THE VALUATION STANDARD

Hello again, dear resident. Moose, Head Archivist. You will have seen “market values” elsewhere: a confident figure beside a figure, and not one word about where it came from. I find that unbearable. A price with no method is a rumour wearing a suit.

So this is ours, written down first. It is the same whether a person reads the sales or, one day, a machine helps them: the rules do not bend for whoever happens to be doing the arithmetic. If a number on this site ever disagrees with this page, the page wins and the number is fixed.

• ·Original price: what the maker or the first shops charged. Kept on every figure's record.
• ·What you paid: your own figure, in your own Vault. Private unless you choose otherwise, and never quietly turned into anything else.
• ·What it sells for: completed sales of that exact figure. The subject of this page.
• ·A researched valuation: a dated conclusion about one figure, by hand, following everything below. Not open yet (see the end).

Four different questions. Muddle them and every answer goes wrong, so I keep them in separate drawers.

A sale only tells you about the figure that was sold. A Deluxe never prices a Standard. A reissue never prices the first release. A convention exclusive never prices the shop version, however alike the boxes look. Every sale is filed against the exact record in the Archive, edition and all, which is why the Archive came first. You can read how that works in The Kollectorium Standard.

A sealed copy and a copy missing its hands are not the same thing, and I refuse to pretend otherwise. Every sale records the condition it went in:

• ·Sealed, opened and complete, displayed: these are complete copies, and only these make a figure's price range.
• ·Missing parts, no box, damaged, customised: listed with the sales, so you can see them, but they never move the range. A cheap broken copy does not drag down the value of a whole one.

We do not invent multipliers like “sealed adds a fifth”. If a pattern ever proves itself in the evidence, it will be written here first.

• ·A completed sale: something that actually changed hands, for a price. Nothing else counts.
• ·Asking prices are not sales. What a seller hopes for is context at best, and it never enters a range. One spectacular asking price does not make a market.
• ·Set aside: bootlegs and recasts, bundles and lots, loose parts, the wrong edition, cancelled or unverifiable sales, and the same sale seen twice.
• ·An Archivist may mark a sale an outlier when it plainly does not reflect the market (a mistyped price, a sale between friends). It stays in our records and leaves the range.

• ·Archivists, reading completed sales on the marketplaces where these figures trade, and entering each one by hand with its listing, so anyone can check it.
• ·The Bazaar: figures sold between residents here.
• ·Collectors themselves: when you remove a figure you sold, the Keep may ask what it went for. Optional, and shared without your name, only if you leave it shared. Those sales carry no link; they are a collector's own word, and they are marked as such.

What we do not do: copy other sites' numbers, scrape marketplaces against their rules, or dress asking prices up as sales. Slower, yes. Honest, also yes.

The market does not have one price for a figure, so neither do we. A figure's page shows a range of what complete copies sold for, how many sales it rests on, and when the last one was:

A range appears only once 3 completed sales of complete copies are on record. Below that the page shows nothing at all, because two sales are an anecdote and one is a coincidence. An empty line can still be honest. It is certainly more honest than a guess.

A sale in yen stays a sale in yen. Each one keeps the amount, the currency and the day it sold. To show you a range in your own currency we convert at the latest European Central Bank rate, and we say “about” when we do. The conversion is for reading only; it never rewrites what was paid.

I will say this plainly, because it matters. Recent sales are evidence of what copies sold for. They are not an appraisal, not an insurance valuation, not a certificate, and not a promise of what your figure will fetch. Kollectorium is not an insurer, and no insurer has approved anything on this page. If you need a formal valuation, ask a qualified appraiser; the Registry can hand them your records.

One more thing, in fairness. Now and then the Keep itself buys or sells a figure, as any collector might. When it does, that sale is treated exactly like anyone else's: it counts only if it meets every rule on this page, and it never gets a thumb on the scale.

One day, and not yet, a collector will be able to ask the Keep for a researched valuation of a figure or a collection: done by hand, following this Standard to the letter, dated, with the evidence it rests on listed and a plain grade for how strong that evidence is. Strong, good, limited, indicative, or not valued when the evidence will not support a responsible answer. It will still be a researched opinion, never an appraisal. When it opens, it will be announced, and this section will say so.