It's just too complicated to use.
When I reviewed
ERIC II, I became very much of the opinion that the format was a
poor fit for Eastern Septimius. The system requiring finding the
obverse details first and going through a series of steps ending with the
reverse type is impossible to use with a series of coins with so many minor
legend variations.
Had the first
field in the sort been the
reverse type so minor things like the differences between IIC, IICO and IICOS obverses would have ended up with adjacent positions in the list, I might have found more user friendliness there but as it is, the chance of making all the right choices to lead to a 'final' level ID was chancy even if it was there. As I recall there were coins in the plates of ERICII that either were not in the list or that I was too unskilled to be able to track down.
While it is wonderful to have a
catalog of what has sold in major indexed
auctions, these big houses are not exactly where one goes to find things that exist only in low grade and extremely low quantity. Any collector of this series is likely to have a coin or twenty that are 'unpublished' using the definition 'not in RIC' and not in the major sales. Using the word 'complete' raises the hopes of those of us who would love to see a revised RIC for Septimius. When I saw that this eBook was just a subset of the next
ERIC (meaning it would use that same laundry list organization) and when I saw neither Barry
nor Martin were in on the project, I lost interest.
I do wonder if the results for
Pescennius Niger would be different because a higher percentage of
his coins that sell pass through the big name sellers. There would
still be the problem of so many variant legends for both sides and so many coins existing only in
part legend condition with less than completely predictable completions for the gaps. In this
field a 'complete'
catalog is going to be a die study. We might expect the later
Rome section to be a better fit to the system but the mess we call 193 to 196 with multiple mints each following their own rules is not the place to risk a word like 'complete'.