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Rainman Pricing tool? (2 Viewers)

Something else worth mentioning is that all the data in the database is anonymous. I'm not tracking any of the PCF user names or eBay IDs with any of the transactions.
 
TL/DR

It doesn't matter what any guide says about any price (and I am not saying a price guide is what this 'project' is). A buyer needs to educate themselves on what they are buying, and figure out what that item is worth to them. If they buy something within that "It's worth it to me" area, no one is getting screwed.

If a buyer fails to adequately educate themselves before purchasing, and find out later they overpaid, they have no one to blame but themselves.
 
ChipEnvy said:
TL/DR

It doesn't matter what any guide says about any price (and I am not saying a price guide is what this 'project' is). A buyer needs to educate themselves on what they are buying, and figure out what that item is worth to them. If they buy something within that "It's worth it to me" area, no one is getting screwed.

If a buyer fails to adequately educate themselves before purchasing, and find out later they overpaid, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Click to expand...

Precisely. Chips are "worth" whatever someone is willing to pay for them. Case in point is me buying up The Grove chips from several sellers here and paying them more than they are "worth" for them, because they're worth more to me than they are to probably anyone else on the planet given my history there and attachment to these chips. I know that means if I ever wish to resell them that I'll almost certainly be losing money, but I didn't care, I just wanted the chips. So I paid what they were worth to me. I knew what they had sold for previously and knowing offered several sellers at least double to triple that as my way of saying "thank you" for letting me have them. No chip transaction database, pricing guide, or tool can change that dynamic of the chipping world.

There already exists a chip price guide and we all pretty much laugh at it. No one uses it. No one is going to pay $80 a piece for those 1/8 pie Nevada Lodge $20s even though they're awesome chips just because that's what the book says it's worth.

This tool is no different. It's just a resource for people to use. The main difference between my project and that chip guide is that my project won't tell you what your chips are "worth". It's just going to show you anonymous previous transaction history.

It remains to be seen whether this will be offered to the public for free however. Based on the feedback I'm getting in this thread, it's not very likely, which would also severely delay it's launch date as setting up controlled access to it isn't something I'll have time for until after school is over sometime this summer.
 
Will the project include any details of the condition of the chips that were sold? That's pretty important to be able to compare like with like..
 
I think a tools value might not be in setting price expectations, but knowing how often certain chips come up for sale. Now thats a tool I can get behind (that didn't come out right).

How many of us have started a set and then found out that getting PNY 1's or 1000's would take a few years to actually accumulate for a playable set. This information might be useful so we do not head down a path where we might end up selling cause we cannot complete a set.

I agree with Bergs on the misuse potential, I can see some new members using the tool in inappropriate ways, lets just wait and see what it looks like first. For the most part this is a community and if you started a thread saying what do you think chips XYZ should sell for, the user community will speak up and help potential buyers and sellers.
 
Whiteside said:
Will the project include any details of the condition of the chips that were sold? That's pretty important to be able to compare like with like..
Click to expand...

Yes, it will. As well as a guide with pictures as to how it defines those conditions. It uses a 5 point condition grading scale.
 
RainmanTrail said:
It uses a 5 point condition grading scale.
Click to expand...

Sorry, just saw this episode and made me think of it

michael-scott-45-points.jpg
 
In the stock market materials you receive, there is always a disclaimer...."past performance does not guarantee future results", which is very true, but it doesn't keep people from tracking past performance. I'm not sure why anyone would have a problem with someone spending time documenting sales prices, but personally, if someone wants to do that work, kudos to you!
 
So my initial post was meant to be more high level questions

Is this tool being developed for public use or is it a pet project for Rainman?
Is it a living breathing doc that the community will contribute, or is Rainman solely responsible for tracking every chip thats ever sold?
Will Newbs be able to use this tool, or will every price check require an @RainmanTrail to compound a report?
Is Rainman tracking Every Chip (oversize inlays included) or just those he is interested in buying?

Sounds like nothing is really determined at his time
 
I think Bergs initial concerns were justified. Veteran chippers feared that data would be mishandled. It sucks that the thread got heated.

My initial reaction to this tool was that it was going to arm the n00b's with static information that they feel is ironclad and not subject to a volatile market. That is, metatarding chip sales as Berg suggested. Now I like it but my fear is that its going to be an expired set of data once the aggregation stops or rainman abandons it due to life and then future people use it like some collectors used the old chip guide for sales pricing or making offers. If the tool has automation in place to collect and present data in an organic way (sorry I haven't read this entire thread) then its a non-issue.
 
RainmanTrail said:
It remains to be seen whether this will be offered to the public for free however. Based on the feedback I'm getting in this thread, it's not very likely, which would also severely delay it's launch date as setting up controlled access to it isn't something I'll have time for until after school is over sometime this summer.
Click to expand...
Personally, I'd hate to see that happen. As much as I think the tòol might provide easy açess to useful information, I seriously doubt there will be much of a market for a purchased or fee-based product.
 
Rainman,

In general I don't think anyone has that much objection to you collecting data for use as a resource by you or others. It only becomes a problem when it is injected into members WTS/Classified listings as some sort of goto pricing authority ie:

RainmanTrail said:
My chip pricing tool puts these at around $700
Click to expand...
in this thread http://www.pokerchipforum.com/threads/ub-tournament-set.10640/#post-161761 and at least one other that has been since removed for the so called "crapping" rule.

Please continue to do your statistical work and provide it, if you want, as a research tool for the community. Just be careful when quoting these past sales data figures as some form of pricing guide.
 
TheBigTater said:
Rainman,

In general I don't think anyone has that much objection to you collecting data for use as a resource by you or others. It only becomes a problem when it is injected into members WTS/Classified listings as some sort of goto pricing authority ie:

in this thread http://www.pokerchipforum.com/threads/ub-tournament-set.10640/#post-161761 and at least one other that has been since removed for the so called "crapping" rule.

Please continue to do your statistical work and provide it, if you want, as a research tool for the community. Just be careful when quoting these past sales data figures as some form of pricing guide.
Click to expand...

So the tool doesn't publicly exist yet, but my concerns around it are already realized?
 
TheBigTater said:
Rainman,

In general I don't think anyone has that much objection to you collecting data for use as a resource by you or others. It only becomes a problem when it is injected into members WTS/Classified listings as some sort of goto pricing authority ie:

in this thread http://www.pokerchipforum.com/threads/ub-tournament-set.10640/#post-161761 and at least one other that has been since removed for the so called "crapping" rule.

Please continue to do your statistical work and provide it, if you want, as a research tool for the community. Just be careful when quoting these past sales data figures as some form of pricing guide.
Click to expand...

What you don't see in that thread though is the edited OP where he said he didn't know what they were worth, was selling them for a friend and wanted to know what the community might pay for them. None of these were in the chip database, I was just giving him an estimate based on other ceramic sets and other UB chips.
 
BGinGA said:
Personally, I'd hate to see that happen. As much as I think the tòol might provide easy açess to useful information, I seriously doubt there will be much of a market for a purchased or fee-based product.
Click to expand...

There definitely won't be much of a market for a fee-based product. I imagine there'd probably only be a handful of people willing to pay anything to use it. What I'm considering rather is a free but controlled access offering to those who wish to contribute to the project. This would address some concerns, but would obviously raise others. I still haven't decided though. It probably depends on how much help I'm able to gather going forward. Data collection and input is currently a manual process. I could write a web-scraper (I've written several - my sports betting models runs off of web scraped social media data), but there's just too much subjectivity with this project to be able to build a proper database for it to work. At best, I could write a scraper for eBay listings, but then it would be missing information like 'Primary vs Secondary' & a consistent condition grading scale. Plus, I don't care to write code to anticipate all the misspellings I'm bound to encounter on eBay. Unfortunately, for this project, it will probably be an almost entirely manual data entry process.

I'm not building this to make money, and don't really have any delusions of making any from it. It was just something I put together for a school project that I thought would be extremely valuable to the community if I hosted it publicly. I may allow people to donate via a PayPal link if they wish to support the hosting costs or as a thank you, but that'd probably be it.

There are a few other issues that I need to work out which have the potential of severely delaying the launch of this though. These have to do with some of the features I'm currently using to build this with. I'll need to figure out a workaround for these issues, otherwise it probably won't be posted. Previously I didn't care about these issues, but I've definitely changed my mind about them now.
 
I don´t like this point:
RainmanTrail said:
Please don't erase the prices after an item is sold :) these forums are a great resource for us to look back at later, and when the prices are erased, it negates that value.
Click to expand...
Some people are buying or selling chips without involving their wifes. They don´t wanna show how much they´ve spent for the new chip set, cause she could ask about these nice shoes she saw last week...:eek: By selling she could ask what we could do w/ the money (except buying a new chip set, but new shoes)...o_O
 
Joker said:
I don´t like this point:

Some people are buying or selling chips without involving their wifes. They don´t wanna show how much they´ve spent for the new chip set, cause she could ask about these nice shoes she saw last week...:eek: By selling she could ask what we could do w/ the money (except buying a new chip set, but new shoes)...o_O
Click to expand...

I really hope Tommy isn't going to start mandating that WTS ads and auctions can't be deleted/locked/edited after the fact. Back to my original point - this site is working whereas Big Blue was an unmitigated disaster in most respects. Let's not try to make things harder/more complicated than they need to be.
 
Joker said:
I don´t like this point:

Some people are buying or selling chips without involving their wifes. They don´t wanna show how much they´ve spent for the new chip set, cause she could ask about these nice shoes she saw last week...:eek: By selling she could ask what we could do w/ the money (except buying a new chip set, but new shoes)...o_O
Click to expand...

bergs said:
I really hope Tommy isn't going to start mandating that WTS ads and auctions can't be deleted/locked/edited after the fact. Back to my original point - this site is working whereas Big Blue was an unmitigated disaster in most respects. Let's not try to make things harder/more complicated than they need to be.
Click to expand...

I'm not calling for some hard rule obviously. If you have something to hide, then by all means, hide it. I'm just speaking to the people who are deleting valuable information to the community without thinking about it. Prices are helpful. All I'm saying.
 

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