ExplodedHamster

I bought a few things, felt a bit like Black Friday at Target during the launch lol. Site is a bit glitchy (stuff I bought is still showing as available for example lol), but Dan is around and making sure it's all good. Some standard launch stuff, I suspect that back end stuff will be fixed shortly. Overall, love the look and the options. I'll check out the content a bit later. 

@Dan64 is a well known commodity in the sealed game world. So for people talking about "shady" this and that, the opposite is actually exactly what he's providing. Ebay is sketchy, MinusWorlds is not. The other really cool thing is that his site appears it's going to be dedicated to video games only, and have some cool content that I feel is missing pretty much everywhere else.

Videos, signed celeb/athlete agreements, hopefully some social media, that's exactly what this the graded universe could really use, which is more fun and focus on the games and history behind them than just the investment aspect. Auction houses focus on so many different mediums that video games never really get the time I think they deserve, so a website that offers a BiN option and I can learn a lot about games and enjoy some content is actually something that I think is really needed. Other collectibles hobbies, which are more mature, have all these things in droves. Video games right now has videos of people yelling at each other about what the best way to collect is. Be nice to get some more fun involved in the graded games scene. 

Rambo III

22 hours ago, inasuma said:

can we get back to the topic?

namely, what we should expect from such a bare bones, non-feature complete pop report.

it's still unclear if we'll see "sealed" game pops without seal ratings, or if all ratings will be purely CIB.

I heard from a good source it will be sealed mostly to start, with some of the higher end NES CIB grades for stuff like sticker seals or TM Zeldas. It will be clear what is sealed and what is CIB. 

I think this is going to be a lot more info than people are giving credit for, even without the seals. Those will be coming, btw, I believe they are just working on how to best format it for viewing.

Finding a nice one of these is a real pain in the ass, I’ve been looking for a long time lol.

Forgot to take a pic, but finished Jungle Book with the daughter. Decent Disney game!

Wolfchild:

Bah, I used to be able to beat W and W 3, no problem, but it’s been a while. I could probably do it if I can find the time. 

Knocked out Zoom tonight, first time playing it. Super fun black grid game.

59 minutes ago, RETRO said:

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.

I mean yeah, they are a business and their data was IP. They’d have been dumb to publish it before a sale from that perspective. Negotiations of this size usually take a long time, as well, which didn’t help. The sale likely played much more of a role in this release than Karl’s video, but nobody here is really claiming programming is what held this up to begin with. It’s more answering why there are no seal grades right away and figuring out the best way to do it.

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.

11 minutes ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

It seems like my 7.0 had a 7.0 box and that was the highest box grade I had seen on a CIB until those two 8.5s came up for sale.

I know there’s a 9.0 still in cello with a Canadian collector from a local find, and I THINK a 9.2, but I could be wrong. Most are gonna be like 6.0.

6 minutes ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

I remember them having two 8.5s back in the summer (I think), but I don't think I've seen one since.

No, and they don’t pop up much on Ebay either. There’s I think one on there now and it’s beat (like almost all are).

7 hours ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

Back when I posted that in February of 2020, there had been several CIB Mega Man Dr. Wright error variants sold in consecutive auctions. That was over a year and a half ago and I haven't noticed any recently either.

Yeah, those were all mine. I had been collecting them for a while and sent them to Heritage all at once like an idiot lol. Not too many have come to market since, outside of I think 2 really nice 8.5 CIBs.

19 hours ago, inasuma said:

i'll bite. who had that pop 1? was it bucky? it was probably bucky.

I do not know who owns it, though others do and claim it is never coming to market. I do know it isn’t Bucky. Then there is the 9.4 from the Hawaii collection. I forget that collector’s name, he is old guard.

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?

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. 

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. 

1 hour ago, avatar! said:

I really wonder who purchases these... and any more news from @karljobst or others regarding HA and WATA?

I mean that’s a sealed TM Zelda…it’s the third to be publicly unearthed. VGA’s pop forever was 1. It’s the first to be publicly available in…10-20 years? More?

8 minutes ago, tidaldreams said:

It's gotta be more than 3... there's already 2 that have come up for auction... that would leave only one left

It was definitely 2 as of the time of the 1.56 auction (Heritage even said so during the auction) and I know of one other that came about after. 

Of course someone is dumping their 9.8 right after that sale lol. The fact more have not surfaced is actually quite telling imo.

2 minutes ago, 3rdStrongestMole said:

Well, without the sealed pop data this will not distinguish either I guess, so now that i think about it this is completely worthless  

I’m not sure it says that. It says you won’t get the seal rating, but it still might say you have, for example, 50 sealed Mario 3 at 8.0 and 20 Mario 3 at 8.0 CIB.

2 hours ago, RH said:

They already did that and have those details.  In fact, some one already has a pop report with all of those details up to June, just without actual grades for all games graded.

There was also no distinguishing whether they were sealed or CIB. There were like 750 SMB 3, I’d guess 2/3rds or so are CIB.

4 hours ago, Gloves said:

I actually have the inside scoop on that, just please don't tell anyone else:

It's a lot.

The 9.8/A++ population, I believe, is 3 or so. I’d guess there are also more graded SMB 1 overall, but that’s just a guess. Could go either way.

On 11/9/2021 at 8:37 PM, Retrofan said:

Seems like legit to me.But it’s like 70/30.With prices so high u can’t be sure in anything.Especially with Zelda.About year ago I was offered Zelda of ebay.It was reseal.Not bad reaseal I’d say.

see attach

 

VGA ended up grading this lol. Then they got wind and got it off the market.

8 hours ago, tidaldreams said:

This week's auction was a total  Like where do they even get some of this stuff... those were some of the junkiest pokemon slabs I've seen in a while.

At some point, WATA essentially being shut down with little coming back to customers was going to reflect on the weeklies.