Mazin

this madness is ruining a lot of other hobbies right now tho, it's not just that scalpers do that to toys, but same for most products i'm interested in, it applies even history books and all other sorts of products no one would consider to be objects of speculation, and this was never the case before... tho i don't even think it's speculation anymore, if someone puts up a new product for double the regular prize or more, especialy that some of these are easily available with large discounts, then they are either targeting some casual buyers, who don't know the prizes and so they might just grab it without knowing there are being scammed, or it's moneylaundering oh yeah, they look usable :) well, the only i would have doubts is the old guy, cause his pink neck would clash with yellowfigures ;) I got mine from the fight with a Cave Troll set, in that dwarf mine that got run over

i'll check it out :) i definitely did use LOTR figs for army building too, they were sorta backward because of their equipment of course, still turned up nicely... i don't think i'e used any "normal" skin elements tho, i don't like to mix them with traditional yellow-skins, but i'm not banning mixing both either ;) but they simply don't look well together on a single person

Bluecoats or Redcoats? :) Which ones are You refering too? or both perhaps? :) I've never played nor had any red ones when i was a kid, i dreamed about them when i swam in those catalogues, but i think my time of collecting legos was already over at the moment they were coming in. But i got myself first few reds when i turned 30, and i did that especially because of this Forum, as i needed some new "characters" for my lego comics during the legendary Redcoats vs Bluecoats contest ;) And me and my friends used to bring bags full of our toys to each other homes too!. With every kind of toys, not only Legos, but also Gijoes, He-Men, toy cars, depending on what was the fashion at a time, or which franchise did we want to play with, often mixing all... I miss those times too. Tho probably a lot of elements got lost this way, my parents even used to lend my Legos to neighbours' kids when they were sick and i wasn't home, cause hardly anyone could afford those bricks and for a while i was the "rich kid", and i'm pretty sure some stuff didn't return to me... Oh, You should try santas from minipacks :) i made few soldiers by using them couple of years ago, soldiers or militias, can't be sure, but i always had this urge to make irregular troopers, by making "uniformed" units from nonarmy figures, like whenever i had few bandanas, torsos and legs in a certain chosen color that would be my way to raise my forces in numbers ;)

So POTC does count :) still, i'm not sure about those civilians when it comes to official Lego sets from the regular line. Were any minifigs oficialy marked as civilians/merchants/some-sort-of-neutrals? Or are there any minifigs from that era widely considered as "neutrals" by the fandom? I mean, every fan probably had/has his/her own approach. I would constantly turn some soldiers into pirates, some pirates into soldiers, make new factions out of both, or mix them with other Lego series... still, this was me. But fandom tends to turn certain anonymous toys into almost quasi-oficial characters with full bio, so i wonder if that's the case with some of those neutraly looking figs... :)

Nice picture! Did You do it all by Yourself? Looks very atmospheric :) So who are those "other' BTW? Maybe it's because i'm sick, or maybe i've depleted all my Lego knowledge during the last Contest, but nothing comes to my mind. Or are You reffering to factions from POTC? Or maybe some minifigs count as merchants? ( like those in the Imperial Trading Post ) PS. Since You've mentioned Yellowcoats, and we've seen few attempts by fans to introduce other xxx-coats into the Lego Pirates world, maybe this could be a good idea for Your next poll? To ask folks what color would they prefer for new army factions, should they be green, or orange, or purple... etc.

Wow :o that's solves it then ;) I'm surprised that people were so reluctant tho, says a thing about our members ;) I was sure that since so many people use software to build from bricks they would like to play games too :/ Tho, 10 years is a lot, maybe something has changed since then. Still, turning down a chance to win anything is weird :/

Yeah, me included ;) I have some Lego games, but i've been unable to play them do to problems with equipment or lack of it ;) Still, it's always a way to give more prizes and one that could be taken under consideration. IF it would be gelally and technically doable of course...

I wanted to ask about this a bit earlier, but things turned differently in this thread and i kinda forgot my idea, but i was thinking that maybe, just maybe, there would be a way to raise the number of prizes by giving away keys to digital products? Lego games on Steam/Epic/GoG come to my mind as first. I admit, I have absolutely no idea if Lego group can even give them away, and some of those games might be actually more expensive than regular Lego sets, still, it seems that allowing access to digital products for more people might be somewhat easier for them than processing all the adresses-local shops-delivery related problems. I might be wrong on this, but by logic i think it would be just faster, easier and cheaper for Lego to award those games ( or other digital products ) for free to more people, rather than giving away even few physical products. And a digital game is still a prize many would opt for.

I don't know about others, but just wanted to say my Eldorado gift has arrived yesterday. So thank You again for honoring me this way, thanx for all the fun time and possibilities this even created for me and for all the kind words :) Already jumped into the constructing phase, took me quite some time to build the vessel from Imperial Trading Post, then took an even longer while to finish first part of the Fortress itself :) So yeah, hopefully i will be done with the whole thing before Christmas ;)

Dude, You do know this Forum and the entire Contest is just a virtual bonus to our everyday lives, right? It's a form of escape from problems, not the place to create problems, it's not like anyone here is part of the US Congress, we are not working on amendmnets to the Constitution or anything similarly serious. We didn't have to sign anything, we didn't have to give away our intelectual properties, we didn't have to pay to be taken under consideration, we didn't have to invest money, and this wasn't a contest that could seriously affect anyone's career or something any of us would write into a Portfolio. It also wasn't run by a big staff of professionals to complain the way You do, just like it wasn't organized to give prizes away to preselected winners, or to commit a tax fraud, or to bring publicity to the site and not give any prizes after all... And here I thought I was the one who wrote and complained too much. Sure, i thought there were few things to discuss, few things that i didn't like, which is completely normal during such events, but there's always a line. I think. And problems with this contest can't even compare with problems i'v witnessed in plenty of others. So boy, I hoped we were going to have a beer already, celebrate, and additionaly talk about few ideas for the future. Few things that could be changed, upgraded. And it's turning into a COURT ROOM battle, and i don;t realy want to be a part of this. On the other hand my brother owes me 100k, and other owe me millions, them i could take to the court room, and since You're an acting lawyer here, maybe i should hire You. Then we could use all that money to reimburse MisterPhes and sponsor tons of prizes in dozens of categories and hire an army of regulators. So i'll just use few words to defend MisterPhes and the whole Contest... This thing started 3 months ago, THREE MONTHS, and it wasn't in a hiatus for even a moment as it kept going and going trough different phases all the time, and i'm pretty sure most of us, including builders, critics, voters, Eurobricks staff and myself, may have been quite tired after a while and may have already forgotten about certain aspects that were set out in the beginning, as no one kept those rules printed and pinned into the fridge all the time, and the same way we might have forgotten about certain entries that may have been too similar, too big, too small etc. Especialy that some of those rule-breakers You bring up were't even in the rules, but are based on Your own assumptions. So after all those weeks I may have forgotten about certain things in the rulebook, other folks had the right to forgot about them too, even MisterPhes included, and most of contests tend to change as they go. Especially those that aren't ment for serious business, but are for poor fun. After all we all did this after hours, and we all had to invest HUNDERDS of hours, if we wanted to go trough every entry, write reviews, respond to each other, and drop few posts in other contest-related topics. Now do the math. Was it worth doing this just for those xxx dollar worth prizes? Nope. Definitely not. If i was here just to win Eldorado i wouldn't get so involved, and i'm based in Eastern Europe where every Lego set's real cost is typically 4 times more than in the West. Now do the math to guess how much more work MisterPhes had to do. And he's the one who won't be getting any prize, even tho he's the one deserving it the most! Cause we all were only having fun, we were the one basically playing with toys. We didn't have to respond to dozens and dozens of private messages, notifications and reports he probably had to deal with on a daily basis. I'll tell You, I've organised a couple of contest myself in the past, much much smaller of course, and i'm shocked HOW WELL this entire show had been run, considering how big and long it was and that we only had MisterPhes behind the wheel from start to finish. As You obviously have no idea how shitty they can be, with entrants breaking rules constantly, to the point one have to start adjusting those rules in order to finish the whole thing, instead of disqualifying almost everyone, and to stay sane, cause after a while even organizers might get sick and tired of the whole thing ;) It all starts with stricts rules and with a dream it will go smoothly... and then people come in and everything takes a turn.

I think @Stoertebricker 's Ironman is the perfect ship for this mission, no other vessel in our contest's fleet carries more guns ;) "i didn't sign for this!" ;) Well, i suppose we could simply use american Lego cannons then, i think they weren't capable of firing any projectiles anyway ;)

About the future... I think in order to run a smooth contest it should be all about the setting clear rules and enforcing them among contestants, cause everyone said they had a great time, but we still had some issues in here. Like with voting, the most important thing is to decide whether we won't to give future prizes to well deserved entries, or do we want to give them domocratically, cause democratic way will always give advantage to popular entrants, or someone with more friends, family, followers, like in all those controversial "most likers = winner" contests on FB. Having contests were someone gets advantage not because of an amazing entry but because he/she has more friends, who will vote for him/her without even checking others kills fun and is an insult to someone's elses effort. Thus, perhaps voting for oneself should be out of the question too. I mean, it wouldn't be a problem if someone should realy think his/her entry was the best. But it's problematic when people have different ethical approach, a lot of folks didn't decide to vote for themselves even tho they had excellent entries, and we saw some bad entries getting votes from their own creators, o courtesy voting, where it was clear that a vote was given to an entry for other reasons then it's attractiveness and compliance with contest's rules. After all, i thought the sole idea in this contest was to pitch ready-to-produce sets and to then draft those best among them, finished sets, digital or hand made, NOT ideas. Still we saw some of those ideas getting a lot of votes or even winning in one case, which was not fair for those who worked hard to have their own sets finished. One particular set managed to kinda roll over the rules, as i thought it was goofy and got accepted only because it was obvious it wouldn't generate votes, or so i hoped, but it turned out people did give quite a lot of points to it, hell, even its builder voted for himself, and i find it very distastefull. And that's just one of the examples of sets that didn't realy follow the basic rule, to pitch someting that could be greenlighted and in compliance with classical Pirate theme, as we've seen quite a lot of builds that Lego wouldn't allow, because they went into a sphere of fantasy, or gore or alcoholism... or because they were just MOCs, not something that could be a legit set. So in the future perhaps it would be best to dissalow such entries from even entering the voting phase, since a lot of folks vote for them anyway, which should be against anyone ethics. Or we should just consider dropping the "legit classic sets" rule and allow everything, no matter how MOCish or goofy they are, or if it's leaning too much into other themes. I'm just sad i've witnessed a couple of contests for new toys recently, and they always have rules, and then a lot of entrants and voters don't realy care about them, often leading to chosing winners that should be actually disqualified because they didn't fulfill original requirements... and yet, everyone is cool about it, completely ommiting the fact that it turned out unfair, ignoring the fact that some people even dropped from entering because they thought they would fail to fulfil requirements. So it's important to talk about this issue in my oppinion. But the biggest problem of our contest to me were not those controversial entries i've mentioned above, but all the repetitive stuff. It was very tirying to see so many similar ships, or remakes of ships charging at me at the very end. I hoped that people will use this great occasion that this contest had offered to them to think about builds that would be quite new and original, that they will come up with things that weren't done in the Lego Pirate world before, but for some reason many of them decided to do yet another version of a Clipper or Barracuda, whether it was called that way or not. So i'd like it very much if we could come up with ways to encourage more diversity and originality among builders, like, maybe in the future contestants could pitch their ideas first, and then they could build them only after getting approval from organisers? So that they would have to "register" that idea first and and slots for rafts or treasure islands would be limited to those who would pitch it fist. Like, that they would have to come up with ideas for new types of vessels before actually building them, so that we could "ok" it before they will do anyting? Say, someone says "i want to make a merchant vessel that is is not realy a merchant vessel, but a pirate ship disguised as a merchant vessel", and so we would respond "great plan! go with it!". And then when someone else would ask "could i make an another galleon with plenty of guns?" we could respond "no, to hell with it, we've seen this already, go back to the planning desk!" ;) And so on... Anyway, whatever turn a new contest will take, a contest is always a contest, it's always fun to follow, and it's always a chance to win something ;) And finaly, it always brings more people to the Forum leading to many of them staying on message boards and creating new topics and sharing more builds. And lastly, i think we would all agree that @Mister Phes should be properly reimbursed for all his time and effort, right boys? I mean, a lousy million $$$ is the least he could do with ;)

Good observation, i agree that Islanders are absolute winners of this contest, but as i've said in my final thoughts during the voting phase, it doesn't neccesarily mean that they got more popular than Pirates and Soldiers, it's just their sets were generaly better, more interesting, more original, while Soldiers for example brought plenty of remakes that had to share a lot of votes. In short, we didn't strike gold in Pirate or Soldier section contest during the contest, but we did strike gold in the Islander zone ;) Congratulations to Winners and sincere thanks to Organizers for coming up with this show and then running it to the end :)

I guess they would do that if they could give away more prizes, but then again approving entries to such categoties could be controversial, as we've seen some "remakes" that were different enough to be considered completely new builds, while some "originals" seemed to have be too similar to older sets ;)

Lets just blame Hungarians for it ;) They started confusion in the Contest, so we should now use them as scapegoats for everything ;)

Good idea to share those charts with us, cause i did find one mistake in my votes @Mister Phes :) In the Mini Build Category i voted for this entry by SevenDeadlyStreamers... while You gave my point to this entry by Janhansson :) Guess that i should have entered a full name of the entry, as I didn't call it "Remake of Renegade Raft...", but called it simpler "Renegade Raft..." and perhaps that might have fooled You ;) Anyway... better check those votes folks :) And maybe we should make it a rule to use full name for every entry next time :)

there were some problems with entries Index, as some of the builds were not included as the deadline clock was ticking, so we formed a special top secret mission force to find all those entries missing from the roster, among them Yours ;) Your welcome ;)

Mission acomplished then ;)

Realy nice :) Is that a little waterfall coming out of that rock? Tho, seeing that You've made somg pig droppings this might be an urinal just as well ;) And I like Your raft, somewhat unique, but works :) Does the skeleton have some play feature behind him? I mean, maybe that's just the way he's attached to the baseplate, but it looks a bit like if pulling him away from the rock would trigger some effect :)

But then again You have to remember that one of the reasons this contest was created was to bring more people into the Pirates Forum, as either viewers or participants, voters too. Or at least i understood it that way :) Allowing only those registered before the contest would play against those promotional goals. @iragm 's idea with allowing accounts that had some activity sounds wiser. Or You could always do it like with reviewing part of the contest, where it was obligatory to register first in order to participate and then participants that didn't realy participate were out of the contest... I guess this simple rule worked here, so it could work for voting just as well :)

To be honest, it didn't look like he was about to win at any point from the moment voting started, tho of course it could change, there's still time and he did receive some legit points, but i thought he would do much better when the contest started, since he did bomb us with his great entries. He was among my own favorites initialy too, tho, luckily or not, it became more and more interesting as the whole show proceeded.

nice job, and i like the fact that You've added a strap of honey to mark Yourself let's have a moment of silence for all those poor fellows with no votes for their entries ( yet ) done now if we could get someone to turn those stats into a musical piece

Wonder if that would help create statistics to check how many voters made similar choices :) Especially in the main category, cause in mini sets it's already quite clear that folks have a much more similar taste ;)

@Yoggington Bear You, i guess You need to change Your vote :P Did a quick check to see how many voters would have to edit their posts in the voting thread and i already thought that it won't be a problem, since no seemed to have actually voted for Alexu's entry... but naaah... :) Wonder what will You pick up this time...

hehe, very cool scene :) i wouldn't mind grabbing one of those, as a diplayable statue to keep somewhere beetween my books ... even tho i'm scared of sharks ;)