AdamW

well, it makes sense since it came with a slipcover. the slipcover would tend to absorb all the wear, and as noted above, the main grade for WATA is the DVD box and the seal, they grade the slipcover separately on the back of the tag and that grade does not affect the overall box or seal grade. so makes sense to me that the main grades for copies of the game that came in a slipcover would trend very high. same reason there are so many high-grade copies of that wii U Zelda game that people take out of a box to grade separately, or individual games broken out of trilogy box sets.

There's a guy in Greg's discord (not sure if he's here too, if he is, hi rdools!) who sells box protectors and acrylic cases in Canada: https://videogameboxdefender.com/ I bought some GB-size acrylic cases off him, they're fine, can recommend, and no international shipping hassles.

yes, that's what that means. Multiple items from the same order. If 004 and 008 were Bioshocks it seems reasonable to suspect that 005, 006 and 007 probably were too. I dunno if this is '9.4 slipcover vs 9.0 slipcover' or 'comicconnect vs HA' so much as it's "there are only so many people in this world willing to pay that much money for a copy of Bioshock, and after the comicconnect auction, one of them was out of the game"...:D

Yes, although it's kinda generally accepted that this is a possibility in all forms of grading/authentication. It's a difficult thing to do 100% accurately. A larger concern is that neither WATA nor VGA has any kind of guarantee that they will buy back items they graded which turn out to be counterfeit, which is something grading companies in other areas do do. Someone told me that they'd heard of WATA buying back something fake that they graded, which is good if true, but since it's not a policy, it's still at their discretion, which isn't great. I have personally notified VGA of counterfeit games they've graded which were for sale on eBay, and got no response beyond a canned customer service reply. The counterfeit games were still being offered for sale some time later. edit: I would be inclined to mostly trust population reports, because the cost/benefit calculation on manipulating them would be very bad for a grader. Doing it would absolutely be a company-killing move if they were caught, and it's actually quite difficult to do it without getting caught, given how much information about graded games is or eventually becomes public, and how many people within the company would be in a position to know or suspect it was happening.

So sorry for the epic necro, but this thread is being referred to quite a bit lately as people like, ahem, whichever sucker bought this: are still buying into the idea that NFR Halo is super rare. So I got curious about the question of where these Canadian copies come from, and found a possible source - the "Xbox Adrenaline Pack": https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/microsoft-releases-xbox-adrenaline-pack/article1158578/ https://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=77897&cid=6919193 It was a Canadian-only bundle of an Xbox, controller and two games - Amped and Halo. Seems to fit the bill...

I would disagree, given Deniz's statement and the purpose and scale of the company. I also disagree with your characterization of what it "comes down to". In this instance I think Seth happens to be right on the money: policies like this are about avoiding not only actual conflicts of interest but the appearance of them. Credibility should be a pretty vital thing for a company like WATA. It doesn't wash for them to state a policy like that, then try to backpedal against what's clearly a violation of the spirit of it (if not the letter) by saying "oh but we totes graded the games fairly so it's fine". For a start, nobody can realistically trust such an assurance (again a point Seth made), which is exactly why you have the policy in the first place, to avoid the issue coming up. On the topic of being a shareholder - remember, WATA was initially a tiny garage band operation. It didn't have minor shareholders like IBM or Microsoft has minor shareholders. They weren't offering 0.00001% stakes on some public exchange. To be a shareholder you clearly had to be fairly involved in the actual work of getting the company off the ground. He didn't just see the symbol come up in Robinhood and think it looked interesting or something. A shareholder of Microsoft owning a copy of Windows has significant differences in both nature and scale from a shareholder of WATA selling WATA-graded games. WATA sells an allegedly 'objective' and 'impartial' grading service. That's not the same thing as software products or boxes of cornflakes or something.

Um, except his statement goes to great lengths to minimize his association with WATA, which is a tough look to pull off when there's that screenshot lying around. Let's be clear about what the accusation is here. It's not that he hid something, so "he didn't hide anything" is not a defence. The accusation is that he had games graded by WATA and traded in games graded by WATA, as a significant shareholder, promoter, and - as you point out - "chief advisor" of WATA, after WATA's CEO told the New York Times that employees could not have games graded or trade in graded games. And he did not deny any of those things. In a court of law you could pick nits about whether he was an "employee", but I would say that any reasonable person reading what the NYT reported Deniz as saying would expect it to cover a guy with his name in lights on the WATA website. Would you disagree?

This is a great example of the classic PR move, the "non-denial denial", wherein you spend a bunch of time heatedly denying several things that weren't actually alleged, and hope nobody notices you didn't deny any of the things that were actually alleged... Edit: I'm also a big fan of him saying he didn't speak to any graders at WATA...except the CEO and the chief grader.

Oh yeah, I have a fake leafgreen manual here. Seen a few of those.

Almost certainly fake, yeah. I'd be curious to see it, though. Do you have pics? Thanks!

One thing that would make it less problematic for me, actually, is something that hasn't been discussed much yet - a universal grading scale. AIUI, comic and card graders all grade on more or less the same scale (out of 10, with pretty much the same claimed meanings for each grade). An interesting thing on the coin story for me was that all the coin graders were supposed to be following the same scale (out of 70), and so it was possible to pretty conclusively establish that Halperin's company was overgrading, because there was a wider definition and understanding of the scale they were grading on. If there was a universal scale in games, defined and understood on a wider level than any one grading company, I think it'd be much easier to discuss "wrong" grading. As it stands, it's hard to claim that a WATA grade is "wrong" because there's no external definition or understanding to compare it to.

Sure. Not mentioning that the offer is from an interested party, or the offer being somewhat...non-firm, would be the kind of things you can do on a "reality" TV show.

Heh, if that's real, I think it might even be actionable. Aren't there laws about cartel behaviour?

This doesn't seem as odd to me as it does to you. I mean, if you get a gemstone assessed, the same person will decide if it's genuine, weigh it, grade it, and then give you an estimate of its price (and then, possibly, offer to buy it off you). If you get your house assessed, the same person will come and count the bedrooms and check if the roof's falling off and give an estimate of the price. They don't have separate people for each function. They're pretty related functions. Those aren't perfect comparisons, of course, and there are "checks and balances" in those cases that don't necessarily exist in games yet, but I don't find the very concept that the same person might both grade and value an item weird.

I doubt that, because that would've been one of the relatively few things you can say on a "reality" TV show that actually could get you into trouble, I think possibly with both the FCC and FTC. I'd be really surprised if he'd said that knowing it to be absolutely false.

Two hours? Oh god. Can someone summarize the juice? I barely made it through all 50+ minutes of the last one. (edit: no offence @Maertens29you know I love ya, I just don't have the attention span for YouTube. I thought you kids these days were all about the five second tikky mctoks or something?!)

Pokemon's the same. Pokemon Red is DMG-APAE in the US but DMG-APAU in Europe, for instance.

PC has two major limitations if I understand how it works correctly: * The listing has to have actually selected the game in eBay's product database or it won't be included. PC searches from the eBay product database, probably because this is the most reliable way; matching on listing titles accurately is very difficult at the kind of scale PC is working at * Earlier this year, eBay fixed a trick PC and other sites were using to identify the true price paid when a best offer was accepted. I think after that PC stopped including listings where offers were accepted. In my own scripting I did find you could at least - I think - reliably identify cases where offers were accepted on a listing, but it didn't sell for an offer price, and you could then trust the 'sold' price for those listings; it's only when an offer was actually accepted that you cannot find the true price and so can't include the sale. I'm not sure if PC is doing that or just leaving out all listings that had offers enabled.

Hey now hey now, you can get a graded Atari game for less than the cost of grading it! Sure sounds like a bargain to me

Which is why it was so funny that Seth's original post implied there was something shady about his "pseudonymous name". At least it was funny to an outside observer, but I can understand how, if you're Bronty, it would be enraging for Seth to make a big deal about you using a forum nick and then "expose" your identity, in a way that tied you into a lot of accusations of unethical or illegal behaviour that Seth then "clarified" he was not actually accusing you of being involved in. I'd probably be mad too. It's one thing to have your name in a forum of friends where nobody is throwing around words like "fraud" or "illegal" or "FTC", it's another to have it up in that kind of article like it was some kind of journalistic jackpot.

It's usually like eBay - a chunk of activity at the start where people bid way less than it will sell for and hope, I dunno, everyone else looking at the auction falls off the face of the planet, or something - and then a chunk at the end, where the serious bidders bid. Of course it's the first time Goldin's sold games and their approach is a bit different to HA so hard to be sure exactly how it'll play out, I guess you could look at past auctions of big collectibles in other fields if they show bid times?

I can never remember whether it's "all holes present is January" or "no holes present is December", heh. I *think* it's "all holes is January" so this is december not November. I don't think I've ever seen it the other way around.

Note they're only grading NES at present. The other choices on the submission form just say "coming soon".

This is officially the first forum thread I've ever been a part of which has its own index. Congrats, everyone.

At the point where words like "FRAUD" and "FTC" started getting thrown around, they will almost certainly have been strongly advised not to say a darn word that CU's legal and PR people have not signed off on.