Wata to release initial pop report later this month - NES only, no seal ratings

[spacepup | 2,404]

Please (all) stop with the petty and negative arguing that is targeted and aggressive.  This thread has been massively derailed by negativity, so let’s move on.

[tidaldreams | 654]

58 minutes ago, AnimalHouse said:

Ugh I have a bad feeling there going to jack the FedEx shipping price up when they move to Calif. On the other hand, maybe Wata's new master might utilize a cheaper alternative shipping service -> USPS. 

 

I have no idea why they have that dropdown menu when the only one you can select is Fedex. I'd rather just give them my UPS account to bill as it would give me a much cheaper rate

[Gulag Joe | 582]

Forreal though is the nes sealed population for Double Dribble less than 20 or has the Facebook research been determined to be inaccurate? I mean I guess we'll find out at the end of this month, right?

[3rdStrongestMole | 430]

I haven't even looked... did VGA get their pop reports working?? 

[Seth | 164]

4 hours ago, Gulag Joe said:

Forreal though is the nes sealed population for Double Dribble less than 20 or has the Facebook research been determined to be inaccurate? I mean I guess we'll find out at the end of this month, right?

What Facebook research do you mean? Can you point me to it?

[DoctorEncore | 3,691]

4 hours ago, Gulag Joe said:

Forreal though is the nes sealed population for Double Dribble less than 20 or has the Facebook research been determined to be inaccurate? I mean I guess we'll find out at the end of this month, right?

Man, I'd be absolutely shocked if there are less than 20 sealed copies of Double Dribble out there. I suppose it's possible Wata may have seen less than 20, but I'd figure the number would be in the hundreds.

[Gulag Joe | 582]

7 minutes ago, DoctorEncore said:

Man, I'd be absolutely shocked if there are less than 20 sealed copies of Double Dribble out there. I suppose it's possible Wata may have seen less than 20, but I'd figure the number would be in the hundreds.

Yea me too. I'm sure there are a bunch of VGA out there too. Maybe there are less than 20 non Rev-A sealed and it's specific to that particular variant.

@RETRO I can't point to it, it was something I saw in comments from a post sometime last year and I couldn't even tell you what post. I'm going with "that is an inaccurate assessment".

[Seth | 164]

6 minutes ago, Gulag Joe said:

Yea me too. I'm sure there are a bunch of VGA out there too. Maybe there are less than 20 non Rev-A sealed and it's specific to that particular variant.

@RETRO I can't point to it, it was something I saw in comments from a post sometime last year and I couldn't even tell you what post. I'm going with "that is an inaccurate assessment".

Got it.

In any way, to answer your question, Double Dribble ranks #160 out of 800+ NES games in market availability, as tracked at my publication. Eight copies have hit the 25 public markets surveyed since December 31, 2018, with five of those copies in the near-mint range or above. Price Charting tallies another five copies on eBay in the decade between 2008 and 2018, with four of those five in the near-mint range or above. So the 13-year tally is 13 copies, 9 in near-mint range or above.

This is just the number that have hit public markets; with private sales and games that went into (and stayed in) private collections, the number could certainly be slightly over 20. This said, remember that the forthcoming WATA pop report is WATA-only, so it's more likely to resemble—because WATA began issuing grades in 2018—the post-2018 data at my publication.

Hope this helps.

[Gulag Joe | 582]

4 minutes ago, RETRO said:

Got it.

In any way, to answer your question, Double Dribble ranks #160 out of 800+ NES games in market availability, as tracked at my publication. Eight copies have hit the 25 public markets surveyed since December 31, 2018, with five of those copies in the near-mint range or above. Price Charting tallies another five copies on eBay in the decade between 2008 and 2018, with four of those five in the near-mint range or above. So the 13-year tally is 13 copies, 9 in near-mint range or above.

This is just the number that have hit public markets; with private sales and games that went into (and stayed in) private collections, the number could certainly be slightly over 20. This said, remember that the forthcoming WATA pop report is WATA-only, so it's more likely to resemble—because WATA began issuing grades in 2018—the post-2018 data at my publication.

Hope this helps.

Thank you this is very helpful to know!

[tidaldreams | 654]

3 hours ago, RETRO said:

What Facebook research do you mean? Can you point me to it?

Facebook research = someone makes up a number, posts it on Facebook, and then everyone believes it to be true

[GPX | 1,369]

3 hours ago, RETRO said:

Got it.

In any way, to answer your question, Double Dribble ranks #160 out of 800+ NES games in market availability, as tracked at my publication. Eight copies have hit the 25 public markets surveyed since December 31, 2018, with five of those copies in the near-mint range or above. Price Charting tallies another five copies on eBay in the decade between 2008 and 2018, with four of those five in the near-mint range or above. So the 13-year tally is 13 copies, 9 in near-mint range or above.

This is just the number that have hit public markets; with private sales and games that went into (and stayed in) private collections, the number could certainly be slightly over 20. This said, remember that the forthcoming WATA pop report is WATA-only, so it's more likely to resemble—because WATA began issuing grades in 2018—the post-2018 data at my publication.

Hope this helps.

Just with the data alone, it can be misleading because official sales may be from the same game being passed on to the next sale. So 3 separate transactions might possibly be from the one same item. Also, the non-official sales are needed to fill in a more complete analysis of a more accurate population sample. This is where collectors who have been tracking the sales directly with their own eyes are likely to be more of value than just looking at the raw official sales data.

Edited November 12, 2021 by GPX

[Seth | 164]

26 minutes ago, GPX said:

Just with the data alone, it can be misleading because official sales may be from the same game being passed on to the next sale. So 3 separate transactions might possibly be from the one same item. Also, the non-official sales are needed to fill in a more complete analysis of a more accurate population sample. This is where collectors who have been tracking the sales directly with their own eyes are likely to be more of value than just looking at the raw official sales data.

I take your point, GPX, but I don't think "misleading" is the right word here, as—albeit that I can only speak for my own published analyses—they are very explicit and transparent about being "availability" analyses, meaning that if a game title is put on the market, bought, and then put on the market again, the analysis deems that it should count twice because it was made available to buyers for purchase via a public market twice.

Even putting that aside, because WATA didn't release their pop-report "matrix-reader" app in June 2018 as Deniz explicitly promised WATA customers in a media interview, it is harder than it should be to identify when a unique product is appearing more than once in a marketplace (not impossible, of course, as you can read the entirety of the front and back of a case for distinguishing characteristics if you're looking at a WATA case rather than a VGA case, but no one has the sort of time or resources to do that work for literally tens of thousands of video game titles).

As far as whether any human being alive can "track sales directly with their own eyes" across the 13-year period since VGA was founded—absolutely! They can. As to fewer than (say) ten titles out of the thousands and thousands of titles market analyses can capture. Like if a Ninja Gaiden expert tells me he has tracked 25 markets over 13 years to determine how many copies of The Dark Sword of Chaos have entered (1) public markets, (2) private sales, and (3) private not-for-sale collections across those more than two dozen markets over a more than a decade period, and if that collector has kept copious notes of these scores of transactions for over 10 years, and if I trust that person implicitly (because I know they're not a Ninja Gaiden reseller trying to over-hype products they personally own), I will take their word over a market analysis. But I can't imagine any other situation in which I would do so, as the idea that random collectors are tracking literally tens of thousands of transactions better than recorded market analyses is simply preposterous from every angle.

I know collectors—me very much included!—like to self-romanticize, especially when it comes to our knowledge base, but that's beyond the pale. Large-scale data-sets are best tracked via large-scale data analyses, not collectors hazily recalling rumors about game titles they aren't personally invested in (which, for all of us, is by volume well over 95% of all video ever games ever released).

Edited November 12, 2021 by RETRO

[ExplodedHamster | 404]

19 hours ago, OptOut said:

Heritage knows the pop report for the items they auction. Their tongue is so far and so firmly up WATA's ass they can TASTE the A++ seals! 

Anyway, Super Mario 64 9.8 A++ can't be rare when they've been grading fresh ass case packs of the game.

@ExplodedHamster just needs to tell himself that so he can sleep at night on his giant pile of blood money! 

Grading fresh ass case packs? VGA has graded ONE case pack in its nearly 15 years of grading games, and it was many years ago. Anyway, the numbers will likely be available in the next 6-12 months, so the noise right now is just that. We'll find out. 

All good here btw, I sleep just fine lol. 

Edited November 12, 2021 by ExplodedHamster

[ExplodedHamster | 404]

As for the population report and sealed games, the more I have envisioned it, the more I see how difficult it's going to be to put everything into one matrix. There are so many combinations that a matrix would be just gigantic if it was a simple excel type of chart. It would be unreadable the way I was thinking it could go. You'd have like 1 million columns.

Once you get it into app form, it will probably be easier, but in terms of giving a simple picture, like PSA does, it's far more difficult, if not impossible. There's too much data to make it that simple, particularly given the number of variants out there. There's going to need to be some clicking involved, or maybe some pop up tables when you hover a mouse over data. 

 

Edited November 12, 2021 by ExplodedHamster

[Gulag Joe | 582]

I would imagine Wata's pop report would be similar to what PSA does for sports cards and list the console and title of the game with a subsection of all the different variations they have graded for each title. Maybe the sorting part will be taken care of by that super awesome matrix technology their website has been hyping for the last 3 years that nobody has seen.

[ExplodedHamster | 404]

19 minutes ago, Gulag Joe said:

I would imagine Wata's pop report would be similar to what PSA does for sports cards and list the console and title of the game with a subsection of all the different variations they have graded for each title. Maybe the sorting part will be taken care of by that super awesome matrix technology their website has been hyping for the last 3 years that nobody has seen.

Yeah, but PSA only has one grade to show, which makes it easy. Card/variant as the column, and grades as the rows. How do you do that with two grades to show? 

You probably need something like box grades in the rows and then you click on the box grades to get a seal distribution? Or hover for a pop-up?

[Gulag Joe | 582]

26 minutes ago, ExplodedHamster said:

Yeah, but PSA only has one grade to show, which makes it easy. Card/variant as the column, and grades as the rows. How do you do that with two grades to show? 

You probably need something like box grades in the rows and then you click on the box grades to get a seal distribution? Or hover for a pop-up?

Autograph cards have 2 grades. They delineate it with 2 tabs. However, you can only see the population of how many cards have been signed and what that signature has been graded as, so there does indeed seem to be a challenge.

[tidaldreams | 654]

2 hours ago, ExplodedHamster said:

As for the population report and sealed games, the more I have envisioned it, the more I see how difficult it's going to be to put everything into one matrix. There are so many combinations that a matrix would be just gigantic if it was a simple excel type of chart. It would be unreadable the way I was thinking it could go. You'd have like 1 million columns.

Once you get it into app form, it will probably be easier, but in terms of giving a simple picture, like PSA does, it's far more difficult, if not impossible. There's too much data to make it that simple, particularly given the number of variants out there. There's going to need to be some clicking involved, or maybe some pop up tables when you hover a mouse over data. 

 

Well... yeah.... obviously. There are 7 seal grades multiplied by however many numerical grades there are = a big number.

Doing this would be akin to BGS doing all combinations of subgrades as different populations for their cards.

TBH i'm really not sure what the best solution is.

[OptOut | 8,883]

Man, you guys are making a real meal out of this one, aren't you? How complicated does it really have to be?

List all the games, click on the game you want to show the grades, click on the grade you want to see the seal ratings within that grade.

How hard is that?

[Seth | 164]

9 minutes ago, OptOut said:

Man, you guys are making a real meal out of this one, aren't you? How complicated does it really have to be?

List all the games, click on the game you want to show the grades, click on the grade you want to see the seal ratings within that grade.

How hard is that?

LOL! I agree with OptOut. The internet allows multi-layered data-sets via hyperlinking. The incredibly curtailed data package WATA is about to squeeze out like a turd it's been holding onto jealously for a dog's age needn't be—and surely won't be—arrayed in a single, analog-like spreadsheet page. This was never a hard hill for WATA to climb, they just weren't interested in publishing this data until new ownership and a series of public scandals forced them to do so. The three-year delay here (remember, Deniz said they were ready to publish full population reports in June 2018!) has nothing to do with a praxis or programming issue. This was just corporate politics, pure and simple.

Edited November 13, 2021 by RETRO

[inasuma | 1,203]

2 hours ago, ExplodedHamster said:

As for the population report and sealed games, the more I have envisioned it, the more I see how difficult it's going to be to put everything into one matrix. There are so many combinations that a matrix would be just gigantic if it was a simple excel type of chart. It would be unreadable the way I was thinking it could go. You'd have like 1 million columns.

Once you get it into app form, it will probably be easier, but in terms of giving a simple picture, like PSA does, it's far more difficult, if not impossible. There's too much data to make it that simple, particularly given the number of variants out there. There's going to need to be some clicking involved, or maybe some pop up tables when you hover a mouse over data. 

 

What you're saying lines up with what I've heard too. E.g. the matrix will provide basic info, but additional rich content (overall pop data, images, or other larger, changing, or complex descriptive info) would need an internet connection.

All Wata needs is the cert number anyway. lol

[inasuma | 1,203]

14 minutes ago, OptOut said:

Man, you guys are making a real meal out of this one, aren't you? How complicated does it really have to be?

List all the games, click on the game you want to show the grades, click on the grade you want to see the seal ratings within that grade.

How hard is that?

Heh, I hope they get more creative than that... Like a chart for larger screens. Mobile is another story entirely though. 

[OptOut | 8,883]

1 minute ago, inasuma said:

Heh, I hope they get more creative than that... Like a chart for larger screens. Mobile is another story entirely though. 

Man, shooting for the fuggin moon, eh?! I doubt fancy charts and whizz bang graphical interfaces are on WATA's to-do list... Unless... 

[inasuma | 1,203]

8 minutes ago, OptOut said:

Man, shooting for the fuggin moon, eh?! I doubt fancy charts and whizz bang graphical interfaces are on WATA's to-do list... Unless... 

I do enjoy a good whiz bang graphic or two. But you’re probably right.  

[ExplodedHamster | 404]

54 minutes ago, OptOut said:

Man, you guys are making a real meal out of this one, aren't you? How complicated does it really have to be?

List all the games, click on the game you want to show the grades, click on the grade you want to see the seal ratings within that grade.

How hard is that?

Within each game there are also variants, so I don’t think it would be super user friendly. There has to be a better ways to display them all for comparison purposes visually without having to click in, take a screenshot, click back, click new variant, another screenshot, etc.