Protege News and Plan of Attack

Sidepot · #1 (**permalink**) 05-01-2006, 04:04 PM

First, the good news

Heavier chip weight - As some of you have already hinted at, with the rollout of this Protégé chip line, we’ll have the option of making a heavier chip. The manufacturer has done the initial R&D on the Cigar & Snifter mold and they’ve got proof of concept for a much heavier version of this chip. Many of you may know this already, but even within a single line of chips the weights vary from color to color. In clay chips, some colors are heavier than others. We did tests on one of the lightest colors in our InPlay Clay line and achieved a weight average for that color of between 9.6 and 9.7 grams. They’ve reproduced this 100s of times, so this is not just speculation. We expect the set average should be slightly higher than this.

Note that there are additional and somewhat substantial costs to making these heavier chips, so for the contest participant pre-buy you will have the option of buying standard weight chips (roughly 8.8 gram weight average, like our existing InPlay Clay line) at the $0.79/chip price per the contest Letter of Agreement, or at the heavier (9.7+ gram) weight for $0.89/chip.

And some even better news :

True shaped inlays (95% confidence) – We’re in the early stages of financing the R&D on this new development, and we will know more around the end of May or early June. In a nutshell, we’re trying to bring back true punched/shaped inlays (Not printed shaped inlays where color matching is an issue, but true punched inlays) on our Cigar & Snifter mold. Our manufacturer went back to their original source and they literally pulled out the original schematics from decades ago. We have about a 95% confidence that these are a go at this point, but we don’t want to say it’s a done deal until we have proof of concept in our hands (which explains the end of May time frame). I was reticent at mentioning this at all until we knew for sure, so please understand that THIS IS PURELY AN ATTEMPT AT THIS POINT. If it can’t be done, well that’s too bad, but we know many members of the community expressed interest in it so we got our manufacturers to agree to give it a shot and we covered the cost of the R&D.

Keeping with the premise of this contest, the shapes included in the Protégé line are up to the ChipTalk community (with the exception of the Points shape, which is not a viable option). The entire line could rely on a single shaped inlay, or there could be a progression, or you could stick with round inlays – your choice. There are significant additional costs to enable shaped inlays, but your price will not change - we'll eat the costs on this.

Note that back when these were used for security concerns, the casino standards were as follows:

$1 – round
$5 – hub
$25 – scallop
$100 – cogwheel
$500 – hexagon

Lastly, the “More work” part :

Now that we're beginning down the path of picking final edge spot and color combinations for the default color set, I contacted the manufacturer to make sure we're all on the same page. From my discussions, I found out we have an issue with the first two chips in our edge spot progression.

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These chips don't follow the edge spot options laid out in the initial contest announcement thread (approved manufacture edge spots pictured below)

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The issue is the chip factory allows users to make edge spots the same color as the base color of the chip (my fault, I didn't know or convey this wasn't an option when X-files was making the tool). Some people have used this functionality to create some cool chips, but unfortunately they are not viable. Without going into details, inserting edge spots to match the base color of a chip creates several manufacturing problems, specifically color matching issues. It's a bigger issue with some colors than with others, but as this set is intended to go into ongoing production after the contest, we don’t want any unnecessary QC issues. As such, we need to pick new edge spots for the 1st two in the set at the top of the page.

The process itself of reviewing these edge spots made me examine the logic of using this progression at all when in actuality it was this package(colors + edge spots + progression), not necessarily just the edge spots themselves, that was selected as the winner of the initial poll. Perhaps this wasn’t even the favorite progression – maybe it was just the best combination. Looking back on how it all played out, it was kind of an arbitrary way to select the edge spots and progression. Plus we’ve only got 8 edge spot patterns when we’ll likely need a ninth to accommodate a NCV chip (which seems to be desired by the group). Since we’re now taking another approach to choosing this default set of colors/ edge spots, I think now is as good a time as any to take a step back and nail the edge spots in isolation.

For getting to a good default set of edge spots and colors, one or more members had a good suggestion about approaching this from a monochromatic point of view, and then adding in colors later. I propose we take about 5 weeks without any delays and go that route in the following steps:

Step 1 (1 week): Select favorite edge spot configurations from a monochromatic selection. Lay them all out in a poll, and vote for your favorites.

Step 2 (1 week): To save us from the chaos of submissions and voting on sets, Sidepot will lay these out into an initial progression (taking into account the critical core of the set), and then let the community discuss and tweak as necessary. At the end of this discussion/tweaking stage, the edge spot progression will be finalized.

Step 3 (3 weeks): Simultaneously start threads for each chip for the base spot and edge spot color submissions. Give it three or four days to collect submissions, and then one chip at a time (starting at $1) do a poll to finalize color choices for the default set. As we select winning colors, I’ll have them approved by the manufacturer, and we’ll take re-votes on any that don’t get approved. We'll build the set from the core out.

Lastly, some more good news :

For your patience thus far, and to get as much of the ChipTalk community involved as possible (the more creative input, the better) in this edge spot and color selection for the default color set, I’d like to offer a bounty of 50 clay chips from our Vintage Vegas chip line ($500 denomination as seen below) to the winning color submission (that gets approved by the manufacturer – to avoid copying casino colors) for each denomination. These chips are no longer in production. So there will be 9 winners of these bounties/prizes.

Now, as soon as I can figure out how to post polls, we'll get underway!