Rarity Score

[mrsaca]

Hi there,

previously noted on other similar sites, I think that placing a rarity score on the games would be a nice addition to the site.
This score can be measured by the available copies of a specific game on the individual collections of each member thus having a rarity score per game and also enable the possibility of scoring the overall collection.


It's just a suggestion but, what do you guys thin ?

Regards

[rayne315]

I like the idea but it would be super generalized and significantly off in rarity. since this is a collectors site most users understand things like sports games having little value and rare games being sought after so there is an actually quite large discrepancy between games in collectors collections and their actual rarity.

for example I personally enjoy collecting shovelware ds games because in most cases I can buy them for 50-70 cents a game and they are incredibly common. but the largest majority of the shovelware ds games I own are owned by less than 5 people. where as a legitimately rare game Breach and Clear for the vita (only 1500 copies were ever made) has 57 owners of it.

[marvelvscapcom2]

Hi there,

previously noted on other similar sites, I think that placing a rarity score on the games would be a nice addition to the site.
This score can be measured by the available copies of a specific game on the individual collections of each member thus having a rarity score per game and also enable the possibility of scoring the overall collection.


It's just a suggestion but, what do you guys thin ?

Regards

That'd be pretty neat,  Each game having a rarity mark would be cool and having a collection score similar to a Xbox gamerscore would be a fun idea .  As long as it isn't a Letter grade or type of thing where it makes people feel bad about their collection.

Adding to the statistics page would be cool too,  maybe more graphs like the pie graph that is there, maybe a graph on how your collection tastes compare with the other users, what types of games make up your demographic each month to show you if your preferences are changing and how you change organically as a gamer.

[mrsaca]

I like the idea but it would be super generalized and significantly off in rarity. since this is a collectors site most users understand things like sports games having little value and rare games being sought after so there is an actually quite large discrepancy between games in collectors collections and their actual rarity.

for example I personally enjoy collecting shovelware ds games because in most cases I can buy them for 50-70 cents a game and they are incredibly common. but the largest majority of the shovelware ds games I own are owned by less than 5 people. where as a legitimately rare game Breach and Clear for the vita (only 1500 copies were ever made) has 57 owners of it.

You are right, but this idea can be tweaked in order to reflect the most accurate information, not just in sports titles but maybe some other crappy games that where on shelves but barely sold or family games that no one wants to collect.

For example I own a game named Ballerburg for the PS1, in fact 5 copies of it. And why you might ask, well I saw them unopened on a flea market and I bought them for 2€ a piece to reuse the cases for other games that i had later to find out that it is a rare game on another site like this one, but I don't believe that is the case since I see that game all the time on the shelves of 2nd hand stores, but since barely no one adds it to their collection it's flagged as rare.

But hey that's why we're having this thread to brainstorm on this idea a find the best way to do it. 

Thank you for your feedback.

[mrsaca]

Also in another note we can use more information than just the collection data of the users, since this is a very good game database which includes the Platinum Versions and the "Best of's", Essentials, etc. we know for starters that those games that reach those status are games which had a considerable amount of sales.

I.E.: To become a Platinum release for the PlayStation it was required that a game have over 400,000 total worldwide sales.

So we can automatically set a max score for those since they sold at least 400k units.

For digital releases, they should be excluded, for now, since it's harder to track unless the more popular digital game distribution platforms posses a service that can be queried to know how may copies they sold of a specific game.

Either way, market available games cannot be labeled in a certain rarity (apart from special editions and such) since they are still available on the marked and copies are still be made.

So the rollout of this should be scoped, primarily to the games of systems that are no longer on the market, then integrate with the recent platforms.

(This is just thought process dumping ^^)

[tripredacus]

Another site I am on (which I track my toy collection) has many sorting methods. One is that you can look into your collection and sort by most and least collected. Items that are shown with a 1 mean you are the only person to have it. Example:
https://www.shmax.com/tripredacus?c_sort_type=mostCollected&c_sort_dir=asc
However this is not a sort limited to your collection but can be applied to any category on the entire site. So you can find items that have 0 in collection, meaning no one has it:
https://www.shmax.com/products?q_filters_toyline=219&q_pagination_limit=20&q_pagination_offset=0&q_sort_type=mostCollected&q_sort_dir=asc

Yet the disclaimer still exists. Due to the limited amount of users on any given website, it does not indicate actual rarity of the item. It only shows this in relation to the site itself. You typically would look beyond the instances of 0 or 1 in collection, and look to 2-5 instead. The reason being is that items with a 0 or 1 can end up (most of the time) being variations or regional exclusives... and the same with video games as with toys, sometimes a person will just track their collection using the US version and not care (or know) that they have some other version.

[mrsaca]

Yet the disclaimer still exists. Due to the limited amount of users on any given website, it does not indicate actual rarity of the item. It only shows this in relation to the site itself.

I could live with that, of course the scope of limiting this only to the data of the website is to avoid workloads and have just data working in our favor.

Other website that I used in the past has this some what implemented, only for certain platforms and the rarity scores only apply to the games, not extending to the overall collection score.

Also I don't know the criteria implemented there.

[rayne315]

thinking of it like that makes it seem more like a uniqueness score than a rarity score.

[mrsaca]

thinking of it like that makes it seem more like a uniqueness score than a rarity score.

What's the difference? What you call uniqueness there is no game unique, unless you make it so and if you do so, what's the point of catalog something unique?

[rayne315]

thinking of it like that makes it seem more like a uniqueness score than a rarity score.

What's the difference? What you call uniqueness there is no game unique, unless you make it so and if you do so, what's the point of catalog something unique?

what I mean is when people think of rarity in a collecting sense they think how many total items of this are out in the wild (which we simply cannot figure 99.9% of them) where as when I think of collection uniqueness I think off all the items in a collection and how uncommon they are to have/be in a collection. like if you have games that are like uncharted, assassins creed, and super metroid in your collection (games with hundreds/thousands owned by collectors on this site) then those are not unique to have where as if you have gardening mama 2, the biggest loser, and madden nfl 08 (games with tens of owners) you collection is significantly more unique.

[mrsaca]

thinking of it like that makes it seem more like a uniqueness score than a rarity score.

What's the difference? What you call uniqueness there is no game unique, unless you make it so and if you do so, what's the point of catalog something unique?

what I mean is when people think of rarity in a collecting sense they think how many total items of this are out in the wild (which we simply cannot figure 99.9% of them) where as when I think of collection uniqueness I think off all the items in a collection and how uncommon they are to have/be in a collection. like if you have games that are like uncharted, assassins creed, and super metroid in your collection (games with hundreds/thousands owned by collectors on this site) then those are not unique to have where as if you have gardening mama 2, the biggest loser, and madden nfl 08 (games with tens of owners) you collection is significantly more unique.

That's like saying the same stuff but in other words... besides using unique there makes no sense at all. Since unique means being the only one of its kind; unlike anything else.

It cannot be 100% accurate of course, that's why the universe is just the collection within this site, which I believe to be a good sample that has the potential to somewhat reflect the reality.

Like most statistics you do by approximation using a small sample of the full universe.

[tripredacus]

What you're really talking about here is a market indicator. This can't be determined from any collector site and the limited members. The main tripping point is that among collectors, there are certain types of games that fall within the minority of collectors. Historically, sports games, shovelware and perhaps board game based titles are not things the typical collector will collect, even though these titles can be immensely popular because they are the games purchased by regular folks.