The Real Indiana Jones

LEGO Ideas Discussion

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I'm a bit mad about the "1 year to get to 10,000 or it gets deleted" thing. Sure, it makes sense from a business perspective, but that just means that I am going to have to promote my project to death in order for it to achieve the goal. And, even if it does, there is no guarantee that it will become a set. What, with the LEGO Review and all. My project has been up for a tiny bit over a year, and guess what? It only has a little over 600 supporters. Just imagine how tough this is going to be.

I by no means want to mock your project, but if it took you a year to get to a little over 600 supporters, how long wil it take to get to 10.000? If it ever gets there?

I think it's just common sense to put a time limit on projects. Yes, it's going to be hard, but not impossible. And if/when Ideas is pomoted a bit more on the Lego pages, it will draw more attention anyway.

And in the end Lego is a commercial company. Sets have to be commercially viable, even if they are the result of Cuusoo/Ideas. A set that took a long time to get the required votes probably won't be that interesting to people.

But I do also fear that the emphasis will shift to sets that are linked to popular themes, more specifically movies and the like. A really cool idea for a City vehicle might never make it, because the people that are interested in those simply might not vote or even know that said idea is there... Maybe Lego could do something about that...

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I by no means want to mock your project, but if it took you a year to get to a little over 600 supporters, how long wil it take to get to 10.000? If it ever gets there?

I think it's just common sense to put a time limit on projects. Yes, it's going to be hard, but not impossible. And if/when Ideas is pomoted a bit more on the Lego pages, it will draw more attention anyway.

And in the end Lego is a commercial company. Sets have to be commercially viable, even if they are the result of Cuusoo/Ideas. A set that took a long time to get the required votes probably won't be that interesting to people.

But I do also fear that the emphasis will shift to sets that are linked to popular themes, more specifically movies and the like. A really cool idea for a City vehicle might never make it, because the people that are interested in those simply might not vote or even know that said idea is there... Maybe Lego could do something about that...

Agreed. As far as the popular themes getting the votes, I think it's ok in that it already happens today with Lego in general. I mean, there are themes that are popular and sell well that I don't care for personally (looks at Chima/Ninjago :classic: )...

Edited by gunm

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I by no means want to mock your project, but if it took you a year to get to a little over 600 supporters, how long wil it take to get to 10.000? If it ever gets there?

I think it's just common sense to put a time limit on projects. Yes, it's going to be hard, but not impossible. And if/when Ideas is pomoted a bit more on the Lego pages, it will draw more attention anyway.

And in the end Lego is a commercial company. Sets have to be commercially viable, even if they are the result of Cuusoo/Ideas. A set that took a long time to get the required votes probably won't be that interesting to people.

But I do also fear that the emphasis will shift to sets that are linked to popular themes, more specifically movies and the like. A really cool idea for a City vehicle might never make it, because the people that are interested in those simply might not vote or even know that said idea is there... Maybe Lego could do something about that...

Part of the reason it can take years to get to 10k is because of the massive amount of effectively dead projects. Trimming out the backlog and having a targeted termination point means each project has a reasonable chance of being found by someone who might like it. It's not lost in the sea of "little Billy's first LDD Batman" creations. Right now you really only effectively have a week or two to gain attention before your project scrolls a few pages in and is never heard from again unless it can make the sidebar or top 15 or so.

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The biggest change here seems to be the name (ok, the one year thing is actually the biggest change), and frankly the new name sucks. CUUSOO was weird and intriguing, and had a meaning that you had to look into to understand. It was just like the name 'LEGO' in fact; it was a distinctive name, and had meaning too. 'Ideas' is just bland and… bland. There's nothing catchy or interesting about the brand name 'Ideas' slapped on a box, no matter how nice the font/logo will be.

Perhaps CUUSOO wasn't the best name because it looks impossible to pronounce for English speakers, but they should've come up with something cool and distinctive in the same vain as CUUSOO. 'Ideas' as a line name sucks.

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I'm pretty sure the name had to change because CUUSOO is not a wholly-owned Lego IP and is not exclusive to Lego-centric designs only. Now that Lego is taking full ownership of the program, it made sense to downplay the partnership and rename it something that is more obviously "Lego".

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Ah, I did read about that after my above post, but I still stand by my sentiment that 'Ideas' is an utterly bland name. They should've come up with something creative and catchy.

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I think this is a load of crap!

One year?! Are you kidding me?!

I demand an explanation!

And I should get one soon.

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I think the 1 year limit is great. I mean if you look at other crowd sourcing like Kickstarter for example you have way less time to make your dollar amount. I agree with the above comment that LEGO Ideas conveys the (dare I say) "idea" of the site better. Well to me anyway. I look forward to the new site. Does anyone know sort of time it took for the existing CUUSOO sets and current items in review to reach the 10000 votes? If this is below 12 months then I would say LEGO are vindicated in setting the time limit as they will.

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I think the 1 year limit is great. I mean if you look at other crowd sourcing like Kickstarter for example you have way less time to make your dollar amount. I agree with the above comment that LEGO Ideas conveys the (dare I say) "idea" of the site better. Well to me anyway. I look forward to the new site. Does anyone know sort of time it took for the existing CUUSOO sets and current items in review to reach the 10000 votes? If this is below 12 months then I would say LEGO are vindicated in setting the time limit as they will.

I know my Ghostbusters set took a little over 3 months, Looking now it looks like my Tumbler took about 15 months.

I think the 1 year is for the better, it will weed out languishing projects (including the majority of my own projects) but that puts the onus on me to promote my projects effectively within that period. You can't just dump a project on there and forget about it, you'll need to constantly promote, update and improve on your pitch over the course of a year.

I think the urgency of the 1 year will help people reach 10000 faster as well, much like Kickstarter, having a definite time limit will hopefully stop people from thinking they can come back and support it later only to forget about it.

I think the name is for the better, it was always a bit frustrating explaining CUUSOO to people, LEGO Ideas gets the concept of the page across mostly in the name, if you have to preface a business name with an explanation it's usually a bad sign. And as someone stated above, CUUSOO doesn't really work for the target audience.

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Technically the content is not too different, but as an Asian I'm alittle concerned with the change of title. Maybe the team want to show the changes or they just want to make it more "international" and get rid of that Japanese origin. Uh, though products are still more impotant than titles.

I don't have too much issues with new rules. Instead of saying that weak projects can be deleted faster, I hope the real use of the rules is to urge FOLs to vote more projects they care about so that each review season can have at least 15 projects passed. I honestly think the achieved projects so far are really not too many. (40 projects in six years? Uh......).

Edited by Dorayaki

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I think this is a load of crap!

One year?! Are you kidding me?!

I demand an explanation!

And I should get one soon.

Be sure to let us know how that works out.

Technically the content is not too different, but as an Asian I'm alittle concerned with the change of title. Maybe the team want to show the changes or they just want to make it more "international" and get rid of that Japanese origin. Uh, though products are still more impotant than titles.

I don't have too much issues with new rules. Instead of saying that weak projects can be deleted faster, I hope the real use of the rules is to urge FOLs to vote more projects they care about so that each review season can have at least 15 projects passed. I honestly think the achieved projects so far are really not too many. (40 projects in six years? Uh......).

As others have said, they had to change the title to bring it in house. CuuSoo is an independent entity. I don't think it is meant to get rid of anything Japanese, beyond a desire to move the title in synch with the English language requirement that has been in place since they went international.

With that said, "Ideas" is just bland. It just reeks of some lame @zzed marketing group focus testing, and has no pop, no zing, no interest. It's bland and boring. It's the sort of name you get when you do focus testing on a group of Ritalin doped kids.

The 1 year cutoff should be fine if they do a bigger publicity push behind the site and improve how ideas are pushed and presented. And with luck it should light a fire under voters.

I think the 1 year limit is great. I mean if you look at other crowd sourcing like Kickstarter for example you have way less time to make your dollar amount. I agree with the above comment that LEGO Ideas conveys the (dare I say) "idea" of the site better. Well to me anyway. I look forward to the new site. Does anyone know sort of time it took for the existing CUUSOO sets and current items in review to reach the 10000 votes? If this is below 12 months then I would say LEGO are vindicated in setting the time limit as they will.

GlenBricker has a ton of data on how fast projects have or will hit 10k on his web site. I think the fastest 10k project was around 6 days. The longest was 2 1/2 years (I want to say Japanese Architecture).

And the Japanese Architecture set is the perfect example of why they are putting in the 1 year limit. Basically it is an all but creator abandoned project. Did CuuSoo ever get a response when they asked the creator to choose or limit the project to one building? Past a year the chances that the creators have walked away or become difficult to reach magnify. 1 year probably guarantees a certain level of engagement.

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Alright, look guys, me and some friends have recently started a CUUSOO Supporter group on Facebook and we all agree that one year for 10,000 supporters is just way too short. What I think LEGO should do is give us options on how long we want the project to be up like Kickstarter or Indiegogo.

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As others have said, they had to change the title to bring it in house. CuuSoo is an independent entity. I don't think it is meant to get rid of anything Japanese, beyond a desire to move the title in synch with the English language requirement that has been in place since they went international.

The 1 year cutoff should be fine if they do a bigger publicity push behind the site and improve how ideas are pushed and presented. And with luck it should light a fire under voters.

Yes, it looks like Cuusoo the Japanese cooporation is not going with TLC in the future, so TLC want to start their own thing. The only question is if "Cuusoo" the name has more market supports, or a new name can bring more people into this website. Kinda agree "Idea" could be too bland to receive attentions.

Cuusso has been actually getting more public attentions (we have 3 achieved sets this year so far, at least). The criteria that one-year-cut rule needs is to have enough voters to make the system work faster. If the rule already existed since its birth, I doubt we could get any set in early years.

Edited by Dorayaki

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The 1 year cutoff should be fine if they do a bigger publicity push behind the site and improve how ideas are pushed and presented. And with luck it should light a fire under voters.

Yes, exactly. After the site "goes live" next week, Lego will obviously start to actively publicize it, so all the fans will know it exists. That is the one critical factor that a lot of people are forgetting. The number of visitors and voters should increase by at least 3x, or perhaps even 10x or more... So projects that would have passed within 3 years will now pass within one year or less, especially if they have a nice head start from being in the Beta Phase.

And I agree, they will undoubtedly improve the interface for searching, and the time limit will force apathetic lurkers to finally press that button!

It will be like "Cuusoo on Fast Forward"!

Edited by The Real Indiana Jones

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Well, for me the care factor for Cuusoo is at a all time low.......27 projects are only a handful have clicked over 100 supports and many over the last few years.

Only if more and more people join up for the right reasons.....not just to support one odd-ball project but to better Lego in general then my hope for Lego Ideas will get boosted.

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The thing is, they want people voting who are actually interested enough in these projects to buy them if and when they become products. If voting is so easy that anyone can do it in a second without having ever visited the site before, they'll get a lot of meaningless votes.

Voting is pretty darn easy right now for people who actually care about the projects - it doesn't take much time to register. They do ask some questions when you vote (how much you'd pay, why you're interested, etc.), but that's undoubtedly because the info is valuable to them when projects enter review.

When I login to a site like IMDB, it gives me various options to sign in: via the site itself, but also via Facebook, Google+ etc. I really believe more votes could be generated if signing in would be simplified... As for the meaningless votes; that's why TLG also wants some reasoning behind the votes (what would you pay; how many would you buy; why do you think it needs to be released). If that stays intact it's less of an issue if one would login via Facebook or another provider, I think...

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Alright, look guys, me and some friends have recently started a CUUSOO Supporter group on Facebook and we all agree that one year for 10,000 supporters is just way too short. What I think LEGO should do is give us options on how long we want the project to be up like Kickstarter or Indiegogo.

Honestly, if you can't get 10,000 votes in 1 year it's probably down to one of two things:

1) Your project just doesn't have the appeal you think it does. If finding 10,000 people to do nothing more than "vote" for free is too hard, chances are that finding 10,000 people to actually pay money for the set is going to be even more difficult and TLG really don't want sets languishing in their inventory for over a year.

2) You aren't connecting with the right audiences. And if you, as the person behind the idea, don't know how to go out and find the right audience and get them enthusiastic about your idea, why do you think TLG would?

Edited by AndyC

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The 1 year limit is definitely for the best in my opinion, it's essentially doing what LEGO would be doing during each review. They would sit down and see how long it took for a project to reach 10000 votes. That in itself is a good indicator to them as to whether the set is popular enough to warrant bringing to market.

If it slowly trickles over the line over the course of year or more, from their perspective it's not going to be a product that is going to jump off the shelves and reach the kind of sales figures they need to warrant bringing the project to the consumer.

This will remove projects like that from the review periods which will help speed up the process, by eliminating a project that they would have done during the review anyway before it even gets to them.

And as stated, a year is plenty time, if it can't reach 10000 votes by that time either the idea or design isn't good enough or there just isn't the interest in what is being presented, as much as the person submitted the project will think it's a great idea, not everyone in the world will.

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I hope this doesn't lead to the site being a flood of licensed IP based on currently-popular crap that gets 10k just because its popular...

Once I get the time, I intend to photograph and submit my "5-in-1 6-wide City cars" idea (which is basically a set of parts which can be used to build 1 of 5 different 6-side City style cars)

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1 year limits would be bad for all projects who wouldn't make it. In subjective views, most project owners might just want to keep waiting and never get their hope (not saying those junk projects), but unfortunately their projects can't move anyone's heart and just stay in fewer than hundred votes.

In objective views, the real pity is for those who are still able to achive 10,000 votes but need more than 1 year to do it. Some very old projects do fit in this mode, because they're kinda like slow-to-warm-up and often lose to those quickly achived projects with great supports and popular license. What the new site needs to do is to actively urge voters to make quick decisions and increase visibilities of all projects.

If I have to worry about someone, I'd say the Piano project is because it's used six years to get that 6'000 votes, and it needs to get the rest 4,000 votes to catch up the upcoming deadline.

Edited by Dorayaki

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If I have to worry about someone, I'd say the Piano project is because it's used six years to get that 6'000 votes, and it needs to get the rest 4,000 votes to catch up the upcoming deadline.

But those kind of projects are exactly why the limit needs to exist. It's a nice enough little MOC, but it's just never, ever, going to be a product that would actually sell in any kind of quantity. Given enough time, it'll trickle up to 10,000 votes, but it's never going to be viable in a real sense.

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But those kind of projects are exactly why the limit needs to exist. It's a nice enough little MOC, but it's just never, ever, going to be a product that would actually sell in any kind of quantity. Given enough time, it'll trickle up to 10,000 votes, but it's never going to be viable in a real sense.

As I know getting achived and getting passed in actual review are two different things. Those rejected examples already proved it. I don't see you statement related to the new rule.

The lack of public attention is one of the problems of Cuusoo so far. Even if it's nice enough, if nobody notices, it can't sell for sure. Optimistically, we should hope the new rules can do good to some projects (meaning that the projects can get more votes, not be deleted).

Edited by Dorayaki

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But those kind of projects are exactly why the limit needs to exist. It's a nice enough little MOC, but it's just never, ever, going to be a product that would actually sell in any kind of quantity. Given enough time, it'll trickle up to 10,000 votes, but it's never going to be viable in a real sense.

I'm not so sure of this one, actually. I can see a lot of more "casual" buyers of LEGO who'd never in a million years look into the hobby deeply enough to even learn of CUUSOO / Ideas' existence, let alone support or create projects, but who might well pick up a copy of that set if they see it in a LEGO Store.

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The one year time limit is great. As many have said if your project cannot reach 10k votes in a year it most likely does not have the economic viability it would require to pass the review process. If anything this might force some people to better refine their project before posting it, rather than just putting it up and hoping to eventually get results. Which could in turn lead to a better selection. Not that it would stop the project dumping on the site, but would help to have a regular clean up of said projects.

Linking the new ideas site to the TLG site will also mean more casual buyers of Legos will more likely to see it and might be inspired to build something of their own. Which is really the whole point for TLG, to keep people interesting in building. An on going reality based contest and like all good contests a deadline is essential or you end up with stagnation which was a problem on Cuusoo.

Don't view the one year time limit as a hindrance, view it as a challenge. TLG is looking for the best sets, not just the good ones.

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