It's an incredibly bad idea to use pinside collection stats to draw any assumptions whatsoever. Not everyone keeps their collection up to date. The vast majority of pinball players I talk to have never heard of pinside, and some have stopped coming here because of the negativity and intolerance exhibited by a small but vocal minority.

I don't know anything about Stern's sales. I do know that we are in the midst of a pinball boom. It would not surprise me one bit if their increased sales were purely due to the boom, even including a reduction in sales from the hardcore pinsiders.

Pinball is now big enough to cater to different tastes. That's a huge milestone. Personally I hate AC/DC and Metallica, but SW is my favorite pin. They're different. That's great for pinball.

FWIW I'm an operator. My SW Pro is crushing it on route.

Just curious, what are you basing that claim on?

No question that Pinside represents a minority. Stats say 10,000 pinsiders were active within the last month. Worldwide that's a small fraction of pinball enthusiasts.

I don't understand how you are drawing all those conclusions from very flawed data.

For example, AFMr classic is only listed in 11 pinsider collections, but 105 SW Pros are listed. Did Stern sell 10x more SW pros than AFMr classics? Is SW Pro 10x better? 10x more popular with players? Which is worth more? We can't answer any of those questions based on collection data because... the data simply isn't trustworthy.

I'm going to take a guess that you don't have a background in data.

I'll try to explain again. Pinside stats aren't good data. The data is bad. It's not solid. It's bad data.

tl;dr: There is no way to verify the accuracy of the data.

You say there is an incentive to self-report collections. I say there is an incentive to exaggerate a person's collection. Which of us is right? There's no way to know.

There's also no way to know how many titles are listed multiple times because of a sale, because Pinside doesn't track serial numbers. It's very likely that many people forget or don't care to update their stats when they sell a pin from their collection. Or they don't come often enough to Pinside, or they stopped coming to Pinside, or they forgot their password and created a new account.

People on this very thread also admit to not listing all of their titles in their pinside collection. There's no way to enforce people keeping their collections up to date. Some people with large collections may not want to share that information for a variety of personal reasons.

We know people create troll accounts here and also that people use multiple accounts. Say 0.005% of pinside accounts have a fake collection. There are 50,000 pinside accounts, so any title could have up to 250 titles more than are actually in the market. This is extremely significant because the numbers being thrown about here to justify sales are very small, and the pinball market is extremely small.

So without adding some really time consuming verification process where we start from scratch and every user sends in a unique picture of the serial number for each title in their collection, this simply isn't valid data.

You say the location data is accurate? Well, none of the pins I operate on location are listed here as being on location. I see very little location advertising here. We have no way of knowing what locations self-report their data, but a casual glance location data looks wildly under reported to me.

We also can't use relative stats because we don't have good data on who the people this site attracts who ALSO have collection stats. Who has an incentive to report their collection? A HUO LE collector or a route operator who buys 10x more pins? I personally think that there are very few route operators here (based on threads), but there's no way to know. This is all speculation, because there's no way to know. That's what makes the data bad.

For these reasons, the data here does not support any assertions, especially a "clearly the LE is more popular" assertion. We can only say with certainty, "of the self-reported unverified collection stats on Pinside, the LE has more entries than the Pro." Which means exactly nothing.

Yeah, the whole argument!

I'm not saying anyone did. That's not the point.

Not at all. But those are two obviously true claims. The fact that Pinside stats support your claim doesn't make the data good. A broken clock still tells the time correctly twice a day.

But you need good data to support, for example, whysnow's claim that AFMrLE sold more than AFMr classic. Or that MET outsold SW. Interesting claims, but Pinside stats can't be used to prove or disprove them. And Pinside data is not good.

I find it odd that this isn't totally obvious to some of you. GIGO.

Hey my fellow pinsider,

I promise you I'm not using my gut.

I usually come to Pinside to learn things. Once in a while I can offer up some of my own knowledge. I'm trying to teach you something, not score points.

Nobody gets to choose if data is good or bad. It's either good or bad. Just like nobody gets to choose if the earth orbits the sun or not. It just does.

I've already explained why the data here is bad and can't be trusted. You should read it again. I put a lot of thought and time into it.

Or maybe you could watch some videos on bias and data collection like this one:

- you can skip to 5:40 if you don't want to watch the whole thing.

Or if you ever get out to Portland let me know and I'll explain it over pinball and beer.

PM me when you get to Portland for that beer.

I don't know of a good source for data. Pinballmap.com data might be usable, since it is publicly verifiable. It'd be cool to have a website that let people upload pix of the serial number of their pins. The numbers might be useful.

I don't watch much TV, especially reality tv