The Ultimate Card # Race Starts Now
We are launching a 1 week race to to get as many card numbers as possible.
Play the Ultimate Card # Race as much as you can between now and Saturday night April 12th at 11:59 PM PST.
Keep an eye on the Weekly Leaderboard. We will be awarding the following prizes for most points.
- 1st Place: $500
- 2nd Place: $250
- 3rd Place: $125
- 4th Place: $50
- 5th Place: $25
- #1 Fastest Time: $250
+ $5 for everyone that earns at least 10,000 points on the Ultimate Card # Race this week.
Double Bonus
If you collectively complete the challenge by reaching 100% of our 7.5 million point goal, we will double all of the prizes and we will award 10 addition $100 rewards randomly based on the number of points you earn on the Ultimate Card # Race. Spread the word and get as many people to play as possible so that you can all get double the prizes.
Notes
The new Ultimate Card # Race is a simplified version of our previous Card # challenges. It only requires that you enter the numeric portion of the card number. You should be able to get some amazing times.
Are you up for the challenge?
Tim,
You have taken a “contest approach” by asking staff to submit numbers for random cards in which they have no interest. For example, I am only interested in vintage baseball and I was presented with basketball card inserts. I work a full-time job and don’t have the time to spend hours per day on the computer on a mindless task. So I wont be participating.
But I am a seller and, like most sellers, I am highly motivated to help if it helps get my inventory into a form where it is more accessible to buyers. In fact, I submitted updates for my most highly priced cards in my inventory. I have checked and the updates were not applied several days later. It would seem that no staff resource has been applied to the make the updates. So I stopped doing this.
I understand you have a goal to get the “whole catalog in shape” as quickly as possible. I think everyone wants the same goal. However the plan for getting there does not motivate the seller who would respond much more quickly if they believed their efforts made a difference in how quickly their inventories were updated. Everyone would gain by the each seller actively updating their numbers and having resources assigned to updating.
I e-mailed them on this as well. If someone is going to check our edits, they might as well just put the information in themselves. I actually see no point is us doing the work if someone needs to check it anyway. Also, yes its completely bad business for us to pay COMC to put the cards on their site, and now we have to do the work to keep people coming back to search for our cards. This was not a well thought out idea by Tim or COMC. I guess I understand why this is happening, and yes on sites like Ebay we have to upload the images and write the descriptions, but at least our items are going up live right away, whereas on COMC it’s been weeks with still not one of my cards uploaded. 100+ cards of mine missed the spring cleaning sale which really stinks. I don’t want to sound like just a complainer because comic has helped me move cards from my collection and add to my collection, but as time goes on I’m getting more and more frustrated by everything. The buy wins all the time on this site.
I totally understand the frustration right now, but please keep in mind that this is only a temporary issue. We have only had a few months to build the catalog. It is actually quite amazing that we are as far along as we are considering the vast amount of data we need to compile. We should be pretty close to done with the basic information by the end of this month.
I wish we hand unlimited resources, but for the past three months we have split our identification team into two teams. Half are working on building set names, and the other half are trying to keep up with all of your processing submissions. It is only because of some major innovations that I implemented a few months ago that our identification team can now go at nearly double the pace and can almost keep up with only half the resources.
The Edit feature was intended to be a subtle feature that allowed people to send us corrections or missing data for the most important items. It got styled in such a way that it appears very prominent, so people have flooded us with more than 20,000 submissions. This is an area that we actively working on this week. As you mentioned, there are more efficient ways for us to gather this data than for you to manually enter it and us to review it.
Thank you for the feedback! We had already planned on doing a feature that would allow sellers to “Fast Track” their own items. Because of your response I went ahead and implemented that feature now. There is a simple check box at the top of the list of challenges that allows you to play any challenge with your own items. You will earn the same points, but you won’t be eligible for the Fastest Time leaderboards.
Once you have answered all of your own items that we have ready for that particular challenge you will start seeing other people’s items.
I hope that helps. We really appreciate the feedback and support! Keep the ideas flowing.
Will the data go into a queue, or will it immediately be reflected? For example, I have a bunch of 1995 Score baseball to price, which also is missing card numbers. If the card numbers were already there, I could price them a lot faster. In fact, I would do the challenges first, so then when I went to price the cards the numbers would now be in place. Would it work that way, or would it still take time for our data entry to be approved?
Right now the data is in a queue that needs approval. We will probably be able to approve the card number’s very quickly, but I recommend using the new “Fast Track” check box with the current challenges to get data to us fastest.
Tim, thank you for adding this functionality. I believe it will motivate sellers more as they can help build up data against their own items for sale.
Thanks for the updates Tim; that makes a lot of sense. As someone who is, to this point, purely a buyer on COMC, I don’t see a similar check box. Could that option be available to use with items that we have purchased? I understand the impetus to allow sellers to quickly make their cards marketable again. Doing the same for buyers would allow one to quickly refine the portion of the catalog relevant to one’s collecting and purchasing habits, the benefits of which should be quite clear.
Also, I would suggest the use of goals and milestones in doing this undertaking. Considering the amount of time and forbearance required, it would help to be given a sense of what needs to be done, and how far along in the process you are. Saying “play the challenge we should be done in around a month” is great; telling us things like the number of cards that have been, and need to be, identified (by player, number, team, etc.) is better. Especially as patience begins to wane, having a quantified sense of accomplishment would help to push through to the end. (The community progress green bars of completion would go a long way towards doing this if they didn’t keep arbitrarily regressing. This in turn just helps to make the process seem unending.)
I agree with the above comment….self preservation is my only motivation…not shy to admit that. I want MY cards to be searchable and correct . I have done the requested edits on my port… Including submissions that I have paid $1 to your company….to do most of the work and they are also incorrect….im a new guy around here but with 1500 cards in your possession that are waiting to be uploaded….not a happy guy to not have NEW submissions done correctly the first time…i can live with the current stuff being a mess for a little while… But everything premium submitted after 4/1 should be correct right away .
Yes, this is a problem. I’ve seen my sales tank after the switch over. The problem is most buyers search by player and/or set, not by card number. In fact, as a buyer I’ve never searched by card number. I too have put in many correction requests to my own inventory over the past several days, such as player, team, set, card #, and they have yet to be updated. I noticed too that items available for sale on Amazon have the complete names/sets/card numbers, assuming you have a translation between that listing and the COMC item #, why couldn’t you mine the data from that to fill in some of the holes? Or since that listing was created from Beckett data prior, are you not legally allowed to use any trace of it now? Hence having to create a catalog from scratch, to demonstrate (legally) that no relationship to it and Beckett can be established?
Greg, thank you for the feedback. This week is a bumpy transition. I expect that we will be able to provide a better experience for premium items by the end of this week, and we will go back and prioritize all of the historical premium items too.
tim…thanks for the follow up….Your responses have encouraged me.
Absolutely hate the distribution of money for this. I’ve done my share of challenges (top 100 overall) but I won’t be doing any more. My reward so far has been a badge and a few bucks. There is little to no incentive for people who aren’t going to be top 5, or superfast, to participate. I hope the top 5 can manage to finish this on behalf of the rest of us so that the site doesn’t still look like a complete mess in a months time.
I agree, I have over 50,000 points this week and will receive only 5 bucks. Why should people that get 1,000 points this week have a chance at the bonus when other have put alot of effort to most likely not receive the $100 bonus? I am in the top 6 this week and in the top 25 all-time with over 115,000 points (lots of hours invested). I have only got $23 for all this. Does,nt seem fair!
Isn’t it $1 per 2000 points? So you would have $25 at 50,000 points. And you get a bonus $5 if you earned 10,000 points in the ultimate challenge. Either way for the amount of time you put in you’ll get $30. i stopped ‘playing’. They use that term thinking people will have fun. I don’t think its fun. I still have over 100 cards waiting to be listed over a month now. Not 1 card has been added.
Is there something wrong with the new “Race” Challenge? Two times in a row I was given Zero and 25 points. I didn’t have that in the first 15,000 points with the other challenges. So basically I just wasted 4 minutes on 25 points. Something doesn’t seem right…
Let me know if you are still having issues. This challenge might take a little getting used to for people because it is only the numeric portion of the card number.
I have some of the same concerns that others have posted. One of them like the others is I want to focus on my inventory.
I have done the challenges and it seems a lot of the cards listed are jut common cards. I also don’t like how if you make a mistake you will be only awarded 25 or 50 points and trying to go fast and have the fastest time only seems that more mistakes will be made.
Before the switch over I had helped identify some non sports sketch card artist for both myself and other collectors. I kept track and the info was updated pretty quickly. Now I see all that info is gone on my cards and was wondering if that info that was provided just recently will come back at some point?
Also holding back on editing because the cards I have edited are not getting updated and are still pending. I don’t want to edit a bunch of things and find out I did it wrong or something else is going to change.
If you had a finite amount of labor hours, what would you assign that labor to do? Would you pick menial tasks that anyone can do, or would you have them work on back-end stuff that nobody (other than an expensive consultant) can do? Every card that I sell or new card that I price that requires changing, I change. I don’t care when it gets updated because I know there are more important things that need to be done right now.
I don’t understand the animosity. Everything that has happened was easily anticipated if you followed along with the blog, the tweets, etc. It’s Day 6 of a changeover that was hinted at taking a month. Considering there are no storage fees for the month, any sales I get in April are a bonus. Are they down? Sure, a little, but it seems more reasonable to pull together as a community and focus on the greater good.
I understand the persecution that Beckett gets, that eBay gets, that the government gets, etc., even if I don’t always agree. But all these comments show me is that some people can just never trust anyone ever with anything. That’s a hard way to live life.
Well i almost never agree with joelsshitshow mostly for the fact that he agrees with almost anything Tim and co. throw out there in a blog, but i have to actully agree with him this time. What so many people don’t understand is that beckett really screw comc over and it is like they had to start all over from scratch because of it. Yes things are going to be crazy if not super crazy over the next 6-8 months but they have no other option. There are so many legal implications involved that the normal man would just run and hide, but Tim has risen to the opp. to make this site even better then it was before. It will take time, patience, and perseverance from all of us. I also like so many of you have a full time job (55 hours a week) two kids and wife that always has something for me to do but i still find time every once in awhile to throw down a few challenges. Lets all just stick together and get through this crap and look ahead to a brighter and better COMC
What do you say about the “edit” feature then? Someone needs to check our edits right? If thats the case, then really there isn’t a point for us to do that.
I imagine they all go in a queue. Those edits are at the card level, not the item level, so they probably get processed the same way the data from the challenges gets processed, whatever that is. The reason I think that is because you can submit multiple edits for the same attribute.
Here is how I think it might work: Let’s say there is a 1995 Score Chad Kreuter that doesn’t have a card number assigned to it. Anyone that comes across that card can “edit” the info and enter a card number. At some point COMC has enough resources to check all the edits to that card’s number (this may also be an automated process that is triggered once, say, 5 unique users have submitted a card number that matches). That’s when the edit would be reflected.
I think a lot of the confusion could be that an “Edit” function usually has an immediate effect. (Most wikis work this way, for example.) It probably is an automated version of the existing “Report Error” feature. Perhaps they wanted to use a different word than “report” so people wouldn’t associate the two. Content strategy, like pimpin’, ain’t easy.
So there is no $100 prize for weekly top 10? I guess I’ll just get to 10,000 points on the ultimate race and then sit back?
We are trying a different format this week. We will likely keep adjusting how we give out rewards to see what works the best.
So basically 5 bucks for 5 thousand entries or 5 bucks for 200 minutes of putting in entries if you go at a really quick pace. Well you guys certainly have cultivated an amazing community for yourselves, and possibility the cheapest data entry work force in the entire world.
Hopefully contributors are having some fun as they build out this catalog that is an asset to the collecting community. We expect that the long term benefits of having a well organized catalog will far exceed the little prizes we are giving as incentive to help speed up the process.
Fun? No. But encouraged because I want and need to sell my cards. I listed all of the numbers for “My Cards” but when I went to do teams my cards weren’t in there. So my guess is that this is only for the card numbers by checking that box? Also, any update on cards that were sent in 3-4 weeks ago? Still not one of my cards has been uploaded from my last shipment of 100+ cards.
My point was that some of these guys have put in 10’s if not 100’s of thousands of data entries for your company for well below minimum wage. While I’m sure you are more aware of that than anyone, that level of loyalty and dedication is really beyond words. I hope when everything is said and done those top contributors are rewarded with more than a comc shield next to their names, as they certainly deserve more. That’s all. Best of luck with trouncing the competition that forced you down this path, hopefully you can prove in your counter-suit that they are effectively a monopoly and taking legal action against your company to maintain that hold on this particular market.
Seeing the payout value go from $1 per thousand to $1 per two thousand isn’t great but we will participate as time allows.
Tim I send in a couple hundred cards in every thursday. Would it be better for you guys for me and other regulars not to send in any cards for the time being?
Well I have to say thank you for allowing us to be a part of building the new catalog and speed up the process. I also have a full time job, 50-60 hrs wk, wife, kids, other things to do. To hell with the prizes or “pay” if you look at it that way. If you guys don’t want to help then don’t. No one is forcing you to work for “peanuts” , they are offering the challenges/prizes as the best alternative to leaving all data as is (pretty much blank) for months, no nightly site updates that shut the site down completely, or just shutting down and doing it all in house. I have cards that haven’t finished processing since Feb. 3rd, probably less than 100 and my next batch of 750 just arrived April 3rd, they will get on when they do. This all is because of BECKETT. Go to their forums and complain and quit using their services and buying their product. Everyone that read the blog, facebook, tweets, knew of this a month or more ahead of time. If it isn’t done this way it jeopardizes the whole site in the Lawsuit BECKETT has filed against COMC because they know this site will crush them. Heck they have already stolen the idea of selling cards on ebay from site inventory that we spoke of in the blogs here a few months back. So if everyone would put on their Big Girl Panties and help bang out these challenges when they can it will all be done a lot quicker. Just do more faster!
When are you doing the $1000 drawing? I thought it was supposed to be on April 1st. For every 5,000 points you went over 20,000 it counted as one entry. As someone who had 400,000 points as of April 1st (76 entries) I’m obviously curious to know the results. Also, are you going to award $100 to the top ten finishers last week? I was first last week as well.
Thanks
cBraund
Hi, we did the drawing for that, and announced it on Facebook. The winner was spiffycollectibles – Here’s the link:
https://www.facebook.com/COMC/posts/10152027133827113?stream_ref=10
Do prizes only apply to the ultimate card # category, or can you play any combination of the challenges to compete for the prizes? Including fastest time, is there only a prize for the card # category or for any of the challenges?
Who are the BIG Card Hunters out there??? I see this as an opportunity to buy something in “Card Show Mode” that you won’t have in a couple three months (just an estimate), Personally, I just bought some no name, no number, no description, no team or description cards for cheap!!!! Why! because well if you see some cards that you have seen before (think vintage) and they are valued a much higher than the seller wants, then you buy them knowing other collectors are looking for them and that they should have the highest degree of a sale in the near future due to supply and demand?
On the other side, as a seller, sure I don’t like that my 20,000 so odd cards in inventory not be 100% recognizable, for anyone to find their player, team or autographed card, but heh, this is the hand that Beckett dealt our card community superstore and we (everyone) will have to suck it up and deal with it. If sales are down in the last week (post April 2nd new start) and may wane for a month or two this is to be expected, however we all know that with a powerhouse web site like COMC, it won’t be long before this mountain of cards is in order and we’ll all be in control of the pricing. Yes the free market will determine the actual value of the cards, not some fabricated corporation that believes they own the sports card pricing rules of book value that we all laugh at!!!
Happy Hunting!!!
I guess where I am getting frustrated is that cards that DID have proper names a few days ago are now being shown with incorrect names… That is the case with the Charley Gehringer auto, and a few others. Why is the system allowing false information to be entered and letting it overwrite correct info?
is the fast track now broken? I’m hardly seeing any of my cards, and it’s only good for the Ultimate challenge? I’d love to be able to get the names of my players in using the players challenge instead of the edit feature. some of my edits were done on 4/2 and still show in review. maybe its just a random generation of what is on the site, but how do we code comics? I see them and skip them. I get about 3-5 during the Ultimate (now that my own cards seem to not want to show up)
BECKETT screwed all of us and have been for years.
Very true… I would like nothing more than to see Beckett and a couple of their largest dealers crash and burn in the cesspool of ignorance and arrogance that they have been swimming in for years. This glitch time on COMC though frustrating was a weekly issue on Beckett for the 8 years my business was a part of the Marketplace….
Looks like the contest if pretty much done already. No way anyone is going to invest time now in an effort to try to get into top 5. There is no doubt you would get this challenge finished much more quickly if you offered $1 per 1000 pts once again. Until then I’m done with the challenge and done with trying to find cards I need on the disaster the site is right now. I can understand missing data, but about 75% of the cards have the wrong data.
I have historically used the site to buy, primarily. I decided last year to send in a few hundred cards to supplement the buying aspect I love the site for. That went well, sent in a much smaller batch, moved through most of those fairly quickly and sent in another few hundred about a month ago. I collect only cards from my alma mater, so I search by player, the majority of which don’t show up during the transition. I did earlier challenges (because I wanted to add some $ to my account and realized it would be helpful as well), to the tune of over 40,000 points. I made time to do so, even with my job and family, because my passion (aside from family) is collecting pieces of cardboard that feature grown men of my alma mater.
My biggest frustration lies on me, I should’ve gotten my last batch of a few hundred cards in sooner, so they would’ve been up sooner than the 5/12/14 date they’re ‘scheduled’ to be uploaded by , and yes, I realize I’d probably have a different frustration now , as a seller. Bottom line, I love what this site has provided for my collection and am willing to put up with the hiccups along the way, and have been attempting to help out with the challenges where I can find a small amount of time to do so.
All of the above to say/ask, any idea when a simple player search will be available, across the board? I’ve attempted some work arounds with minimal success, and am anxious to use what little I do have in my account towards expanding my collection, and even more anxious to sell what I sent in March. Thanks in advance for your reply and your efforts in this transition.
Anyone else tired of seeing comic books and other magazines coming up in the “Ultimate CARD # Race Challenge”? Please, all that is doing is slowing the whole process down!
How would you suggest getting the issue number of the comic book entered into the database?
Through an “Ultimate Comic/Magazine Issue # Race Challenge”. Then the people who know comics/magazines will know what they are looking for and can be accurate.
We have now removed them from the challenge. Thanks for the reminder. Meant to do that earlier.
Thank you VERY much. Nice to see the quick action by the COMC staff.
Is it a safe assumption on my end, that when I do a player search and I get no results (formerly I would, but these would be players that typically have less than 24 unique cards historically, for reference) that no new submissions have been uploaded? As I would once again assume, that any new submissions are being uploaded in what is considered the “new” normal method? Hope that made sense.