Seth

It's started. The owner of an 8.0/A+ Racket Attack has bumped his price from $548 to $750 on Mercari—the first price bump ever for this item (which had been repeatedly dropped in price from $2,000 to $548 over the last two months). And the owner of the only Wizardry WATA has ever graded has just bumped his price from $1,000 to $1,500. (Did I mention I track these things pretty damn closely?)

Nope. Another Jackal myth. There is no reason to cross over VGA grades to WATA grades—except in the view of a small group of high-end resellers who make up a tiny part of the market since 2013—so a very, very small number of WATA grades are crossovers. But hey, folks should keep on believing those who were wrong the first time and disbelieving those who were right the first time if they like. I can't convince anyone who pathologically won't come in from the rain to do so, and I know that. (Not speaking of you, CIBWholesale, just speaking generally—and with much sarcasm!)

I know you're being sarcastic, and rightly so, but we have to stop saying, "There are only..." This is 36 months of WATA data. VGA will be releasing a pop report from 13 years—10 of which they operated during without competition—meaning that their volume per annum for each title should be higher than WATA operating with competition across the three years since 2018. If WATA graded 16 "left bro" SMB3s in 36 months, we can expect there to be about 64 from VGA and 80 total—at a minimum. The numbers could in fact be 100+ and 116+. So we might expect, in a decade, for there to be 150 to 250 sealed and graded "left bro" SMB3 variants. You know how many people in the world have demonstrated that they care about this variant in the 15 years they've now had to express that care? Way under 100.

The one thing absolutely nobody can take from this is the idea that the top games are rare relative to demand in this market. If WATA is reporting 237 sealed SMB3s in just 36 months of grading, (1) add in all the sealed and graded SMB3s from VGA's 13 years of grading—one has to think 237 is now the absolute, rock-bottom floor for that figure—and (2) project forward ten years (which is what you have to do given that folks are stupidly buying SMB3s as investments they plan to sell a decade on) and you've easily got 1,000+ SMB3s out there when folks are looking to sell their "investments." Dave Robbins likes to say that that supply will be wildly outstripped by demand, but he's wrong: buying sealed and graded games is a hobby that's been around for almost 15 years, and it still has a consumer base only in the hundreds. There are (and will be) way, way, way more SMB3s on the market than the market can support. There is no longer a strong market case for SMB3 being an investment. OTOH, while Dave Robbins was on eBay trying to sell one of the worst games on the NES—Renegade (14 copies from one grading house in just 36 months)—for $22,000, some of us were buying the top-graded sealed copies of better-reviewed (and far more beloved) NES games for between $200 and $400. And since most future collectors in this highly niche market will be those who love the NES and its best games, not randos who have only heard of SMB3, those $200 to $400 games will be the ones worth something. Some of us were saying this publicly all along. We didn't hide the ball on anything. We told the Jackals they were wrong about everything, and they were wrong about everything. Investors could have been getting better investments for three figures than they got for five figures, but they were listening to high-end resellers—not those who'd done the hard data research on title rarity for the NES.

As I wrote above to Tom, Dan, I accept your representation. Thank you for clarifying. S. EDIT: No—I owe you more than that, Dan. I owe you an apology. I confused you with the other Dan, who has at times been kind to me and at times taken the piss about my work at RETRO. I may think MinusWorlds.com is overpriced, but as I said above, that is neither illegal nor unethical. It is your right to charge (or let sellers charge) whatever you like on your site, and as someone who has built many sites I know how hard it is and I don't mean to make it even harder for you. I hope you go ahead with your project to collect market data; having done it, I know it is exhausting and thankless work that doesn't even end up being remunerative despite how much money it could save people. I applaud your commitment to doing it, and I apologize again for letting my anger toward Tom cloud my judgment in how I approached you, here, regarding your project. I wish you luck with it.

Tom, I have no problem seeing what you are. If others can't, that's on them. As a public defender for years, I saw every sort of vice known to humankind. You're the sort of casual 1980s misogynist who calls me a woman as an insult—and does it multiple times to make sure I caught it. This would really offend me if I were six years old and it were 1982. You're the sort of elitist and hypocrite who spends his life not doing public service—you're not a teacher, or an activist, or an artist, or a public interest attorney, or a journalist—but selling toys to multimillionaires, and who then brings up my education (repeatedly) to deflect from the fact that you contribute nothing to society beyond your own financial enrichment. I used the degree you despise so much to become a public servant across multiple decades and multiple roles in the public sector. I don't know what degrees you have and I don't care (nor do I care about my own degrees, which were merely a means to an end in trying to help bring more goodness and justice into the world); you use your skills to gouge middle-class buyers and flatter rich playboys. That's who you are and all you will ever be unless the attitude you've exhibited here changes dramatically and soon. I don't know if you're a far-right lunatic, but you certainly talk like one—deriding proven political corruption as "conspiracy theory." I can't tell if this is a performance for your neo-fascist far-right clients domestically and abroad or a garden-variety ignorance about politics that should be embarrassing in a man your age. No, I'm not going to "reach out directly" to a man who says it takes balls to email him. If we're going to talk like 1980s schoolchildren, it would have taken "balls" for you to stand up to your pals at WATA. It would have taken "balls" for you to even read the subtitle of a RETRO article you whined about ad nauseam on Facebook but inexplicably wouldn't click on let alone pay a pittance to read (even as you called the price "well worth it," which contradiction I will never understand). It would have taken "balls" for you to not repeatedly lie about the sealed video games market and the history of the market in your chat with Dave Robbins and Karl Jobst. It would have taken "balls"—and humility—to admit that you and the rest of the Jackals have done nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, to open this hobby up to anyone who can't enrich you personally. You are a blight on this hobby and your presence in it threatens its future. I am earnestly sorry about your mother and earnestly sorry about your friend. I lost my father during the pandemic and I am no stranger to loss generally. But the question is what we transmit that loss into, and I have seen enough from you to know the answer to that question. That said, I have always been too credulous by half—even with strangers. If you and Dan both say you're not involved with creating market research reports identical to those at RETRO (and yes, transparently explained, at length, as market research reports), I'm going to choose to believe you. My hope is that when you return to this market, you will do five things: Spend thirty minutes talking or writing about gaming for every thirty minutes you talk or write about the graded video game market. Spend fifty minutes thinking about new entrants to the hobby who are buyers and collectors rather than resellers and investors for every ten minutes you think about the Jackals and the "community" of cynical, unethical market predators that "you" built on Facebook and elsewhere. Come clean about how unstable and senseless this market is right now, and your role in perpetuating that quite apart from any fanboying for WATA. (Note that I haven't made the sort of accusations about your involvement with WATA that you seem to think I have; I merely think you are an apologist for WATA, a shill for WATA, and someone who would, for instance, senselessly denigrate the VGA "qualified" scale as equivalent to WATA's CIB scale when literally the former involves new games and the latter used games. How obvious can the sycophancy be?) Openly militate for pop reports from the companies you have previously shilled for unofficially, and get on their case when they break promises or—as importantly—abuse their customers by not answering their customer service phones, inserting human and dog hair into their cases, selling subpar cases with bubbles in them, negligently scuffing and scratching cases before sending them out, allowing their website to misrepresent their known TATs, overcharging for services they don't provide, engaging in fake appraisals on television, self-dealing contrary to public policy, and worse. I know what kind of man you are by what you don't just forgive but enable, Tom. What "men" do, if that's going to be your frame, is stand up for the vulnerable and call out injustice. You can misdirect people with misogyny and irrelevant comments about my education, but your values are clear in everything you write and they are abominable. Take dramatic public steps to bring new blood into the hobby—and I mean middle-class buyers, not more well-heeled Saudis and Germans and Emiratis. You could do this by hyping up three-figure games and surprising finds; restoring the rarity component to the market, which makes more commonly appreciated and found games more affordable for all; and fighting the $1000-plus price-fixing philosophy of your Jackals at every turn. This would just be a start. But my God, if I have to listen to Dave Robbins opine one more time about how many new people are going to be coming into this hobby in the years ahead, when they already had decades to do so and didn't and when collecting high-end sealed and graded games (not games generally, as every gamer already collects games just by finding ones they like and buying and playing them) will always be wildly niche in part because people like him and you are trying to price everyone but millionaires out of it, I will puke. From the first moment you engaged with me, Tom, you have been uncouth and a liar. I know that, like all humans, you suffer and have human moments—and I'm sorry again for your recent losses—but I'll say again that it is what we do with grief that defines us. S.

Here's what I saw: WATA is referred to as a grading house, and VGA as a mere "authenticator." That is false. VGA's grading scale is misrepresented as relating to "authentication," while WATA gets two lengthy box-checking filters for the entirety of its grading rubric. By comparison, VGA gets a single slider (I'll put aside that the two grading houses aren't listed alphabetically or by age or by volume of games graded—any of which would have put VGA first—but by the site's clear preference for WATA). When you search for VGA graded games, even if you check the box, nothing comes up. WATA games come up just fine. There are three times as many WATA games as VGA games (and when the site first went up and I formed my opinion, it was about 10x WATA games), even though VGA has—over 13 years—graded substantially more games than WATA has in its 3.5 years. You could argue that The Jackals simply prefer WATA because the Jackals hyped the market for WATA games to the point that WATA games always sell for more—that's why they (and WATA) push the preposterous idea of "crossing over" games needlessly; the only reason to do this is to sell your product for an artificially inflated price because it's WATA-branded (the sort of tautological reality that market manipulation is intended to create)—and that MinusWorlds.com is simply getting most of its up-charged product from Jackals, but that kind of proves my point. The whole milieu that birthed this site is a series of high-end resellers who act as WATA fanboys and shills for the sake of personal financial profit. Edit: In the Knowledge Center, VGA is properly presented as a grading company. I'm referring to the most important part of the site: the game search.

Oh, the crew is very real. In analyzing the market I had to figure out who was who and what they're doing (and their core philosophy, and their relationships with one another)—as a lawyer and investigative journalist and academic I don't like to be involved in any ecosystem I haven't researched; if you get into sealed and graded collecting without understanding what this crew is doing and why, you'll lose your shirt—and I discovered that the crew is so clearly defined that I had to come up with a name for them just to streamline my own thought processes and analyses. I came up with The Jackals.

Agreed—MinusWorlds overcharging by 25% to 50% isn't illegal, and arguably isn't even unethical. In a market, you can sell for whatever you like. But it certainly can't be presented as altruism. It continues to be the case that those who want to engage in this hobby for a reasonable cost must ignore almost 100% of what comes out of the leading folks in the High-End Collectors Facebook group. You can get fifty really good sealed-and-graded games for what Robbins is selling his Renegade for, I'm serious. And Renegade is considered one of the worst games on the NES.

Of course they're friends. Everyone knows that. That's not my point. My point is that RETRO was contacted 2+ months ago by someone who is in this crew and they said that Tom was pushing "his new brokerage" hard in private conversations—and began doing so not long after falsely attacking my market research. Dan writes "we" repeatedly on MinusWorlds and mentions that he spoke with Tom about the project, so until Dan comes here to say that Tom has had no role whatsoever in this project besides lending his handle to it, I'm steamed.

Multiple people told me Tom is involved in this project. Again, if Dan wants to say that Tom has had no role of any kind whatsoever, I'll believe it about as much as I believe WATA saying Richard Lecce had no role in WATA but I will accept it. As for the FB nonsense, I'm not going to let Dan pitch here as a valuable public service the same research that his crew elsewhere implied was without value. I lost sleep over those attacks—a lot. Seeing an idea I put into action months ago and got slammed for pitched here as a fresh, honorable contribution is not something I can or should let slide. By all means, if Dan wants to say his crew was dead wrong about RETRO and that they want to build on my idea for widely available marketplace research on sealed-and-graded games, they can—but linking to a Reddit tool that is now offline and making no mention of RETRO while cribbing from it is BS and needs to be called out.

I was told by multiple people that Tom Curtin—who falsely accused me of labeling market research as grading-house pop reports because he refused to read the goddamn article he was attacking on Facebook—is involved in this project well beyond lending his VGS handle to it, much like WATA had many people involved with it at its founding who somehow (usually for very, very convenient reasons) stayed behind the scenes. If Dan Allegra wants to swear to God before this entire community that Tom Curtin has contributed precisely nothing to this project besides his handle (not contacts or outreach or advice or games or anything else), OK—but don't hold your breath. This project is by and for high-end resellers of sealed and graded WATA games, period. (I tried to see the thirty-something VGA games the site allegedly has out of hundreds and hundreds of games, and couldn't find them.) Consumer advocates who argue for the integrity and wallet and interests of three-figure buyers, people new to the hobby, and people who don't like market manipulation have been attacked by this crew at every turn. And honestly? I said to my wife today that I don't know why I keep telling people this—as it only benefits me that I can use the data at RETRO to get games for three figures that will appear (from other hands) at MinusWorlds for thousands or even five figures. But then, I'm Quixotic—like most public defenders who become poets who become professors. If just one person hears anything I have written here or at RETRO, which I won't link to because Adam will drop another turd complaining about it, I'm happy, as it'll save one more relative newcomer to the hobby from falling prey to the jackals. I mean I just watched a video by Dave Robbins, who is part of this crew, in which he says it's ethical to run claim sales that aren't real claim sales, auctions that aren't real auctions, and even orally agree to a deal and then take a subsequent offer. He's selling a copy of Renegade for $22,000 that I could get for $500 right now. Everything possible is being done to keep this hobby closed to new blood unless they're foreign-dwelling multimillionaires and highly networked. Dress it up however you like, that's all this is—folks without ethics, who don't even know the language or habits of ethics, claiming to be doing a public service. My God I hope no one falls for this.

So Tom Curtin is going to create the sort of marketplace database RETRO is already doing for Intellivision and Atari and NES games, and which it has been doing for months, and which Tom publicly attacked me for doing. I guess it all makes sense now. You guys really are sharks. Or perhaps some much smaller land animal. In any case, I suppose you *can* do this work for free—instead of as one minor feature on a massive website that costs $2.90/month, like RETRO—when you're making money hand over fist as an unnecessary middleman in a market Tom helped inflate with years of bullsh*t, and when you work directly behind the scenes (as you say you plan to) with the very auction houses that also (like Tom) want these prices inflated. God help us—or more specifically, buyers in this new market. Their actual advocates get steamrolled so that high-end resellers in bed with auction houses and grading companies can offer "free" services for the masses as they overcharge them by 25% to 50% for games. You guys made me feel like garbage for charging anything for hundreds of hours of research; little did I know that you were going to do the same work but make it free because you're making 1000x my monthly sub rate via up-charging. I never was a shark like that. Didn't have the bloodlust for it. This community gets what it deserves, candidly. It doesn't demand better, so it gets this. I'll continue buying the same games for three figures (sealed and graded) that you're selling for thousands. Make sure that when you tally thousands of sales at Heritage and 24 other markets (as I already have at RETRO), you leave off what things sold for. You don't want people seeing that at Heritage games go for half of what they're going for at MinusWorlds.

Did anyone have "WATA is full of sh*t and they're not going to release pop reports in November" on their bingo card? I'll admit that I didn't—I felt (and to an extent still do) that they may find a way to get these reports out in the next 120 hours as promised (though really it's 36 hours, as I expect Monday midday is now the earliest it would happen). I'm just astounded (and yet, why?) that after 3 years of not giving the reports they promised, they announced "November" and are now taking it this close to the wire. And that's with them only offering reports on one console, one type of game on that console (sealed), and one metric on that one type of game on that one console (box grade). Is some exec doing eleventh hour shopping for raw sealed copies of MENDEL PALACE, or what? WATA will never cease to amaze me.

I don't consider myself eloquent and I don't think there's any need for eloquence on a discussion board. You can watch the video yourself; in it, Deniz clearly explains to the interviewer how the WATA app (never released) is going to work when released in June 2018, and explains that it will be able to access the "matrix" that has been on all WATA cases since the beginning—uselessly, given WATA's failure to carry out what it promised its customers on that score. Deniz says that the matrix will have population report data on it. I don't know how his words could be misconstrued, but I'm not saying and didn't say you're a WATA fanboy. And of course you have every right to do business with a company that makes you money, even if they would make you a hell of a lot more money if they were a better business—and only pressure from their customers will force them to be a better business. Deniz was demoted because the business was doing bad things, and was a year behind schedule on fulfilling orders, and was manipulating the market in a way that led to terrible press and actually kept a huge volume of buyers away from buying your/anyone's product in this new, volatile, vulnerable market. By contrast, pop reports are coming out because Karl Jobst did something very good. So no matter who is making you money, your priorities and credulousness are profoundly misplaced if you are giving Deniz a pass on everything (which candidly you are) and calling Karl a "random guy on YouTube ranting." Talk about misdirected sentiments. You're getting the pop reports Deniz kept from you because of Karl, maybe some gratitude is in order. Incidentally, the reason more people don't do the right thing in this world is because those who do get derided while those like Deniz who don't get a pass. My two cents, anyway—your values are your values and you are entitled to them.

I admit to being confused by this statement. In May 2018, then-WATA CEO and President Deniz Kahn told the media that WATA was ready to release pop reports for all games, on all systems, across all grades and conditions, and across all game types (sealed and CIB), and now, three and a half years later, you're saying that the reason the head of the company's estimate was off by three and a half years is because the head of the company was unaware how big a task what he publicly promised would be? And you're implying that WATA has been working on this project for three and a half years ("[this] is why it has taken them so long") when we have absolutely no evidence that that is true, and even none of the WATA fanboys with a backchannel to Deniz (and no compunctions about shilling for WATA) say it's true? What? Why don't we stick to the facts. WATA just went through the worst PR scandal of its existence, and was bought out by a new parent company. That new parent company—both as a way of building good faith with customers (who are waiting 5x to 10x longer for their products than they paid for) and as a way of reversing course from the now-demoted Kahn's policy of doing absolutely nothing to release pop reports (and unethically manipulating the sealed-and-graded games market on TV)—decided to start its pop-report project for the first time. Because it's a big project, the company is starting with one subset of data from one console. It likely didn't announce its intentions until it had gotten most of the way through this effort, which would have begun shortly after WATA was bought out in July. So while we may be able to say that it has taken them months to get their data into shape—and the poor shape of the data is of course the company's fault, and negligence, and may be part of the reason Kahn was demoted—we cannot say that they have been working on this all along, that any issues they're facing now weren't foreseeable three and a half years ago, or that WATA is to be given any credit for doing the absolute rock-bottom least it can possibly do to get itself out of the business ethics and consumer-confidence hole it willfully created for itself and is in right now.

FWIW: Othello (sealed and graded) Rarity Ranking: #47 Most Common of 810 ranked NES titles Anticipation (sealed and graded) Rarity Ranking: #187 Most Common of 810 ranked NES titles S.

OptOut, I just want to say that I hear what you're saying, that everything you've said is self-evidently correct and accurate, and that a few folks here are being obtuse for whatever reason. Especially egregious is comparing a genuine-article SMB3 CIB to a Honus Wagner *repro*. That's an insult to the intelligence of folks here, especially when *repros exist in gaming* so the analogy is obviously a farce. The level of interest in a Honus Wagner repro matches the level of interest in an SMB3 repro—approximately zero—and anyone who has ever collected sports cards knows this. Collecting sealed and graded games is niche. It will always be niche. Yes, the number of such collectors will grow—but so too will the population of sealed and graded games. In fact, the latter will grow much faster than the former, which is why prices will come down (a market *correction*, not a collapse). When I raised the prospect of $400 SMB3s a decade from now I was speaking in the way OptOut is speaking: of the median price of all graded SMB3s, across (as I said) all conditions (in terms of box and seal, so yes, that includes both sealed games and no-seal CIBs). I never said that the *highest* end of the SMB3 population would be $400; that's absurd and putting words in my mouth. Jonas is saying that a NM sealed-and-graded SMB3 will always be worth four figures, and *I agree with him*. He might say $7,500 to $10,000 will be the common future sale price for such items, and I might say $3,500, but we are not so far off from one another here. But if NM sealed-and-graded SMB3s are going for $3,500 *or* the average of Jonas's ten-year projection ($8,750) ten years from now, given that SMB3 is considered one of the greatest games of all time and therefore perhaps the game that (all things being equal) the sealed and graded video game collector would most want, a mid-/high four-figure market for such a game means a *massive* correction from what we are seeing now, considering that a couple dozen NM and NM+ NES titles are now trending toward or over $50,000 in that condition. The fact is, there will *never* be equivalency of any kind between the niche sealed-and-graded market and sports card collecting until high-end resellers like Jonas do something to nurture and encourage a three-figure sealed-and-graded market. Instead, too many people in this hobby—Goldin Auctions being a great example, which is why I went after that guy here—are trying to *systematically* destroy that market. If they keep on this way their complaints in 2025 that there are no buyers left anymore will fall on deaf ears. I'm saying that people in this hobby better start thinking more about *buyers*—and I don't mean multimillionaires, I mean regular folks—rather than seeing everything through the lens of investors, speculators, and high-end sellers. That's a recipe for *foreclosing* the bright future for the hobby that Jonas sees. And BTW there is *nothing* radical about this view—if anything, it's such ploddingly logical common sense as to be wholly banal.

Okay, but just to be clear, your argument appears to be with Pat, not me. *I* didn't say that "78" is a damning number. I agree that a "damning" number—if I'm forced to use such silly terminology—would be the very very low thousands, which is what I think we're looking at (as I said) over a ten-year window going forward and across all grading houses and grades. In any case, I have been harping on relative rarity and have been transparent about the difference between "market availability" and "number of copies in existence" for many months now, both here and at RETRO and on FB. It's why I rank games by appearances rather than absolute copies—the latter of which no single analysis *or* population report can ever tell us, because there are too many variables about which grading houses are used and where games go post-grading—and why I speak of SMB3 as "common" only *relative* to other NES games and not in any absolute sense. In any case, I agree with almost everything you said, Jonas, unless your ultimate point is that the current price points for SMB3 are anything but unsustainable, because they manifestly are.

I apologize, I was just in a jocular way calling you "boss", "guy", "man" (&c). Clearly it didn't come off as intended and that's my fault. I say "propaganda" because we mustn't create a fallacious logic circle in which whatever the WATA population reports reveal, it's good news for everybody. Good news, for a market where sealed SMB3s are selling for five figures, would be for all indications to be that there will never be more than 100 to 200 sealed SMB3s. That would be in line with what a market can support at five figures. But what the data suggests is that there will be *ten times* that number of SMB3s, which means that calling them "rare" is really just rhetoric—i.e., propaganda that hypes the market when what we really should be saying, if we want to be responsible, is something like, "There will be so many sealed and graded SMB3s in the market over the next decade that $400 is a reasonable price to buy one for now."

Ah. The propaganda begins. (Anyone who wants to know what the WATA data is likely to show can see the website link at the very bottom of this post, or, failing that, the image below this text, where the very beginning of the 800-plus-title market analysis I did reveals that SMB3 will be the most-graded WATA game and that SMB, SMB2, and all the other games WATA pumped up in sometimes unethical ways since 2018 will make the Top 25.) As to "78 is rare." Yes, it is rare. Some rare things—like many rare baseball cards—are worth as much as $10! A whole ten bucks! Other things that are "rare" are worth millions. A sealed-and-graded title can be both rare *and* overpriced. When people say "this game isn't rare" they don't mean there are tens of millions of sealed-and-graded copies, they mean that the number of copies does not warrant the prices being paid for these titles. That said... the number ain't 78, chief. Pat is quoting from my website RETRO, which his excellent podcast (to my everlasting awe) often does. RETRO has located (now) 91 copies of SMB3 that have been in the market since January 1, 2019. But here's the thing: that's just the public-market copies; it's possible a handful of copies escaped the tally; no private sales are considered; no private gradings that led to games going right to private collections are considered. Oh, and it's only since January 1, 2019—and WATA began grading 8 months before that and VGA {checks notes} a full decade before that. So when Pat says 78, he'd agree that we're talking, in fact, about hundreds of SMB3s that are sealed. The other thing you're missing is the element of time in the other direction, i.e., how many copies will be graded in the next year or two years or three years at the pace of grading we're now seeing from WATA? Most of the copies listed at RETRO are WATA copies; WATA is grading about 25 copies a year all by themselves, which means that if the market stays tiny—which it won't!—we'd expect just that one grading house to grade another 250+ SMB3s in the next 10 years. And 10 years is a perfectly credible window to look at when we're talking about games often (usually) being bought as investments. So we are quite clearly going to be talking about well over 1,000 sealed SMB3s in this market. Possibly in the low four-figures, like 2,000 to 3,000. And that's one damned game on one damned system. You imply that all video game collectors want that game. What? Only a fraction of collectors are high-end NES collectors who like Mario. It might be 20%, but it's still a fraction. And again, we're not talking about "is 1,000 or 2,000" rare, we're talking about, "What should anyone pay for something there are thousands of and only a relatively small number of people care about?" And I'll answer that question: about $400. Not $400,000. And WATA damn well knows it, which is why they've been getting while the getting is good, and so many others have, too.

Fair enough. (And I'd cited my sources in other threads here, just not in the comment you commented on. I've never been interested in hiding my sources.)

That's compelling evidence, indeed!

Obviously I respect your opinion, even if I disagree. He clearly wrote that anyone who says they found hair in a WATA case put it there themselves (accidentally) and then withheld (intentionally) the fact that they did so when complaining about WATA being the culprit rather than their own home environments. Multiple folks here have complained of human and/or dog hair in WATA cases, and I've posted photos of WATA cases—not mine—with human or dog hair in them. So when someone here says that people are withholding information about their home environments to blame WATA for something they did, and does so knowing that people here have made exactly that sort of complaint, respectfully that seems like an attack to me. The other possibility is that you may have missed Code Monkey's initial comment on this, as it was part of a very long attack on me earlier in the thread that was similarly filled with things that are untrue.

You should check in with Code Monkey. He's attacking people on the forum and saying that the hair you all found in your cases was your fault, not WATA's. Also the hair that scores of others have found in their cases wasn't WATA's fault, either. Not the hair all over the Lone Ranger (NES) currently on eBay, not the hair all over the otherwise great-looking Thundercade (NES) now on eBay. All you folks are to blame... says Code Monkey. Odd, isn't it Code Monkey, how WATA has decided to make these folks whole for something that was "their own fault"?