I've come to the conclusion the market has become like the car collector market. People are buying things for their reputation and prominence.. and not their play. The post like the one you are replying to is the tell tale of sign one. Second sign.. the eagerness to pay for high priced Mods. People are looking to BLING out their games more now than ever. The old days of TomW TZ mods look like childs play to people paying $200-$400 dollars for a single mod.

It won't be long before shows will have long lines of games with their glass off.. and playfields up so we can all inspect and oo and ahh over how well the pin has been kept pristine.

Certainly the idea of a cherry game is not new... but what we are seeing now is the rush and volume for that. Stern's LEs play right into that (good for them) and the amount of money chasing mods now shows the eagerness to pimp out in large volumes.

It's like having cars to race... vs having cars to admire or showoff. That's what is happening for a lot of people in the pin hobby now too

Well unless the aging pinball community of the last 20 years all of a sudden came into a lot of money... there is a lot of new people and new money chasing stuff in the market. There isn't anything to say they adhere to the same likes/philosophies of the old. The tolerance for paying for games and mods has gone through the roof. That isn't happening by sellers alone... it's buyer dollars too.

I don't believe its a vocal minority - I think it's a new audience that is growing.

My hope is it's a 'short one' as eventually these collectors find there is little outside appreciation for their efforts and the community is too small to sustain their need for new appreciation

There is certainly room for both I think... I mean TreasureCove discussions and HEP.. and others all had their market while the majority of the hobby wouldn't fathom putting that much into a single title. But the 'keeping up with the jones' is a little out of control and the balance of what type of audience we have on this site may not be so typical either.

The problem becomes when camp A decides to badmouth camp B... instead of being willing to just pass it over as 'not your taste' and focusing on what is important to you.

excellent point - this is going to cause friction more and more as time goes on. In the past, our games were cheap because they were dumped second hand by the operators and went through a few cycles. Now, the inventory is almost exclusively going to be HUO.. that alone will drive prices on titles of the last few years significantly higher than the previous expectation of a DMD game for 1-3k.

As the first time buyers pay more.. and have no operating revenue to offset their costs.. its difficult to sell for a loss. Combine that with the 'fresh meat' coming into the hobby willing to pay... the prices will stay high even for 2nd or 3rd hand pins.

The loss of onlocation pinball drives up prices - further agitating the traditional hobbyist.

That is a bit of the function of how this site is setup though. This site is setup to always display new posts across all forums by default .. as the view everyone gets to start with. This is very different from the traditional forums where people would dive into a forum topic first and then see the topic list.

The negative to this is.. whatever is most frequent will always dominate the newsfeed. There are tools to change the view.. but the majority won't customize their view.

what was the name of the other website that provided a web view into RGP?

thx LTG.. it was rgparchive I was trying to think of.