Even if we start getting numbers more regularly, I don't think it will be a massive change.  Maybe I am projecting my own feelings onto others, but it is difficult to get excited about discussing the weekly numbers when you know they are going to change in the months to come.  Why waste the time and effort analyzing why X outsold Y when it might turn out that Y actually outsold X.

Even worse when you know the numbers are wrong but VGC doesn't get around to changing them.  Then any discussion around those figures has the added effort of remembering what is wrong with them and providing evidence of it.

EVEN worse than that is numbers that used to be right that got screwed up somehow in the database.  A fair number of games had their European numbers wiped pre-2011 (when we started getting UK/Fr/Ger), and that seems to have just never been resolved.  As well as just a lot of other errors in the database.

I feel like VG Chartz would flourish if the rest of the site's staff 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.

Being a long time user myself I definitely can understand the frustration. I've been lurking here since 2007 and this was once my primary source of new information and general sales information. Now I mostly frequent GAF, because let's face it the news is faster. The primary reason to visit VGC is for news and sales, but it's not adequate without the other.

Now things happen in real life, and that's unfortunate. However, the fact that Brett hasn't had some sort of backup plan to keep this site updated in real time has been slightly embarrassing.

Dunno what happened to your post, but yeah. There's probably a lot of people who would agree with you on that one.

This to me is a forum now 1st and foremost.

I used to crave the sales updates like a crack addict. This slow drip these last months were a great way to ween myself off of it all. I can now say I kicked the habit ;) and is now a pleasant distraction to see, when it actually is updated.

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.

I don't understand why the excessive defense over ioi.

He may not charge access here (he does for plus and could for here if he wanted) but he still collects money with the site so it's a job. Unlike the mods that pull 100x more work for free.

So when 9 out of 10 times the under/overtracked cry is right, why complain about the cries? If you have done your work wrong 90% of time (no matter how extensive, complex, etc) don't you think your boss would rightly complain? Here we are ioi customer and boss. Facebook and Google are free and moneytize in different ways, does that prevent criticism? Even more when deserved?

About his long vacation. You also wouldn't receive if you abbandoned your post for months. So he hasn't even been deserving the site revenue for the year.

So again are we supposed to be pleased with any leftovers and defend to death or request better service? I choose the second.

Yeah this site is all about sales, if there is no more sales update, I don't see the point to continue coming here.

I totally agree with this!

I get that but whats the point of making a thread every other day about it? Not you specifically of course, but all these threads arent going to change anything