| Posted By
JamesC
on 2005-12-22
23:04:14
|  Software Rarity
Csabo said: "Of course we really have to think the rating system through... A game that can be bought in online shops right now is common. Rarity has its own values as well. I think the best people to come up with the scores would be the ones with large collections. Anyway, I'm thinking something like:
- 1 Absolutely rare: limited release etc
- 2 Very rare: dunno, help me out here
...
- 9 Common: even sold now in online stores."
I nominate the following ratings:
1 - Not verified as ever released (1942, Commodore's Wizard of Wor cartridge)
2 - Extremely rare (Commodore's Hulk diskette release, etc)
3 - Rare (Exorcist single release with graphic cover, etc)
4 - Common (Plus Pack tapes with no graphics on cover)
5 - Everywhere (the ones that are always on Ebay)
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Posted By
Sidius
on 2005-12-23
04:38:20
 | Re: Software Rarity
I think that's a good idea...and interesting is it always ! 
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Posted By
C16 Chris
on 2005-12-23
07:36:07
 | Re: Software Rarity
I think we can not say what is realy rare !
O.K. at Point 2 i have never seen this Commodore Disks for sale.
But at Point 3 Exorcist i have Buy in three eBay Action for only one Penny.
And speacel rerealeases are there rare when we see them only onetime ?
I have buy my Tequila Sunrice Tapes at eBay Belgium for the Starting Bit (1,99 Euro).
I will realease my C16 Price Guide in Januar 2006 and update them every Year
Every body can contact me to say what he means thats rare and that not so can i write it in the Price Guide.
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Posted By
Plus4Vampyre
on 2005-12-23
09:21:46
 | Re: Software Rarity
James is absolutly right - the suggestion of James is a common method to specify the rarity of a computer game. Have a look to http://www.digitpress.com/ - I would suggest the scale of 0 to 10 - 0 are rumor mills like Wizard of Wor,1942,.. - 10 prototypes. 9 is extrem rare like the Octasoft BASIC 7.0 Cartridge and 1 is common lilke the Mastertronic tapes. I one of the old topics in the forum I suggested to add a rarity guide to this site - maybe Csabo or Lando can do this. @James - I would give Hulk a rarity of 8 because its rare but I have seen this on ebay 3 times. @C16 Chris - in my opinon you have to set up first the rarity than the price - but the price does not depend on the rarity - eg. Pac Man for the Atari 2600 has a rarity of 1 (because there are more carts than concoles) but the price is 1$-5$ because the people love the game and are willing to pay 5$. It's also a bad idea to add the shipping cost to the price of an game. I think its a great idea to have a catalogue of rarity and price for all the c16/plus/4 games but it should be realistic and in my opinion the user of the emucamp site should be able to set the rarity and maybe price by there experiences. And I do not want to resign the estimation of Crown, Ulysses, James and all the other users.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2005-12-23
13:57:20
| Re: Software Rarity
JamesC's list sounds pretty reasonable. For some reason I also think the rare numbers should be the lower ones, and not the other way around, although I can really see that this is just preference. Perhaps keep those, and allow middle values? So we'd have numbers from 1-9, and 8 could be stuff which is between his 4 and 5.
Point #1: take my above suggestion (values 1-9, explanations are what JamesC wrote). If no major objections, then this shall be done.
Point #2: So how will come to a consensus on the "correct" value? Plus4Vampyre, are you suggesting some kind of voting system? E.g. each member could set the value, and the average would be the end result? That could be pretty accurate in the end, but seeing the low voting particiation I think we would never fully populate the db. We need to talk this out a bit more. Opinions?
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Posted By
Ulysses777
on 2005-12-23
15:26:18
| Re: Software Rarity
Provided that there can be different rarity ratings for different releases of the same game (e.g. Icicle Works is very common in the Plus Pack release, but very rare in its original release) then it sounds like a good plan indeed
I also agree that the rating system should have higher numbers for rarer games (as well as Digitpress, AtariAge also uses a similar system).
I'm not sure about the idea of specifying approximate prices though, because some sellers (Ebay or otherwise) may start raising their starting/BIN prices unnecessarily for the rarer titles.
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Posted By
JamesC
on 2005-12-23
18:38:02
| Re: Software Rarity
Further Suggestions, based on your comments so far:
- Different versions are usually indicated by different covers. Therefore, when a specific cover is known, the rating of rare to common should apply to that particular version.
- Compilations (re-releases, re-re-releases) are listed in this database as seperate entries, and should be rated on their own, not on the programs contained in the compliation.
- Do we need to nitpick down to "slightly more common than a Plus Pack tape, but not as common as a Mastertronic tape from 1986"? Would 10 rarity levels be (enough), (not enough), or (too many)?
- I wrote 1 being vaporware, 5 being very common, to be consistent with Csabo, but also to indicate how precious a particular title is. A "number one" is more precious than a "number three" program, for example, due to its rarity (not due to playability score, otherwise only Tom Thumb would be a 1).
- I disagree with the idea of the site listing prices. Reason one, I'm in North America and rarity here is completely different than over there in Europe. Reason two, as stated by another, an Ebay seller may decide to use the list to price his offerings higher than we collectors are willing to pay, or throw "junk" into the lot so that we have to pay more for that one rare gem.
- If our titles start going up in price on Ebay, I nominate holding C16Chris responsible.
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Posted By
Crown
on 2005-12-23
19:07:04
| Re: Software Rarity
Prices already started to go up, but the only reason for that is that demand (number of collectors) went up over the last 2-3 years, while supply keeps pretty much the same...
I actually would not like to see subjective ratings, but rather some rating which depends on quantifiable data. Something like along the line how many known copies of a particular version of a program exists...
How this could work is that the site became became our inventory reposit. If I have a certain game than I could set on the site that I have it and how many copies of it I have. Basically the same stuff I'm and others doing right now keepin an HTML or Doc file version of their inventory and duplicates list. If only just 5-10 people keep their inventory numbers up to date on the site, than that's an immediate rating on rarity, because if nobody from the collectors have an item then that's an extremely rare item, if 1 or 2 has them then it is rare, if 3-4 people has it than medium rare, more than 10 people has it vey common etc...
Now it would be also good to know, the original release quantitites for individual titles, but that's not going to happen....
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Posted By
JamesC
on 2005-12-24
00:01:57
| Re: Software Rarity
I had thought about asking the users to enter their "inventory" on the site, but decided against it. For one, some people's inventory changes too frequently due to trades and sells. Another reason is that some collections are so big that it would take (almost) forever to get together a reasonable list, let alone enter them into the database here.
Plus, this isn't my site, it's not my place to tell Csabo to make this possible.
A third reason is that some rarities we're come across lately have been found by a small few.... C16Chris and Commodore16.com Chris are two examples. Their site (Commodore16.com) would be their first place to "publicize" their finds, and entering them here would be secondary. I know that when I find something new, I post it on my site (cbm264.com) first, so I cannot say that the Chris-ses (?!) would be out of place in using new finds to their advantage.
I think it would be great if we all had a central repository of software, but this site has done the second best thing -- made it available to all of us without the hassle of shipping and postage and packing costs.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2005-12-27
13:13:23
| Re: Software Rarity
We could do a "member inventory", to code this would not be much trouble.
There's a deeper issue however, related to "releases" vs. "software". As it is, the database structure we've been building all these years is not good enough. "Software" and "release" are mingled together, but they should be separate entities. The first time this became evident was when we had two different product codes for one game (because it was released by two different companies, and each gave it a different code). So basically when we enter "software", it would have very few properties, and then for each software we would have to add at least one (but possibly more) "release" records. Release date, device req, product code, etc. would all be properties of the "release" and not the software. And of course the new "rarity" field would also go to "release" not software. Covers would be linked to releases as well.
To fix this would be a HUGE change. Basically every page that deals with software would have to be changed, along with the db itself. Or, we could just stick it out the way it currently is... Is it worth it?
James, this place is your site as much as it's anyone else's The whole point is to bring everything and everyone together under one big community effort. If we actually owned the host, we wouldn't be so stingy with FTP accounts either. (Right now we're just extremely grateful for the space and bandwidth.) Who knows, maybe someday we'll all pitch in and buy a new domain+host, a keep building it all together, where everyone can contribute and "do their thing".
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Posted By
JamesC
on 2005-12-27
16:25:31
| Re: Software Rarity
Csabo, what you suggest makes very good sense, and seems to be more like what the database should have been to begin with..... not to say you've done a bad job. You've done a very good job, but the database is clearly not set up to do what we're discussing.
If you wish to redesign your database to reflect "software" that has various "releases" (alternate software houses, different languages, etc), that is going to fall upon you to do so. I code straight HTML because that's what I've taught myself, and have no ambitions to move into SQL and PHP. 
An alternate idea, though this may not work fully as intended: the site currently has the "Commercial" flag for commercial/freeware software. There exists the possibility to only allow rarity ratings on "Commercial" software.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2005-12-27
17:17:52
| Re: Software Rarity
Yeah, I the above would be (is?) my job... By the way, the "commercial flag" (release type) would also be a property of the release, and not the software. This way we could finally clear up all the stuff properly, e.g. if a commercial games has a crack with cheat by someone, that could be listed as an additional, "crack" or freeware release. And of course the "rarity" would only make sense for commercial stuff, obviously everything else is either 100% available or lost. Same with price.
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Posted By
JamesC
on 2005-12-27
17:41:44
| Re: Software Rarity
Csabo, I mentioned the possibility of using the "Commercial" flag to allow rarity ratings. This was an alternate idea to your redesigning the database, not a feature of a new database.
Since the "Commercial" flag follows the release, and we currently have a seperate (but linkable) entry for each release in the database, this would be easier to impelment than converting the existing database to a new one.
Also, as I said before, different rarities exist for different releases of the same software.... so the rarity rating would still follow the release, not the software. I forsee someone trying to establish that a certain cover is more rare than another, so I still feel that using a cover as a rarity rating "key" (Cover A with white-on-black is rarer than Cover B with yellow-on-black, for example) is feasible.
But yes, the untimate rarity rating would be on the software itself. Let's take Questprobe: The Hulk for example. This title would be Very Rare for a Commodore diskette release (as we do know that it does exist), yet rated Common in the Adventure International cassette release that has a yellow sticker on the box. There may be a different box found in the future that has the computer model printed right on the box (not a sticker) that could also be rated Very Rare.... so for Hulk, we would need to take into account the software itself as Common, but the packaging and format as Very Rare or Common.
I also collect Matchbox miniature cars, and own an older copy of a rarity/pricing guide for them. To me, the Volkswagen Beetle Concept is the same vehicle no matter what color Mattel paints it.... but to other collectors a blue one is different from a yellow one, the spokes on the wheels make a difference, the color of the plastic used for the windows makes a difference.
Compared to miniature cars, sorting out Plus/4 software is a piece of cake.
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Posted By
C16 Chris
on 2005-12-27
17:46:42
| Re: Software Rarity
Wunderfull now we on th right way !
But why sort the Software by Name and not by Publisher ?
I have sort my collecten und the Price Guide so .
I have found 129 commercial Publischer of 264er Software.
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Posted By
JamesC
on 2005-12-27
17:54:55
| Re: Software Rarity
Upon reading more closely, I see that Csabo and I agree on using covers as a distinguishing characteristic of a particular release.
I do see a potential problem with the users entering in their inventory... how will we do it? Are we going to upload an Excel spreadsheet and hope that we entered our titles exactly the same way as in the database? Shall we have little checkboxes to mark if we have a particular diskette or cassette or cartridge? Are we going to enter the titles online, typing each one in?
I can see the potential for people to make mistakes entering their inventory in, and then mucking up their fixes (double entries, one gets erased accidentally, the wrong cover is checked because they didn't notice the software house).
We have over 5000 titles in the database.... if we say only 20% is ratable software (commercially published) then we're still looking at 1000 distinctly different releases that we may have to be particular about. That's one heck of a list of boxes to check off!
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Posted By
JamesC
on 2005-12-27
18:01:53
| Re: Software Rarity
C16 Chris, I think the reason we don't sort by publisher is because a title may have been released by different software labels. We've seen some publishers selling a first release under one name, the re-release under a different label that they also own, then finally licensing the game out to another publishing house for a compliation.
Sorting by title allows one to find the program in question easier, and without having to find the disk or cassette box in order to determine who published it.
Sorting by language is a bit easier and reflects the software house to a point. Most M&T and Kingsoft releases are in German, most Commodore releases are in English, most Novosoft releases are in Hungarian, for example.
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Posted By
JamesC
on 2006-01-02
11:42:39
| Re: Software Rarity
A new thought: How will new releases (such as TRM's new Lunar Blitz) be accounted for on the rarity list?
With the idea of downloadable commercial releases, rarities can change literally overnight. Today, Chronosoft's website doesn't list TMR's new titles, therefore owning them on cassette or disk would make them "extremely rare" or "prototype". But in two weeks or a month, once Chronosoft sells a few of these, it could drop down to "uncommon". If all of us (visiting this site regularly, under 30 of us) were to buy a copy, then it would be "common" even though the greater Commodore scene (thousands across the globe) more than likely does not own it.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2006-01-02
12:01:21
| Re: Software Rarity
I don't think we have to change this stuff overnight. We can assume that those two titles will be available, so they are "common".
Also, the "rarity" should mean how difficult it is for someone who NOW wants to purchase a game. If any games are still sold in online shops, then it's no problem, you just buy a copy and you're done.
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