Quote:
Originally Posted by barrysloate
So maybe the great skill that TPG's have is not grading or authenticating, but making lots of people very wealthy. As such, I don't think we are going to see much change at all in the industry. Sure, a bunch of collectors may drop out or cut back their purchases, but as long as TPG's continue to mint money, nothing at all is going to change.
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Barry, on that I think you are right on the money. Because of how the TPGs have ingrained themselves in the hobby and with all the money involved, I can't see how we could get them out at this point. There is too much money tied up in the Registry, as Kenny had said and alluded to in his post. It is more than just the Registry though, as that is pretty much tied to a single TPG and the premium prices they seem to command over those for cards graded by the other TPG services. Still these other TPG services are also grading cards and obviously have altered/doctored cards in their holders as well.
Still the Registry is a major driving force behind the sometimes ridiculous price jumps we've been seeing. And that was one of the reasons I was bringing up the question as to the standards and uniformity in grading. Since the Registry behind the significant price jumps is tied to only one specific TPG, where most of these altered /doctored cards seem to be going, the fact that that TPG cannot effectively detect and tell certain types of alterations and changes to cards is basically them saying they don't see any alterations/doctoring. If that TPG finally admits they've been duped and starts to adjust and remove a few cards on their Registry, aren't they kind of setting themselves up for even bigger problems as people start demanding they remove any and all questionable cards on their Registry? You know darn well that someone with a lesser graded set on the Registry will start cross referencing these questionable cards and if they find someone with a higher rated Regsitry set than there's with any of these questionable cards as part of it, they'll be screaming bloody murder to have those questionable cards removed from that other person's Registry set. I don't know if anyone on the Registry has started doing that yet, or even thought about it, but you can bet that as this issue gets out there with more and more publicity that it is eventually going to come up from someone. And then how does this TPG respond?
If they admit to the errors and start removing cards from the Registry, how do they decide which ones do or don't get removed? Who will actually decide then which cards are definitively altered/doctored? That could lead to a huge change/problem with the Registry itself and end up making the entire Registry worthless to many current users. That in turn effects people in the market, and prices, and on and on. I can easily see why the TPG would rather say nothing and hope this blows over. The implications and negative impact it could have on their Registry, and by extension their actual business, could be irreparable to them. Not to mention a huge blow to the hobby as well and negatively impact the value of so many people's collections.