!!

[GPX | 1,370]

Honestly, I think we’ve reached an era where games prices are fluctuating at a rate of knots. Websites for evaluating prices of games are not going to be able to keep up as easily. So it’s best if people are a little more observant on auction/sold listings, with some grains of salt. Also it’s important to compare prices with comparable condition.

[Magus | 169]

On 9/3/2020 at 5:11 AM, jonebone said:

Goldeneye and Lolo 3 are still showing for exactly the same price as when I made the post.  Maybe at midnight their algorithm busted again, wouldn't surprise me.

I don't know why you support these guys and then act condescending when the community has had enough of their bullshit?  They don't care about collectors they care about money.  They made that clear with NA and they've made it clear by removing VGA sales to promote their own Wata interest.  

They did a Beta for months, and still can't get it right when going live?  And these are paid experts?  

Do you not see the hypocrisy of calling ME condescending after all the condescending posts people are posting here, not just towards GVN, but towards me? Including you and some of your posts. And if i did come across as condescending it was definitely not my intention and i apologize. But you can't imagine how frustrating it is to pour time into making a site better, troubleshoot issues, and have people talk and treat you the way some have here as if this is all my fault. I had one member poking fun at me in a thread that wasn't even GVN related. Some of you are understanding that i am just a middleman who is doing what he can and i appreciate that. Others not so much. And i don't even have to be posting here at all, i do it because i choose to. Rick was always involved in the community, and i wanted to keep that same spirit and do the same. I genuinely want the site to be better, so when you point out issues, i want to be able to fix them. 

And no, those games have actually been fixed, hopefully for good this time. You might have caught the small window where like you said, they reverted back because of something in the programming reset at midnight and had to be permantly fixed, but my point is, if you just gave me a chance to try and fix this and explain what's going on before jumping to baseless accusations it would have been a lot more fair. Instead you made a wild claim about price manipulating for what was a simple error. A major error, but a simple mistake that can be fixed. 

I don't think you understand how much goes on behind the scenes to make a site like GVN work tracking tens of thousands of games, and hundreds of thousands of sales. 



 

Edited September 7, 2020 by Magus

[Mega Tank | 963]

1 hour ago, Magus said:

But you can't imagine how frustrating it is to pour time into making a site better, troubleshoot issues, and have people talk and treat you the way some have here as if this is all my fault.

1 hour ago, Magus said:

I don't think you understand how much goes on behind the scenes to make a site like GVN work tracking tens of thousands of games, and hundreds of thousands of sales.

 

I don't have a personal problem with you as I recall I never did. I would check my PM's but that site many people poured their time into making it better got blasted, by the same people you work for. It is puzzling how you fail to realize why some people have an issue with the people you work for and why you are taking the heat.

 

[Richardhead | 2,813]

This is a good old fashioned witch hunt right here. Same thing that made NA such a great place to be. Quick! Everyone get their pitchforks and run @Magusright out the door. Then when that’s done, we gotta find someone else

In all seriousness though, what the actual fuck is going on here. GVN has always sucked a fat one. So guess what? I never used it. But to put another member here on blast because of who he works for is ridiculous. Take that shit over to the discord.

[LeatherRebel5150 | 1,056]

1 hour ago, Mega Tank said:

 

I don't have a personal problem with you as I recall I never did. I would check my PM's but that site many people poured their time into making it better got blasted, by the same people you work for. It is puzzling how you fail to realize why some people have an issue with the people you work for and why you are taking the heat.

 

Dude are you serious? Your justifying giving @Magus shit for working for people that no one likes? Do you go kick the gardener in the shins that works at a Trump golf course too, or spit on a cashier because the department store they work for uses shady practices to get their product? Im not a fan of the new owners either but unless you have some evidence that Magus is apart of this whole price manipulation conspiracy then there is no reason he should be subject to the ridicule directed toward the owners. If I was him I would tell you guys to piss up a rope and not take anymore feedback from here.

Edited September 7, 2020 by LeatherRebel5150