Nittaku Factive Review

Via time-honored WAG ('wild a** guess') technique, I presume.

For what it's worth - I played quite a few ~1500 West coasties at US Open and did not lose once as a lowly 1750 East coast player. 

50-100 point  difference I might be convinced (but you still need to show me some data, anecdotes are not enough) - 700 is a silly joke. 

P.S. Most of the time when someone says they are 'around XXXX strength', this usually means they don't actually have a rating, but 'estimate' themselves to be at that level. IMHO, of course.

I played a little against a robot with Vega Europe and Factive in the same thickness (1.8mm) on the same blade (twiddling). To be honest, often I can't even tell them apart. Factive feels a bit more crisp on power drives (probably due to harder sponge). Factive also lacks Vega's catapult. Spin generation seems similar.  At this point (and it is still early days in my testing the setup) I actually prefer Factive to Vega because I find Vega's catapult more annoying than helpful.

I am around 1300 strength (West Coast, which is about 2000 on the East Coast scale)

I agree with this.  I think most of the discussion above was that the "strategy of differentiation" approach leads to more consumer confusion, which I partly agree with but don't agree that it's ESN's fault, and it varies from reseller to reseller.

BRS wrote: From what I have seen the most common generic setup recommendation for a coached kid is tb alc with t05 or t64. Until that changes Butterfly occupies the high ground and the other companies are mostly fighting among themselves.

Tenergy has become a vanilla default type of rubber range - a safe option for anyone starting out their development along a generic topspin attacking path.  Butterfly got to that high ground in the early days of Tenergy when it brought a clear advantage after the glue ban.  Now that advantage doesn't exist in performance terms (IMO only, I know not everyone will agree), but the general perception is that it's the best in some objective way - most used by pros, most expensive, most popular, etc.  But since Tenergy broke the mold to some degree on release, Butterfly have vastly pumped the price and rigged territorial control.

I can't see how other companies can break the mindset of "BTY=Best because BTY=Best", but some are improving in recent years (Nittaku, Andro, Stiga have done well IMO).  Butterfly are without doubt the market leader and overhauling them just won't happen overnight, if ever.

GSOM_GSOM11 wrote: From what I have seen the most common generic setup recommendation for a coached kid is tb alc with t05 or t64. Until that changes Butterfly occupies the high ground and the other companies are mostly fighting among themselves. - I don`t think MX-P and EL-P/EL-S are a worse option for a coached kid. It`s time for BTY to regain superiority.

Totally, but how do you change the mindset of the people making these decisions?  It's a long road, but Tibhar have done well with their player sponsorship recently.

GSOM_GSOM11 wrote: About Factive - can we consider it as a "Fastarc P-2", a step down from P-1 in hardness and speed, but in the same series, like Bluefire M2 from M1?

Look, as much as this is interesting for me personally, it's a big derailment of this thread (and of course I'm contributing to that).  So I'll try to make this the last one from me.  

The way I read the above, and most of what you've found so far, is that Tensor happened, then Tensor Bios.  So Tensor was Biosed - a Bios process was added to Tensor.  The marketing and renaming by Joola suggest that Bios is some kind of more eco-friendly process applied to the original Tensor design.  The way I've always imagined it is that these are two steps in a development process.  But regardless, there was Tensor, and then Tensor Bios.  There is a difference between the two things.  There are two logos, rather than one "Tensor Bios" logo.  My opinion is that this difference, whatever it is, can be applied independently of the original state.  So you can Bios a Tensor, or Bios a non-Tensor, whatever that might mean.  That guess is just based on how these things are labelled, marketed, discussed, and how they actually play when I try them out.  Bios, without the Tensor, is a new-ish thing (the last few years only) because ESN have only recently been producing a lot of "entry level" rubbers for all the various resellers.  ESN are unlikely to reveal anything interesting about the process, so we are only going to have educated guesses to go on.  But with it being a recent change in the way ESN rubbers are labelled up and described, I don't think looking back 11 years ago is as helpful as you might think.  "Tensor Bios" were always together because could have been the only type of rubber they made back then - both things together, both logos together.  It's easy to come up with possible explanations for this stuff if you try.

Of course, the logo, packaging and marketing situation is muddled, and it has been inconsistent obver the years in my eyes.  I can't see how either one of us will prove the other one "wrong".  But for a second, narrow your focus to GA5 and GA8.  Why would one have Tensor and Bios, and one Bios?  Why would the Tensor one behave like most of ESN's top-shelf products, and the other like their slower, allround offerings?  Why would DHS use the word "Respectively" when describing Tensor and Bios to GA8 and GA5?  Why would the back of the GA5 packet say this specifically...

Double Happiness Gold Arc 5 - an inverted rubber that integrates the intensive pimple-structure and BIOS technology to provide stable control and excellent hand feel.

...mentioning Bios and not Tensor.  An effort has been made here to include Tensor in GA8 and to exclude it for GA5 in both use of logos and the written word.  I suppose it could be all a mistake, a very elaborate ruse, or a weird coincidence.  I don't think it is in this case, but that's just my opinion.

If they have the Tensor logo, definitely Tensors.

Now, I'd always assumed that Joola had renamed "Bios" to "Green Power".  Big assumption of course, just based on....intuition I suppose.

And here is the next assumption - Joola rebadged "Tensor" as "Geo-blahblahblah", just as Tibhar did with SPI-gubbins, and Xiom did with Elasto-thingy.  But then they haven't used that in all cases of new rubbers, so they would be doing this selectively.

Sometimes it's pretty clear what's going on - I think GA5 and 8 is one of the better cases actually.  Then we can make some common sense assumptions by inference.  Joola MAXX is pretty similar (in material design) to MX-P, which is pretty similar to Bluefire M1, and so on backwards through history.  None have the Tensor logo - they all use their own jargon - but from our experience of how ESN operate and how the rubbers play we can reasonably (IMO) assume they are all Tensors.  It's not 100% and if someone produced some evidence that MAXX was made differently to MX-P and SPI was a renamed Tensor but Geo-blah wasn't then I could get behind that.