HTC Vive Base Station

So I honestly dont know how to rate these. The things arent cheap, you obviously need them for tracking, and when they work they just work, but when they die its a hassle. The only thing can be said about their regular normal use is they can be slightly annoying. They have two spinning motors in them which hum and buzz, and can seem to be loud and annoying at certain times and almost inaudible at others. If you have them attached to lighthouse poles in your room or have them hard-mounted on a wall or something similar they can make some noise and vibrate. However, these lighthouses seem to have an unknown probability value. I personally had one die after less than 2 years of light use (less than 72 hours run time/in-game time), I had one replacement arrive DOA with the same issue as I was needing to replace the dead one (bad laser diode), and youll find countless threads online of these things kicking the bucket at seemingly random times and without warning, along with horror stories from HTCs customer service. Youll also find people saying theyve used theirs pretty heavily for years and theyre still going strong, or someone whos had one for commercial use thats had the thing running nonstop for years and it still works. So its sort of playing Russian Roulette with these things. Is yours going to die one week after the warranty expires on it? Is it going to die after 3 months and youre forced to deal with the legendarily horrible HTC support? Will it last 10 years and you never have a problem? Flip a coin and find out. Another problem that may or may not appear over time with failure rates on these is that the original Vive which has now been discontinued cannot use the version 2.0 tracking base stations, its only compatible with these 1.0 versions. There are no real 3rd party options for these things, so if the production of these is stopped and failure rates remain unknown but a definite eventuality due to moving parts, you may be forced into upgrading sooner than you planned to, or replacement parts may continue to rise in price if production is stopped due to the discontinuation of the original Vive.

Product connected quickly and doesnt lose tracking.

I bought this as a replacement, because the vive support team kept closing my ticket for replacing the bricked base station. Never got a label for repair or anything like they stated, just closed my ticket. I had enough of waiting a year for the label so I bought a new station. Lone behold, this station barely got any use out of it. Plugging it in shows no LED, not even the red light. Im just sick of buying expensive stations for them to break themselves in a short amount of time and not being able to get help from the support team.

Works as it should

Came in tip top shape

The product works as intended. I wish it came with a wall mount, but I wont dock it a star for a personal preference.

I like that it will work with other headsets too like the Valve Index for when I get that. This was definitely a good buy.

Works perfectly to use for seated play. If you turn off the other base stations, it will remember your seated layout. I use smart plugs to simplify the set up.

I bought my first base station from here after one of the two I received with my Vive died. It work fine for about a month and than started blinking red (internal fault error), after some troubleshooting I figured out it wasnt possible to fix on my end and ordered another one. The second one took nearly a month to arrive (even though I had prime delivery) and was dead on arrival. Im now looking into other options to purchase either these or the 2.0 versions because Ive had no luck here.

Ordered 2 of them, they came in today. I set them up on the wall mounts and everything. I plug them into the wall and one of them is green and working, the other one is blinking red. I have been unable to find any solutions for the past 3 hours, and searching online just says it is an internal/rotor failure or something. I am amazed that something brand new doesnt work at all...Rated 2 stars just because one of them works and also because they were delivered fast.