Gaijin Punch wrote:Alerts will stay
...
the alerts will be even better than before.
Excellent. If you need someone to do some beta-testing and make sure everything's working correctly, I'm your man. Feel free to send me an email anytime.
lordnikon wrote:It has been a pleasure using the service over the years. I remember when Gaijin Punch first reached out to me after I bought a few items off him on Digital Press forums with an offer to use his service. Funny thing is, it took me about a year to circle back and start using the service properly due to other stuff I had going on.
It was the opposite in my case: I reached out to him. GP briefly mentioned his service in a random post (may or may not have been on Digital Press forums) so I gave him a PM (on DP) in 2008. Funnily enough, like you, it took me one year after registering to actually give it a shot. Not sure why I took so long. Prior to GP, I had only used an intermediary of this type once. The rest of it was GP and proudly so.
lordnikon wrote:The service helped me
I'll probably sound like a broken record/corrupted MP3, but a special mention must go out to the Alerts. I'm not necessarily a rare-item hunter like some other members here, but I am a bargain hunter. Bargain hunters must take advantage of every possible opportunity that might exist. In order to do this, I have close to 10 pages of alerts, each page with 50 searches for a total of 1000 searches (a partial reason is that some items are known by katakana as well as in English {even though the katakana is a representation of the English}* so I have to do two searches for the same item in order to capture all the results). Looking up each and every search would take me ages, not to mention boring. With the Alerts, it is literally saving me time and money by only giving me relevant and most importantly, new results. And it is fun, rather than tedious, looking through the results.
If I must cite an example, then my favourite bargain was probably back in 2012: 40 RPG soundtracks (all big quality names, not a single filler, mostly excellent to mint condition) for 11,600 yen (excluding shipping etc). If I was a resident of Japan, then it would have been about 300 yen per soundtrack. That's way too damn cheap. I haven't seen a similar auction as good as this one since. Thanks to the Alerts for alerting me to it (because I wouldn't have manually searched for it), and thanks to Gamengai itself for the arguably too reasonable fees.
*Yes, searching for "Final Fantasy" brings up ファイナルファンタジー results, but that is an exception to the rule.
emphatic wrote:What's happened?
The time must come to say goodbye to the Gamengai intermediary.
Because
nothing can live forever.