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Why no modern Digi-press rarity guide?


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How does a modern version of the "rarity guides" produced way back when (before my time) by the likes of Digi-press etc not exist nowadays?  
imagine how much more information we have now then we did back then - even without official population stats.  

 

I think we could get a really close to the truth here by leveraging the digi-press benchmarks as a starting point and crowd sourcing the community to update the rankings.  

 

Is it the fear of the "secret excel spreadsheet" that gives collectors the edge on newbies that keeps this from happening?  

or just good old fashioned laziness.  

 

*grabs popcorn

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I still use Digitpress sometimes when starting a set and seeing what I should target first in terms of price/rarity. If it was relatively scarce 15 years ago, it's probably still relatively scarce. Trying to determine objective rarity is hard though, and as game collecting is more popular it's only going to be harder and certain games get bought out or become trendy and change hands very often. Current market availability is perhaps a better metric. Is it on Ebay right now? How many have sold on PriceCharting in last 5 years?

Otherwise, we still have all the old NintendoAge, AtariAge, DigitPress, etc. rarity ratings to look back on (and the new ThePhleo and Pat The NES Punk ratings!).

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6 hours ago, Deadeye said:

I'll check out http://www.rarityguide.com/ for a ball park of how rare the item is.  I don't put a lot of stock in it because I have no idea how actuate it is.  I don't use the pricing on it, that it no longer relevant. 

I wouldn't even really trust the rarity either. That info hasn't been updated since I first saw it in 2011 it seems like, and who knows how long the info was there before that.

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I always found the old digit press lists very useful in my journeys hunting Ps1 rares.  They’re still a pretty solid guide to finding uncommon games in a set even if some of the tiers for some of the games are off at this point.  Anything concept of relative rarity more accurate or up to date than that I had to develop through near constant research and watching a lot of titles for extended periods of time on eBay.  
How many threads around the web can one man sift through where the consensus is that black label final fantasy vii is rare because “me mate Ricky C paid $40 for a complete copy”.  Through those old digit press lists I actually ended up with a boatload of titles that aren’t worth diddly but are absolutely more more scarce than some big $$ ‘rares’.  At one point I thought about trying to update some of the database on PlaystationAge but no one wanted to play with me and it’s a lot of work just to inevitably have folks who did none of that work criticize it no matter how you do it.  

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If the guide stuck to the digital press style of a letter grade on how rare it is to come by a game, manual, box (potential poster, etc sheet) that would be handy.  I'd think at this rate especially with everyone out to make a buck more than anything else a lot more has been flushed out into the open space.  Perhaps it would be easier to assign a letter as you could look at history and present year and maybe get a decent grade going using the old DP list as a starting point.  I imagine some of it likely has shifted minimally if at all, and it would be largely easier than assigning either a 0-10 level or far worse, a dollar value since that's super sketchy for some time now and especially this year with virus pricing.

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Pricing has always been too variable.  Anyone making a new guide, PLEASE just do the rarity of each game/item and not the pricing; rarity (by and large) doesn't change decade over decade, whereas prices are mostly out of date before the book even gets off the press.  Look at the DP guide, for example.  The rarity is about 70% correct, even though it's been 20 years, while the pricing is about as far removed from reality as a flying pig...

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On 7/31/2020 at 5:24 AM, Reed Rothchild said:

I could grab the SNES rarities.  goCollect owns them, but I'm the one who calculated them in a spreadsheet and then input them.  Do they own my spreadsheet? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Dain sold your ass like the finest grass, my friend, and smoked it all the way to the BANK!

But, fear not, I'm sure the new owners of all that precious data, carefully and lovingly accrued and curated over countless hours, will take the utmost care in its stewardship...

BWAHAHAHAH!!!! HA HA BAH !!!! BHAHHAHA!!!! Those fucks, lololollolol!

  • Haha 1
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