Ridiculous eBay Prices

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Huh. I wonder what my White Box is worth. Some of those prices are pretty crazy.
 
The first two I found on EBay were listed at $680 and $1200. That sounds way high.
 
Mine is this one:
pic503586.jpg


Two listed at the prices above. Which still seem insane.
 

I just want to mention that NobleKnight games has really changed in more recent years.

Now, to be fair, they always had a tendency to go a bit crazy on pricing for collector's items like this. I'm not realy talking about that.

But I've seen them do some stuff on ebay which seems... odd. Like they seed the Completed Listings for rarer items with abnormally high values and then try to sell the same items. They may also have a few satellite sellers who list the same items they do, but at higher prices so the Nobleknight items seem like better deals. I've noticed that when these items sell, the other sellers suddenly delist their copies of the same item.

Maybe I'm seeing patterns where they don't exist, but there's just fishy stuff that goes on with their listings.

Plus, back many years ago, you could order from NobleKnight and rest assured the item you got would probably be in better condition than they had graded it. But the last couple of times I ordered from them, I got stuff that was... not in acceptable condition and certainly not of the grade they had stated. Their customer service became bad, so I stopped dealing with them.
 
I do have a DC Heroes 2e in the shrinkwrap but I don’t think I would even sell it for $250. It’s just too valuable to me to sell it.
 
The worst one of the ones I posted is the Mentzer red box listed as “very rare”. That’s just being dishonest. There was a gazillion of those printed and it’s not hard to find them in really good shape still. Many people got them for presents and threw them in the closet untouched because they didn’t know what to do with them.
 
$139.99
Yea, I'm glad I got a replacement one in 2005 when it was maybe $20 at Powells. Back in 1990 or so I sold all my AD&D books except my PH which no one bought. In 2005, I got re-interested in AD&D and a player gave me a DMG and I bought the MM (and I got MM, PH, DMG, FF, UA. MMII in PDF form as well as OD&D, Holmes, BX, and BECM).
 
Yea, I'm glad I got a replacement one in 2005 when it was maybe $20 at Powells.


Powells used to be my go-to for used RPGs. They had a fantastic selection back in the early aughts
 
They may also have a few satellite sellers who list the same items they do, but at higher prices so the Nobleknight items seem like better deals. I've noticed that when these items sell, the other sellers suddenly delist their copies of the same item.

[...]

Plus, back many years ago, you could order from NobleKnight and rest assured the item you got would probably be in better condition than they had graded it. But the last couple of times I ordered from them, I got stuff that was... not in acceptable condition and certainly not of the grade they had stated. Their customer service became bad, so I stopped dealing with them.
Sad if this is really the case. I don’t know the last time I dealt with them, whether direct or via eBay, but I found them to be good & reliable at the time.

WRT the first paragraph, that is very weird. I wonder if an alternate hypothesis might apply, of “scalpers” trying to get naive/lazy buyers to BIN at an inflated price and planning to source the product just-in-time by BINing from NK. Then when the underlying item is sold, they of course cancel.
 
Powells used to be my go-to for used RPGs. They had a fantastic selection back in the early aughts
Oh, are you in the Portland area? I also got a lot of used stuff from the store that used to be in Tualatin and a little bit from Bridgetown Hobbies.
 
Oh, are you in the Portland area? I also got a lot of used stuff from the store that used to be in Tualatin and a little bit from Bridgetown Hobbies.
Powell's also has a really strong online retail presence, but I do love the downtown location. Hopefully they are able to weather COVID.
 
I just want to mention that NobleKnight games has really changed in more recent years.

Now, to be fair, they always had a tendency to go a bit crazy on pricing for collector's items like this. I'm not realy talking about that.

But I've seen them do some stuff on ebay which seems... odd. Like they seed the Completed Listings for rarer items with abnormally high values and then try to sell the same items. They may also have a few satellite sellers who list the same items they do, but at higher prices so the Nobleknight items seem like better deals. I've noticed that when these items sell, the other sellers suddenly delist their copies of the same item.

Maybe I'm seeing patterns where they don't exist, but there's just fishy stuff that goes on with their listings.

Plus, back many years ago, you could order from NobleKnight and rest assured the item you got would probably be in better condition than they had graded it. But the last couple of times I ordered from them, I got stuff that was... not in acceptable condition and certainly not of the grade they had stated. Their customer service became bad, so I stopped dealing with them.

I've not seen them on ebay but they do turn up on Amazon often leading the pack of high priced sellers. They have the Gaslight Equipment Catalog of CoC listed for $65 as a "collectible", other sellers have it for $13.95-17.95 and it is available POD at DTRPG for $21 with a pdf copy. That was one of the Chaosium Monographs so I'm not sure it was ever a real print run, those being sold hard copy were likely POD to begin with.

I used to buy from NK years ago, but they long ago priced themselves out of my consideration. In the early 2000s they were a decent resource for used games. Not sure when they moved to collectors market pricing, I probably haven't bought anything from them in 15 years.
 
Plus, back many years ago, you could order from NobleKnight and rest assured the item you got would probably be in better condition than they had graded it. But the last couple of times I ordered from them, I got stuff that was... not in acceptable condition and certainly not of the grade they had stated. Their customer service became bad, so I stopped dealing with them.
I've noticed the same. Used to be you could bite the price-bullet for the sake of getting a game in good condition, but that seems to no longer be the case.
 
Oh, are you in the Portland area?

I was at the time, lived there for 3 years (well, most of the first year in Salem, OR). Powell's is one of those places I've always missed since leaving though.
 
I was at the time, lived there for 3 years (well, most of the first year in Salem, OR). Powell's is one of those places I've always missed since leaving though.
Yea, it's a great store. I don't get there as often as I used to (and not at all since the stay at home orders). Over the years the RPG section has become less interesting though. I assume that more people recognize the value of the good stuff and either never bring it to Powells in the first place, or it gets snapped up fast. Guardian Games does have a huge number of older RPGs, but the last time I went there is was overwhelming to actually try and look for stuff I might be interested in.
 
Powell's also has a really strong online retail presence, but I do love the downtown location. Hopefully they are able to weather COVID.

I've ordered from them once or twice, but I used to spend entire days hanging out at that store. They gave really good credit for used books too, I often would bring in a box in the morning and do that line-up for evaluators on the first floor, and then spend the rest of the day going through the levels, often ducking over to the Virginia cafe for lunch.
 
If you collect antiquarian books this sort of stuff shows up all the time. There's a few books on eBay at the moment going for >$500 that I know I could get for around $2 in a nearby bookshop. I remember another a while back that was like >$1000 that I got a copy of for $10.

It's not exactly the same as the RPG case, but similar factors are at play with eBay sellers essentially guessing the worth based on items that are similar on a surface level analysis.
 
If you collect antiquarian books this sort of stuff shows up all the time. There's a few books on eBay at the moment going for >$500 that I know I could get for around $2 in a nearby bookshop. I remember another a while back that was like >$1000 that I got a copy of for $10.

It's not exactly the same as the RPG case, but similar factors are at play with eBay sellers essentially guessing the worth based on items that are similar on a surface level analysis.


Yeah, as a book collector my usual process is find something I want on Amazon, then check Ebay, Abebooks and a hundred other online sellers, before driving around town to all the used shops in my area, before deciding on the best price. I've saved myself thousands over the years via that. Before Covid, I also used to hit the book section of thrift/secondhand clothing shops on a regular basis. I've found so many gems in those places for pennies on the dollar.
 
Yea, I'm glad I got a replacement one in 2005 when it was maybe $20 at Powells...

You can still get the MM for a reasonable price, even online for less than $40, these postings are a scam.
 
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It's not exactly the same as the RPG case, but similar factors are at play with eBay sellers essentially guessing the worth based on items that are similar on a surface level analysis.
I've got a friend who sells used books over Amazon. She scours the local thrift stores and library sales looking for 'winners'. Sometimes I help her enter them into her shop, which involves checking prices to see if it's worth keeping. She does a cursory look online while buying them (usually for small change)... but she'll tell me that something is 'very valuable' and I'll look it up to find one crazy person selling it at the 'very valuable' price and everyone else selling it for 1 cent plus shipping. So she ends up throwing a lot of them back to the charity shops, since she doesn't have the space to keep them all hoping for suckers.
For all her time and effort I doubt she's making minimum wage off it.
 
I don't know what a fair price is for a "woodgrain" OD&D boxed set is, but they are a genuine collectible, because we know that only 4,000 of them were ever made (1,000 of the 1st printing, 1,000 of the 2nd printing, and 2,000 of the 3rd printing) and that they were hand assembled in Gary Gygax and Don Kaye's basements in 1974-75. These things have a pedigree and can be pointed at as the direct genesis of the entire D&D/rpg hobby. Starting with the 4th printing in late 1975 they changed to the "white box" with different cover art and the printings started being a lot bigger (10,000+) and the sets were no longer assembled by hand. I used to own a 4th printing copy (and still own a 5th printing one); I've never touched a woodgrain-box copy. They were already selling for hundreds of $ in the 80s and 90s - thousands of $ for decent-condition one now doesn't seem unreasonable to me, and I can only assume their value will continue to rise and rise.
 
Yeah, as a book collector my usual process is find something I want on Amazon, then check Ebay, Abebooks and a hundred other online sellers, before driving around town to all the used shops in my area, before deciding on the best price. I've saved myself thousands over the years via that. Before Covid, I also used to hit the book section of thrift/secondhand clothing shops on a regular basis. I've found so many gems in those places for pennies on the dollar.
I do your process in reverse.
 
As someone in the market for this game, I'm trying to figure out what a fair market price for it is. At least that one is still sealed. And personally, I can see a high demand box set in NIB condition meriting a price like that. For whatever reason, DC Heroes 2e doesn't seem to pop up on ebay often. At least it hasn't for the past year.

I mean, if I hadn't just made a high dollar purchase in another area of interest, then I could see at least entertaining that price for that item.

That said, the past several months on ebay have gone insane for some things. DC Heroes is one of the games affected. Just six months ago, sellers couldn't even give away DC Heroes 1e stuff. I got two complete and unused 1e sets for about $60. Now people are listing beat up and incomplete sets for $100.

I had been doing a lot of RPG ebaying right before COVID hit and now that I'm returning to it, I see a lot of prices have spiked.

Yikes... I have the 2e boxed set... unsealed, though. I absolutely adored it at the time, because it was my gateway into comics. But as a game, it's pretty rubbish. My only attempt to actually run the game turned to crap within the first few minutes of chargen.

But the stack of character cards were so much fun, though. Completely pointless, but fun to skim through. I also have 3e, but it doesn't have all the 'fun stuff' like the boxed set.
 
There's no way anything from 84' could be that rare.
 
Especially something that you could make more of with a photocopier.
 
There's no way anything from 84' could be that rare.
I remember seeing this in my local Waldenbooks in 1984. I didn't buy it because I could tell it was the same thing as this, which I already had. A few months later it was taken out of print and replaced by a different set of sheets. I remember being mildly annoyed a couple decades later when I found out that the 1984 version was considered to be collectible (presumably because it was only in print for a few months and sold poorly, so it's rarer than other items of that era), because had I bought it I'd have been happy to sell it for a tidy profit.
 
The thing about eBay is if you are patient, a lot of stuff will come around again. Often in better shape and/or cheaper. There are exceptions. I paid a bit for a box set of Golden Heroes, but it's complete, in pretty decent shape, and also had the Supervisors' Kit in the box. I paid about a buck oh five. Other stuff, like James Bond 007 modules, I often see going for 50 bucks, even opened. But I've managed to pick up a handful of sealed adventures for 15-20 each. Hell, I paid 35 for a sealed James Bond 007 Box set, which I figure ain't bad. I did, however, recently pay $85 for a sealed Justice, Inc. in pristine condition. No fading, no dishing. That hurt a little, but it's not like I'm gonna see another one of those anytime soon. Especially not in that shape.

I used to have a copy of Alma Mater, including the poster and character sheet. I lost it in a move. Paid maybe thirty bucks for it in the early 'aughts. That goes for a BARE MINIMUM of a hundo now. Ah, well, it's not like I was ever gonna find anyone to play it with me anyway. That's one I always wanted to play, but I'm sure I would have hated myself in the morning.

As for the sealed stuff I've snagged, I'm opening all of those motherfuckers.
 
>The thing about eBay is if you are patient, a lot of stuff will come around again.

Yep. I have a lot of very specific eBay searches set up to email me results every day. I also have a lot of items set up with camelcamelcamel (which watches Amazon listings). I can wait a while - even years - to get the books and games I want at a decent price.

For example, there are a couple of academic publisher series relating to the history of magic that I like. They are priced for university libraries, so it isn't unusual for them to hover around $70-90 dollars each. I get most of them for $30 or less by watching camelcamelcamel alerts. That is even cheaper than used copies on eBay, Alibris, etc. I have watched some of them for 2-3 years before I got the price I wanted.
 
Yeah, I have ongoing ebay saved searches. One of the things I do is also save searches for mis-spellings. These are more common than you think. With minis, especially, I also will look up the names for them in other languages and save searches on Ebay France and Ebay Germany. Sometimes it takes a while,, but eventually a deal comes around. There's a mini that I've been looking for for 5 years now at a decent price, the C28 Citadel Death Demon from the early 80s, as I want to convert him for a Skaven mount. Normal prices range upwards of 100-200 GBP when he shows up. Just last month I snagged him for 20 GBP just because of one such saved search. If you're willing to play the long game, eventually a deal will come around...

C28 Death Demon.jpg
 
Yeah, I have ongoing ebay saved searches. One of the things I do is also save searches for mis-spellings. These are more common than you think. With minis, especially, I also will look up the names for them in other languages and save searches on Ebay France and Ebay Germany. Sometimes it takes a while,, but eventually a deal comes around. There's a mini that I've been looking for for 5 years now at a decent price, the C28 Citadel Death Demon from the early 80s, as I want to convert him for a Skaven mount. Normal prices range upwards of 100-200 GBP when he shows up. Just last month I snagged him for 20 GBP just because of one such saved search. If you're willing to play the long game, eventually a deal will come around...

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Yes and see this is where having a wide array of interests helps too. A wide,deep hobby list means deals can be found regularly.
 
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