Are pricing and value questions on topic?

Question

The question What's the most valuable Avalon Hill wargame? was recently asked. Similar questions that might one day be asked are:

• What is the most valuable Magic card?
• Has the price of [board game] increased or decreased since it's gone out of print?

My concern is that these answers could become out of date (board game A was the most valuable today, now it's board game B). Also, while questions about value could probably be definitively answered for things like Magic given that there are so many price guides, it's less clear for things like Avalon Hill wargames.

Are questions like this on-topic for this site?

Answer 1

Pricing questions should be on topic regardless, and the community should use their votes to push low quality answers to the bottom.

I am not a fan of making rules where crowd moderation can work just fine. And this is absolutely one of those situations where crowd moderation can work just fine.

There are two kinds of answers that a pricing question can get.

1. Specific answers
   • Bad. Specific answers provide a price but no methodology. They do not give the reader the tools required to answer similar questions in the future.
2. General answers
   • Good. General answers describe a process by which readers can determine a price. They may provide a few examples (i.e., they can contain specific answers).

If a specific question gets a specific answer and the community upvotes the answer, guess whose fault that is?

Upvote good answers instead of making more rules.

Example: I ask about the current price of Tarmogoyf. Someone looks up the price and writes an answer that says it's worth $257.41. Without any additional information about the process he used to arrive at that price, I expect the community to downvote that answer.

Answer 2

General pricing questions should be on topic

One question we have is How do I find out a fair price for my Magic the Gathering cards?. This question is a general strategy of how to determine the value of card games. Where can I find the value of cards from the Dragon Ball Z Trading Card Game? is similar in this regard.

The key to these is that both questions also have longevity: the answers will likely be valid for years to come.

Questions about a specific price (or "most valuable", etc.) should not be on topic

Other questions are about the specific price of a game:

• 1993 collectors edition sealed box (closed as primarily opinion based)
• What the value of a misprinted Graverobber Spider?
• What's the most valuable Avalon Hill wargame?

Any answers to such questions will be relying on price guides or eBay results, and those prices can change drastically over a short period of time.. The price of a card or board game today may not be the same tomorrow.

Say that we had a question asking about the value of the Magic: The Gathering card Tarmogyf. Yesterday, I might have looked up a Magic the Gathering price guide and written an answer saying that the card was worth $257.41. But today, the guide says that it is worth $114.00. My answer is out of date and useless.

The same can happen for board games. Say that game X is the most valuable Avalon Hill board game today. Tomorrow, the game is reprinted and so its value is considerably less. Or perhaps game Y was an obscure game with a limited print run, but the designer hits it big with another game and people are much more interested in his or her earlier game. Now game Y is the most valuable game.

There's also the fact that prices are subjective. If price guide A says that something is worth $100, price guide B says it's worth $200, and there is currently an eBay listing for $300, which one is correct? There is no objective answer and it's up to individual opinion which one is correct.

There used to be a close reason of "Too Localized", which would be an ideal close reason for specific pricing questions. Since we don't have that here, I think that closing as primarily opinion-based would be an appropriate close reason for such specific questions.