Aquamarine said:
I feel like VG Chartz would flourish if the rest of the site's staff / other had access to ioi's sample methodologies and collectively worked on the sales database.
Chartz's potential is truncated with ioi doing all the number work pretty much all on his own.
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I'm not sure of the machinations for actually compiling the weekly charts, so I can't really speculate on how additional staff might assist him. In terms of fixing errors, having someone on staff with an ear to the community would definitely go a long way.
There are many instances where an error is immediately apparent, but can go unchanged for a long period of time. One time where it was blatantly obvious was Borderlands 2 Vita. The game was available in a bundle the week before the standalone release. In the week where it was only available as a bundle VGC showed 42k B2 copies sold and 2k Vitas. People pointed this out immediately, but it wasn't addressed for weeks. This actually ties into another complaint that I have. VGC tends to take half measures when it makes adjustments. I can kind of see the reasoning when it comes to adjusting due to numbers from NPD/MC/etc, but this seems to occur for most errors. That includes sell through or shipment numbers from manufacturers as well as just general errors like with Borderlands. In this case VGC had adjusted the Vita to 5k for that week by the time the NPD thread rolled around. That resulted in VGC showing 11k for May compared to NPD's 57k. VGC eventually adjusted to something fairly close to the NPD number, but even so B2 software is greater than Vita hardware for that first week. Maybe ioi's reasoning is that some stand alone copies got sold early, but considering the SW number is unchanged since it first went up I kind of doubt there is any reasoning.
Having someone with the ability to edit the database that is listening to the community would help to both fix these mistakes and prevent them from going forward. I remember VGC had the PSP selling in the 3 figure range for months after Nintendo charts showed it being upwards of 10k. There is no reason errors like this should have continued for weeks or months. There have definitely been times where it feels like the charts are automated.
There are a lot of other more mundane errors that could be attended to as well. Games listed as week 35 in their launch week, for some reason the weekly charts don't like Pokemon and the name is missing for most of the older games (guessing there is some problem with the é)(this also made me realize that the pictures on the weekly charts all link to gamewise now), mentioned the missing European numbers before, etc.
Maybe ioi is generally too busy to pay attention to externalities like this, and more collective work can alleviate that.