ICStats said: I agree we shouldn't be having major threads about how the position changed +/- every hour, but I like them as a general reference. We can see the reactions right after announcements & such. VGC is all about deducing early numbers so I don't think we should ban that kind of thing or any kind of data source really. Can we ban ban requests? j/k please don't ban me though

YOU'RE BANNED!!  Oh, wait...I don't have that power.  Damn!  I agree it is interesting seeing where things lie when they are first available to purchase/pre-order.  Still, even with those threads, people usually wait a few hours to see it how long they stay in the Top 20.  Usually, anyway.  But, yea, this is mostly for those who just feel the need to make multiple threads whenever one console/game jumps over another, only to have it drop below again, then a day later we get yet another thread about the same thing.  It just gets repetitive.

You can't ban stupidity.

For hourly sales, a DEDICATED thread might be more useful; discuss trends, basically form a 'map' of spikes or declines in certain games, but keep all discussion to the one thread. I do agree making multiple threads for individual sale spikes- seriously, all declaring 'The Tide Is Turning!' based on a couple hours of sales does is set you up for ridicule when the tide does not, in fact, turn- is a pain in the butt. Same thing happened with the Amiibos, I recall. And yes, even when the PS4 is the subject, though there's even less of a reason to make a PS4 thread based on hourly sales. x3 'Oh, a PS4 SKU is still above all the Xbox One SKUs for the twentieth week in a row? TO THE THREAD MAKE BUTTON!'

There are no positive X1 news... a spike of a few days because of a free game is nothing extraordinary and the Xbox One is already out of T20 hourly and going down. It will take time to stabilise down because amazon has an average system... that's why you see games which are out of stock still holding high up the charts for some time. This is indeed an unreliable way to draw out conclusions and pretty much a waste of time.

I agree that the constant use of hourly Amazon bestsellers to prove ANYTHING is infuriating. You mention seeing them used to support XBO, but I see them used to support all sorts of things, and I too am sick of it. I've only recently started seeing it used to support XBO, actually. I've seen it more with Nintendo, and I can't stand it, because it just makes things worse. It gives me false hope for a second until I realize they're using hourly data and thus it's meaningless, and it makes the fanbase look desperate and therefore makes the whole situation look more grim. It also annoys the other fanbases because it's shoddy reasoning that sometimes gets used to baselessly poke fun at another fanbase. So it's generally just bad for everybody. I would support this sort of ban.

No. It's valid information if used and interpreted correctly. If the hourlies are consistently showing a pattern then you can draw valid conclusions. But if you take one snapshot and say "look this one is winning." Then that's meaningless wishful thinking. If you sample the hourlies 3 or 4 times a day, every day for a few days and the same thing is showing consistently, e.g. Desinty PS4 bundle always in the top 10 and no other console in the top 10, then you can say with pretty good certainty that PS4 Destiny bundle is selling better than anything else. But if you look at the hourly once and it shows something you like, such as Xbone vanilla model ahead of PS4 vanilla model (and you ignore the PS4 Destiny bundle) and try to claim "Xb one is back baby" then you're either stupid or deliberately trying to deceive.

Amazon hourlies, when sampled often enough, have been a better predictor of which console would win NPD than VGC has been this year. So if you're going to ban Amazon hourlies then you'd better ban the weekly VGC numbers thread and only allow threads after adjustments.

The issue is more of how people are using the hourly charts. If people are doing a thread every instance the Top 100 List changes, then they're doing it wrong. However, if they observe that a certain SKU or product is hovering in the Top 10 for the past few days, then that is something worthy of discussing.

i thought most of it was confined to specific amazon threads? some of us track is consistently and compared it to sales to see how it stacks up. we also compare it to later weekly/monthly/year results.

To make a new thread about "hey its at this rank right now" is a bit pointless, but a thread about a sku being consistently ahead of a very important competitor sku can be of interest. Like how we tracked the destiny bundle having been ahead of the xb sku for the whole summer, i used it to eventually predict an area in the yearly top 100, and it went even beyond that lol now we just need to compare it to sales when we get them.

Nah.. Insiderp, on the other hand, is something that needs to be banned!

i have to admit:

not completely before i made my post