The Verdict is in -- SACKBOY STRIKES BACK! 670K Week 1 WW (wk 0 + 1 in NA)

[Dodece]

I think I have seen it a fair amount in this thread so I am going to chime in on the poor prediction practices. Your prediction does not have to be correct. Very few posters are going to be inclined to take issue with anything remotely close to a rational prediction. Part of the problem with this titles expectations is that far too many posters have gotten in a bad habit of ranging instead of predicting.

A prediction should be as hard a number as you can provide. Ranging on the other hand just takes a huge swath of territory, and says somewhere inside that. One takes skill, and the other is a lazy way to cover ass. Well that ass covering has a price, because your range that gives you that ultimate wiggle room also gives the detractors a blank check to cash.

You say this title will sell between five hundred thousand and two million. Guess which of the numbers the critics are going to quote. They are going to quote the one farthest from the true number, and they are right to do so. To turn your shitty predicting practices against you. No you were not right in fact you were the most wrong.

Ranging means you are wrong all of the time, because your not making one prediction. You are making millions of predictions, and as any gambler tells you if you place your chips across the board while you may hit pay dirt here and there you still lose out, because all your bad bets lose. You cannot play it safe and have big payouts with ranging. Not only is it unskilled, lazy, self serving, and above all a waste of bandwidth. You are handing ammunition to the detractors.

This is part of what happened to LBP a lot of lazy Sony clique members decided to hedge their bets so far and so wide that at best they were worthless, and at worst they made the group seem irresponsible. Anyway I have seen it a number of times in this thread generally ranging is bad, but under no circumstance should a range be a multiple of the base number. We are not talking the difference between one inch of rain and two inches of rain here. We are talking the difference between one inch of rain and a foot of rain. Ask the guy who had his house swept away if there is a difference.