In the description of the dingo, it says that the Dingo, made by One Drop is “An excellent first step into all metal yo-yos and unresponsive play!”. For some reason, that doesn’t sit right with me. It is obviously not a good yoyo to start out with if it’s your first metal. I don’t want a hundred replies “every yoyo is good in it’s own right” (which I’m sure I’ll get since I said that).
But seriously, how many of you would reply to the question "I started yoyoing about a month ago, and I think I need an upgrade for my Legacy. What do you think my first metal should be? Would you say “The Dingo is an excellent first step into all metal yo-yos and unresponsive play!”.
Even if yoyos are about preference, telling someone to get a Dingo as their first metal is misleading. It is a novelty yoyo, one to keep in your pocket to pull out at the bus stop, or to try something challenging. It is not a yoyo to learn on.
Tell me what you think!
Don’t see anything wrong with even starting with a metal, never mind getting one a month in. You don’t have to “earn” the right to blow your money on whatever you want.
I think it’s mostly about the price. There aren’t all that many decent metals for $50, and even fewer made by the really popular and desirable brands like One Drop.
So, for a new guy who’s looking for an unresponsive metal, the Dingo is probably a decent option if for no other reason than the investment isn’t great.
I think they’re also just trying to find a way to say that this is the entry level one drop without implying that it’s the cheap one drop.
I did the exact same thing! I had a PGM before that, but I only had it for about 2 weeks. Then I learned everything on a POPStar from September until Christmas that year.
It doesn’t have anything to do with a right of passage, which is what I think most people get twisted about. It’s that metals are really unnecessary for a long period, and can hurt your technique in the long run in that they often come paired with a sloppy gap-width for the players’ skill level at the time, and a weird set of training wheels that lead you to progress in a way that disregards the essentials.
What about the Zen series? Or a Dibase?Or a Raptor? The Raptor is cheaper and plays way better, and is cheaper to boot. I would say that the entry level One Drop would be the Cafe Racer (not speaking from experience, I haven’t played one yet). They are making more of them, by the way.
The point is, there are metals far better for learning on than the Dingo to the point where it was ridiculous to recommend it.
1st, yoyoing is about having fun. some people can handle the frustration of a plastic’s performance for years, others would just quit after a month
2nd, there is absolutely no example out there that proves your point, none whatsoever. Au contraire, there are tons of players who are good, smooth, technical players and who started with a metal early
3rd, yoyoing is cheap enough so beginners have easily access to the high end stuff, and more often than not, people buy metals not for the performance, but for the looks, comfort and hype
4th you take as a constant that all the players want to become as good as they can, while some players do want that -and they usually get there without playing with a plastic for a year, at least nowadays they do- but others just are in it for the fun, or for the collector’s point of view, many, many players don’t really care about being excellent, most just find yoyoing fun and they want to have fun.
5th actually, there are tons of counter examples, well, it’s a bit of a stretch, but look at the early 2000s players, they all spent TONS of time with crappy, plastic responsive throws. Given that they had to develop a stronger technique first, before they even got started with the kind of tricks that most newbies start learning after a couple weeks, they were starting to learn them after a year or even later. With today modern yoyos, you can easily get the tricks and technique under your belt and the smoothness will eventually come with time anyway, but by the time you get there, you will have learned a significant amount of techniques, mounts, tricks, because your yoyos allowed you to go further without having the technique, so after a couple years, when the smoothness really start to kick in, you will actually have a much higher technical level than one guy who spent those couple years with a kickside. He’ll probably be smoother, but after 3 or 4 years, no one will be able to tell the difference while you’ll still have at least 1 year worth of technique on the kickside dude.
back at the dingo’s description. just put it back in context, the dingo is like at least 2 or 3 years old, by then, the cheap metal range was nowhere near the choice it offers nowadays (cheap chinese throws were not as widely distributed then), so price wise, it may or may not have been -at the time- of a good price/quality ratio.
By today’s standards, the dingo may be regarded by many as a plain bad throw, but it wasn’t released yesterday. They probably never edited the description since the release, and what do you expect them to write anyway?
“the Dingo is an awful yoyo that doesn’t spin for long and lacks stability, however, it does cost more than other metals that play up to today’s standards” then change the video with a random failvid from youtube ;D ;D ;D
that said, I used to have a dingo, it was fun and not so horrible (not so good either)
PS: I’m not a native english speaker, but I think it’s actually “rite of passage”, not “right of passage”
I agree with the original point. I think the point is that these days, there are far better “entry level” metals out there to choose from than the 3 year old Dingo. It does, however, represent the OneDrop brand as no other OneDrop does because of its significance to both yoyo and OneDrop history.
I think the marketing description is similar to what was used at the time that it came out. At that time the Dingo was revolutionary for a metal yoyo at that price point. Some might even go so far as to call it a game changer. As I recall, the Dingo ruffled a few feathers in the industry for that very reason. Some very large players in the biz were not pleased by the Dingo; or OneDrop for making it.
The Dingo is OneDrop. Bold, take no prisoners, make no compromises and forge ahead.
I said there aren’t all that many. Listing 3 or 4 doesn’t really counter this very effectively. It’s just true that most of the metal market, especially from the big boys like One Drop, starts at almost twice this price. So, even if the Dingo isn’t that great, the price alone still makes it a decent throw for a beginner. They’re not going to notice the difference between a good and a great yoyo anyway. They just need something that’s unresponsive and plays alright, and if that thing is metal, all the better I guess.
You also have to remember that YYE has a relationship with every manufacturer. They’re advertising a product moreso than making actual recommendations, so you can expect that they’re going to go overboard with praise. It just happened that in this instance, marketing it to beginners makes the most sense because it’s cheap, but from a reliable manufacturer.
I used words like “can” in order to not make huge, obviously false, general assumptions about everyone. Of course there are examples of people that fared just fine, but when I look at a majority of one/two month YouTube videos, I’m not very confident in their model choice.
I won’t address everything you say. I won’t will myself into a war with you (which I’m sure you’d be more than willing to take up) when you are putting words in my mouth, “you take as a constant”, in order to get more numbers in your list.
I dunno. Maybe just because I agree with what Hadoq said and couldn’t have said it better myself, I didn’t see it as a war charge. It’s just disagreement with the general premise that you have to teach yourself with a more challenging throw in order to learn and grow. You really don’t.
As a kid, I wanted to be a skateboarder. I saved up my allowance and got a board from Consumer’s Distributing, a mail-order store that had some cool looking skateboards. I got the board and boy did I suck. I used it for a while before I got disappointed and bored that I couldn’t even Ollie with it. I never became a skateboarder.
Flash forward a few years, and I had occasion to try out a friend’s brand-name “pro” board with all the trimmings. Once I got my feet used to the board, I did more in a few minutes than I ever did in hours and hours of using that cruddy board.
I wasn’t interested any more, but a light bulb sure went on, and since then I’ve always been a big advocate for buying the best gear you can reasonably afford while at the beginner stages. That applies to anything… musical instruments, visual art (don’t try to do a “real” watercolour with a kids’ watercolour kit and some printer paper!), cooking (ingredients and implements count!)… why shouldn’t it apply to yoyo?
I don’t think (although I certainly don’t know) that Hadoq meant to throw down a gauntlet, and neither do I. All friendly exchanging of two different perspectives on the same topic. I can only speak for myself when I say that I’m not a believer in so-called “beginner equipment” or the idea of “training” yourself with more challenging gear except by conscious choice. The best beginner gear is the best gear you can get your hands on in a sane way.
For me, I lump the dingo in the with trigger based on size and at least to me, comparable playability. The Trigger was the first all metal I got, and I was so excited to get it, but when I got it, man that thing was temperamental. Now that I’ve been throwing longer I can pull off my tricks with it, but when I first got it, I was twisting and turning all over. What i use it for now, is mainly to polish tricks that I learn on a larger yoyo. Trying to learn on an undersize, at least for me, was highly frustrating. So in my eyes, I wouldn’t recommend the Dingo as an “Intro Metal”, but rather as a fun throw that you can use to get clean on a trick you’ve learned on a more comfortable yoyo.
this is the only part of your message I’ll address publicly.
people who play since one or two months are not supposed to be either good or smooth, no matter what they play.
and since you don’t want to reply my points, I’m going to make them again.
1st. yoyoing is a toy and a hobby, collecting and owning good looking yoyos is, for some people, more important than actually being good, I know people who play for years and barely know a few tricks, but they own most significant throws in yoyoing history, including titaniums, expensive/high ends etc…
2nd. yoyoing is a toy and a hobby, just like any other toy or hobby, people have the means to buy expensive stuff and they do it, because they can. I’ve seen people on trackdays driving ferraris and getting overtaken by more talented drivers in miatas. Are they wrong to have bought a ferrari? why would they, if they can afford one, they’ll enjoy it on their own level.
Most people I know would have quit yoyoing if they had to throw responsive/low end plastics for more than a month. Metals make it easier to have fun earlier on, they make yoyoing more accessible to more people, and they help the community grow by doing just that. And with the community growing, the average level also gets better and better with time.
Today, tricks are doing tricks in a couple months, that took people 5 or 7 years ago a couple years to learn, by my book, it means that people are getting better and faster than before, when you claim it’s the other way around.
see, I’m not starting a war, but a debate, in that we do not agree on one point, so I take the time to expose the arguments in favor of what I do believe and what I do experience. whereas you’re only response to that is an accusation of me wanting to start a war. you did not address a single one of my arguments, you just dismissed everything in accusing me of being a troll, basically. But trolls don’t spend time writing thought out arguments.
I can only speak for myself when I say that I’m not a believer in so-called “beginner equipment” or the idea of “training” yourself with more challenging gear except by conscious choice. The best beginner gear is the best gear you can get your hands on in a sane way.