anothergol

Something ironic in this, Lego's most useful parts generally started as minifig accessories, including weapons. These guns, MOCers understand how annoying their SIGHT is, but we have to do with that, because it's a gun. Well, some in my collection have the sight cut off. And where did I get them? Bricklink of course! Cut off by kids who would prefer this part NOT being a FRIGGING GUN.

They're not dumb, if 99% of their income comes from kids, if they invested pocket money it's not to directly make pocket money, but improve their image, because their brand is all they have. If that ensures them that Bricklink isn't gonna be filled with third-party parts, there, that may already be worth what they invested. If there's a company that knows how serious of a threat clone brands are, it's the one that started itself as a clone brand. Bricklink only shows incomplete stats, so maybe this will be totally wrong, but let's do a quick computation: https://www.bricklink.com/help.asp?helpID=1304 From the 2013 chart, let's round it at 1 million orders per year. Or let's be very generous, make that 2 million orders per year (BL says to have 1 million accounts, god knows how many are still very active, so 2 millions orders/year seems fair). Let's also be generous on the average order value, and make it $40. What's 3% of 80 millions? 2.4 millions. With that you have to pay salaries, and remember, that's a year of programmers on Studio & other apps TOO. ..but let's be generous here too and let's say it's 2.4millions profit. How much is Lego making again? Let's check. 1.2... BILLION! Pocket money I say. We're only a handful of adults playing with Lego, we're not the market. Lego's profits seem to fluctuate by +- 200 millions each year, the acquisition of BL isn't gonna reflect in that, even if they raised the fees to 100%. I mean just look at this chart, BL's pocket money may just affect the decimal part, they're not caring at this level. Instead they work on the protection of what they have & their image, because that's globally what makes a difference.

I don't understand why some are worried about fees. Lego isn't there for pocket money, what is 3% of what's sold on BL per month? And EVEN if you doubled the fees, consider that 10 to 30% of your order is shipping, that Paypal is probably taking as much as BL, and that the price of a part can be up to 10x different from one shop/country/month to another. Plus Lego is more known to waste money with AFOL's, sending so many letters across countries with just 1 little part inside. It's for the reason that it's pocket money that I'm not worried about prices changing, but it's also the reason I'm worried that they could just abandon it if they feel it's too small or didn't bring anything. There are lots & lots of examples of companies bought & projects abandonned. They could even be after the talents & allocate them to other projects (which might be what happened with the LDD). Hey, if they bought it for their image and they realize they're already getting hate before even doing anything.. Yeah, let's shed a tear for Kiddicraft first :)

But you already get data analysis made public, with BL providing (very) detailed data on all purchases, min/average/max buy prices, parts in people's wish lists.. Personally, I WANT Lego to process that data, I want them to understand which parts are wanted in which colors, & start producing them, whether it's for their own shop or distributed to sellers around the globe. And I don't think they're there for the fees, for them it must be pocket money. They're more there for control. As for MOCers, I don't think has ever been any relevant for MOCs. Their system of buying MOCs from sellers is a bit pointless. For MOCs there's Rebrickable (where there is no censorship but MOCers have already been forced to change their titles to reduce copyright issues). We should gather to tell them about that. For me what's missing is mainly moving & centering the camera, it's the thing you do the most & it's painful in Studio, way too fast & not through right-clicking. LDD got it perfect.

Oh yeah I forgot about 3D printing. With resin printers being so cheap, & chinese manufacturers so ready to produce custom parts, I could have imagine many Brickarms clones as tiny new businesses. Now obviously that's not gonna happen, not on BL. Is Lego also against chroming? (why?) (something funky is happening when I'm posting here. It repeats my last message & loses the one I just typed?)

Well when you buy & shut, it's more about losing less than making. But here the competition isn't BL, it's all of the other brands. I could totally have imagined BL becoming a generic brick market, in that way it makes sense for Lego to buy it just to limit it to Lego, which is already their very first move. The announcement also tells about "an opportunity", implying that it's more BL that offered the deal, & thus perhaps it was simply good & cheap enough for Lego. But let's face it, AFOL money is pockey money for Lego, I don't think it's directly for the money that they care. Lego values their image, and that requires control on everything that touches it, and they seem to like control, which they see they're losing since today "Lego" means "all brick brands".

Something I can imagine is ALL of the sets that got their 10k votes and weren't picked for mass production, to go the way of the AFOL designer program. That is: smaller production, sold exclusively on BL, and with no editing of the original design (thus smaller costs involved).

No, that can't change pricing in local shops, because it's only dictated by offer & demand. If it can affect anything, it's Lego's own pricing. If BL stopped working like a stock market, with parts costing the same in every shop, it would be its end, that would make no sense.

This is huge, the biggest news from Lego to me. And it's good & bad. Where to start.. -it means we're FINALLY gonna see Bricks&Pieces as a proper BL shop, instead of that bro.. ah wait, Bricks&Pieces isn't broken anymore. But anyway, BL is still a way way superior way of buying parts. -it means there might be hope for a "part version" of the MOC design thing. And Lego now owns a pretty good list of colors "wanted" by MOCers, and can now decide to start batches & feed, if not its own shop, sellers around the world. -what does it mean for prices? It's already one thing that prices can vary from 1 to 10 according to the shop, but prices on BL are totally different than on B&P. Lego's prices are generally based on rarity but also size/weight/amount of plastic, whereas the amount of plastic doesn't matter for BL and many large parts are bargained because no one wants them. BL's prices are a prime example of offer & demand, Lego's (part) prices are not. -Studio. It means the LDD got its last nail in its coffin :( As much as I like Studio, it's still not ready for me. But maybe it means the workflow can be changed to be as quick as in the LDD, it only needs a few tweaks. -the future. It's rather common to see stuff bought by very large companies just dying in a few years. And Lego has proven (LDD) that it's not reliable. Fortunately BL is a very mature system & I can't imagine it going bad. Studio however isn't finished and it could go the way of the LDD. There's also the possibility that Lego bought it not for its value, but to prevent it from allowing third-party parts. From the interview you can already read that non-Lego parts (the guns & stuff) are already gonna disappear from BL. I could have imagined BL partnering with chinese companies, obviously not anymore. I'm already seeing a change btw, the sets from the AFOL designer program, which could still be ordered, have now disappeared (except from resellers), which is funny because they're all gonna raise in price because the sets are now "official" Lego ones. Not true - large companies will also buy smaller ones (& not do anything with them) to stop the competition. As I wrote above, there's a slight possibility that part of the motivation was to prevent "clone" parts on BL (even though BL's owners seemed to be against that - but not totally since Brickarms & others were allowed).

Common city minifigs? 1.5eur to 3eur max, new. If they're common you'll easily find them new on BL.

You could ask for pictures before bying. "Used" = crap on Bricklink, because it has no grading system. In the best case, some sellers comment on the state. So that's it, you may get lucky, but consider that you *will* get some crap, but that's how Bricklink works, unless you buy new. And even there, several sellers report parts in a good state as "new". I've never heard of returning stuff to the seller, however if you can prove that the quality was really too bad, the seller will give a refund or offer a coupon. They're all cooperative.

Thanks, looking forward to seeing your version! True that the "exhaust" section of the back is a slightly raised triangle, I don't think it should be 1 full plate thick, though. However I hesitated not using sloped tiles at the end of that triangle, so that it looks raised at the tips. And that was very doable, as we also have triangle flat tiles. I ended up with rounded tiles because flat ones would have meant seeing another support plate underneath, so it would have looked inferior I believe. But yeah, I believe flat plates around the blue thruster thing would have given the illusion of a raised triangle section in the back. Originally the prongs were to be held using 2 pair of clips, then I made it 3 pair of clips, 3 technic axles, then another safety attach AND I also had to tie them together through the front rectangle cover thing. It's always technic parts that are the problem here, they're designed to bend to absorb shocks (that beats breaking, I guess), but of course they suck for static models.

It's weird that they didn't add the extra landing gears where there were existing holes, that would have made sense. Instead they shifted the holes to the sides and added large landing gear boxes. There were also mistakes in the cockpit, the inside not matching the outside.

You mean for the docking rings? There's actually a full radar behind the one with holes, I just thought it looked cool with the holes. But in all cases the ring should be bigger & totally different, but as always it's a tradeoff between accuracy in metrics, accuracy in shaping & overall look. At first I thought you were talking about the radar, because there was a version of the 6x6 dish with open studs (weirdly not the latest version) and none of the ones I had had open studs so I had to revise the model. But those robot feet worked pretty well too.

Yes & no, the front-bottom slices aren't all properly attached upwards, and it's fragile because of all of the slope tiles at the tip of slices. And I wouldn't mind if it was easy to service, but that's the main problem, it's not, and anything that detaches is a pain to repair.

Finally done with it! And it wasn't fun to assemble, I'm glad it's all over. Not touching this thing anymore.

Actually, the wedges aren't there to cover anything, so it could be fully tiled up, but then we have straight lines that only look weird. I also had tried to fully tile it up like Joerg's MOC (https://www.flickr.com/photos/152499780@N02/37671037711), but with corner tiles to avoid the stairs effect, but it didn't look as good either.

What do you mean by rays? Yes, good old LDD, Studio only for rendering. I'm nearly done with it, and yeah it was a pure nightmare. The worst being that I hadn't designed it for servicing, so things were ok to assemble as long as there was room to access them, but the last few things were a nightmare. I'm more than happy with the outside, but the inside was only troubles. Now hoping I'm not gonna break it before I take proper pictures.

Oh this has been a big shit sandwich! I'm only happy with the unconventional spine that worked solidly, but the rest.. First the prongs that were drooping, had to add more attach points. Then the cockpit/head that droops & had to be secured more as well. The pie slices are attached together with their neighbor, AND with their mirror (the gribling is done on the part that attaches both together). And it's all self-aligning so it works well enough, only at the very end it occured to me that I had room to make it more stable with a 3mm tube, so I added that. Plus the underside that I originally was cursing the original falcon to have, that actually helps supporting some of them. The front-top ones are easy, they're like in every MF, they just lay down naturally on the prongs. The front-underside ones.. I don't know yet! But I'll find something. Only 2 slices of the front ones are attached to their mirror. For size comparison:

Exactly

I noticed my last order had +10% in pretty much all lots, that's cool. Is that a new thing?

Slowly taking shape. I made my best to avoid drooping, and the prong does droop a little, but I don't really have many options. I can't attach it anywhere near its center of gravity, so the lever effect is pretty high.

Frankly, clones of the xingbao family are pretty good. I even find studs looking better without the logo (they have nasty mold marks too, however). They're just not very good for technic parts and.. yeah minifigs, and stickers (even though I've found their printed parts *better* than Lego's), and transparent parts (but Lego has just changed to another material that feels as weird as the clones). I've also recently ordered clones of parts that Lego has made but cost the price of a house on Bricklink. Like, 2x2 turntable plates in LBG. I have no doubt they will be good, I just hope the color will match (or they're useless to me). Lots of brands and many are apparently bad.

Totally

Do you mean removing a couple of tiles like this? I'm not too convinced, also because there are some I can't remove. I can't remove the wedges because they connect to the big tube things, and I can't remove the first tiles because they cover DBG plates underneath (to simulate those trapezoidal holes). (I can round the tips, but.. not convinced either) I've reworked the center disk btw. It used to be larger in one direction by one plate, I've reworked it to use the 2x2 triangle tiles (that we don't have in the LDD) instead. The disk gap will also be filled by a 3mm tube, which isn't in the renders because tubes in Studio are simply unusable.