Shmaxian rating system

[Tripredacus]

While I do think that implementing some sort of condition options would be nice, I don't think a full blown condition scale is appropriate considering the amount of work involved vs the amount it would be used. That being said, I would like to have an option to specify the completeness of a figure. People may assume we all have perfect figures added into our Shmax collection and this is plainly not the case. As an example, the G1 Roadbuster I have in my collection could be considered a junker, since it is missing his head! And if you think my Insecticon army is perfect, you'd certainly be wrong about that. I have yet to add them all into Shmax (I have at least 10 of each basic G1 guy) but I can say I have at about 5 Shrapnels that are missing arms or have broken chrome parts.

But if there was a way to specify that say... my Trailbreaker is a junker, I could look into my collection, show only the junkers, then I would know which ones of those they are. And then if I am looking at stuff on Ebay or a BST on a forum and see someone selling a Trailbreaker junker, I would know that I should probably get it to fix up mine.

[shmax]

At this point my takeaway is that none of the C Scale or derivatives we've discussed or linked to in this thread are anything but subjective interpretations; there doesn't seem to be any standard. One of the pages Trip linked to mentioned that it's a concept generally descended from baseball cards, which seems right. Whether we do adopt a grading scale of some kind or not, I don't know if there's any point in trying to nail down C scale--if we come up with our own take on it we're just adding to the problem and would suffer from each person's preconceptions about what the ratings mean.

This is exactly why I removed all references to terms liike MISB and MIB (and replaced them with Sealed and Opened)--the terms had been so abused by eBayer's and others that they had lost all meaning and I wanted nothing to do with them. My instinct is to do something similar with grading (also remember that we're trying to expand beyond action figures, so any grading system we use needs to be versatile enough to work for pretty much anything). I also tend to side with Engledogg that we should grade part by part, especially when you consider the practice many members have of building sets piece-by-piece, and we're in a rare position to do it with our part-tracking infrastructure.

That said, I think I'd like to save grading (and reviews) for shmax 2.0, as we're considering dramatically changing the way parts and products are organized and tracked.

[Antron007]

Although I have no info that you guys haven't already posted, I did a bunch of research on Grading a while back to the best of my knowledge, there was no official standard. Just the Cosgrove Scale, a 00-99 scale. And even those had no truly defined standards. Even with the AFA, the truth in grading is that it depends on where you go and how the particular person grading it feels that day. One mans C4 is another mans C6 is another mans C3.

I think it would be cool to have this feature just for personal reasons. It would be nice to have something like a mint/near mint/excellent/good/fair/ and I don't know where to go from there. I only have a few toys with damage or issues and I just use the handy notes section for that.

Very interesting conversation guys. I gotta run

[shmax]

Although I have no info that you guys haven't already posted, I did a bunch of research on Grading a while back to the best of my knowledge, there was no official standard. Just the Cosgrove Scale, a 00-99 scale. And even those had no truly defined standards. Even with the AFA, the truth in grading is that it depends on where you go and how the particular person grading it feels that day. One mans C4 is another mans C6 is another mans C3.

I think it would be cool to have this feature just for personal reasons. It would be nice to have something like a mint/near mint/excellent/good/fair/ and I don't know where to go from there. I only have a few toys with damage or issues and I just use the handy notes section for that.

Very interesting conversation guys. I gotta run

Even "mint", "excellent", "good" and "fair" seem a little vague to me. Why not just be more explicit about it with real language? See attachment...

[KidTDragon]

Even "mint", "excellent", "good" and "fair" seem a little vague to me. Why not just be more explicit about it with real language? See attachment...

I like this idea a lot. It removes a lot of the subjectivity and vagueries of a grading system. Maybe you could add some quantifying levels to the damage descriptions, like "a lot of scratches" or "slightly yellowed", although admittedly that brings back some of the subjectivity.

[shmax]

How about this?

[KidTDragon]

I like, I like!

[Tripredacus]

Even "mint", "excellent", "good" and "fair" seem a little vague to me. Why not just be more explicit about it with real language? See attachment...

I like this one better than the radio button option. But in this case would all those options really be available? Look at the one in the example. The current condition is sealed, so missing labels or chipping wouldn't be applicable in that case right? Also, consider that toy doesn't even have labels! Also, joints loose would apply to almost everything!

[shmax]

Even "mint", "excellent", "good" and "fair" seem a little vague to me. Why not just be more explicit about it with real language? See attachment...

I like this one better than the radio button option. But in this case would all those options really be available? Look at the one in the example. The current condition is sealed, so missing labels or chipping wouldn't be applicable in that case right? Also, consider that toy doesn't even have labels! Also, joints loose would apply to almost everything!

It was just a sample--I didn't have the energy to flesh out all the possible options for a quick mock-up. If the item was sealed the conditions for the parts would all be max'ed out and uneditable. We already have a similar behavior in place now, such that when an item is sealed the part checklist is disabled. If an item has no labels, I would think you would just leave it on "like new", or whatever the highest setting is. Alternatively, we could add a "has labels?" field to the part record, and consider it when constructing the grading widgets.

One thing I want to do in shmax 2.0 is add the notion of "what is it?" to each toy record. You would start with "Action figure", "Trading card", "Vehicle Toy", "Playset", and so on. Once we have that, we could tailor the grading pop-up appropriately (we could even use the C Scale for trading cards, as it was apparently originally intended for this purpose).

[Antron007]

I liked the layout and organization of the second one but maybe with the check boxes instead of radios and keeping that little comments field as well. I like that field a lot. But, that's just my $.02

[Edit]
I'm using the term "Applied Labels" in my notes field where applicable.
[/Edit]

[shmax]

I liked the layout and organization of the second one but maybe with the check boxes instead of radios and keeping that little comments field as well. I like that field a lot. But, that's just my $.02

[Edit]
I'm using the term "Applied Labels" in my notes field where applicable.
[/Edit]

Another idea would be to do drop-downs, or a little slider you can drag between two values for each quality. Will think about it some more.

[Antron007]

Geeze Max. We ask for some check boxes and you want to give us the "Fancy Bear" slider. You're too cool dude.