3 STRIKES would be better if...

[illustriousrocket]

1) Take out all strike balls and just put the number balls in.  A misplaced number gives a strike.  3 misplaced numbers ends the game

I feel like this would disproportionately weight the game toward ending prematurely, as there are more numbers to be placed potentially incorrectly at the start than there is at the end.

However I'd argue the real issue is that it ends the game once the fourth digit is correctly placed. If you can't draw a strike and you can't place the last number incorrectly, the game is already won. Depending on which spaces you get wrong and which you get right, it may even be theoretically possible to have the game won after three digits are placed.

I just don't think the baseball motif is the right place to be looking for a solution.

[Nick]

According to Kelley Blue Book, the current mean average price of a new car in the US is about $50,000 (and a full-size truck typically goes for >$70,000), so there's no way a car priced in the 40s could be considered luxury anymore.

So that further supports my position that the game is not properly rewarding players for its difficulty, and contestants are also not pricing the cars well because the are expecting them to be more expensive.

The solution to that is not to offer the first digit free or to go back to one strike in the bag.  It's simply to offer more expensive cars commensurate with the difficulty of the game.

[MSTieScott]

According to Kelley Blue Book, the current mean average price of a new car in the US is about $50,000 (and a full-size truck typically goes for >$70,000), so there's no way a car priced in the 40s could be considered luxury anymore.

I take issue with mean rather than median (and notably, there isn't a readily available statistic for the median price of a car). It doesn't feel realistic to say that a $50,000 car is an "average" car.

Four models of BMW (X1, X2, 230i, and 330i) all have starting MSRPs in the $40,000 range. You can buy a Ford Mustang convertible for less than $50,000. On The Price Is Right, those aren't average cars.

Which means the show could still get that luxury-car pop by playing Three Strikes for cars in the $50,000 range (which at this point, would be approximately between two and three times the price of a "normal" pricing game car, which tracks with how the game was treated in the '00s). And if the cars are in the $50,000 range, giving one away shouldn't be catastrophic to the budget, which means the show could go back to one strike in the bag to get more exciting playings, as Fake Brad Pitt calculated.