jdubbs

@Mandalorianknight I dunno, but it's almost like people here don't read the preceding posts before they reply. Especially the posts from the mods that say, as explicitly as humanly possible, "drop it", "move on", "stop trying to get the last word".

1. The Razor Crest had to be temporarily renamed in certain markets due to a trademark issue in the EU, which was subsequently resolved. 2. Most of those sets have awkward or redundant names for SEO purposes... they load up the product names with common search terms to make them rank higher or get grouped together in search results. I know most of you, in your infinite wisdom and years of experience running multi-billion dollar companies, think LEGO (or Disney, take your pick) is run by complete idiots. But sometimes, ocassionally, there is a rhyme and reason to what they do.

If you don't actually own the set (and have a defective, missing, or broken part), that's a great way to get yourself banned from the LEGO Store forever.

You bought close to $1000 worth of parts for $210, all in one place? I'd say you either got the deal of the century... or you're going to find those aren't real LEGO parts you bought.

Do you mean, overstate?

No offense but, how many times are people going to ask this exact same question? The information comes out when it comes out. It could be the day LEGO announces it, or it could leak tomorrow. No one here can predict when that will be -- what happened last year, or the year before that, isn't a reliable indicator of what will happen this year, especially if there are indeed three D2Cs rather than the usual two.

Umm... the sets that were "speculated" to be cancelled were in fact cancelled. And, we got far fewer System sets than in previous years, which was the impetus for the "doom and gloom". Yes, there were one or two retail exclusives whose identities weren't publicly known in advance, but this is true most years... The one saving grace was the Cantina... but even with it, I doubt there are many who would call 2020 a banner year.

Too much sodium is bad for your heart.

There is a small in-store giveaway and double VIP points on Star Wars sets. Previous years, a handful of older sets also went on sale but I haven't seen anything to indicate that this year.

For Star Wars sets, yes.

Sounds like the remaining 5% was right.

You're painting with a rather broad brush there. And it's not so much a matter of not knowing where to look, as knowing the right people, and treating those people with respect. "Respect" includes not sharing things publicly when asked/told not to. I do not personally agree with MandR's post above, but I will say there's also less and less upside to sharing things here. There is inevitably conflicting information out there, given all the fake lists floating around, so posting "This set is X" just opens you up to a ton of second-guessing ("but so-and-so on Insta said something different 3 months ago and he has an Insta account so clearly I believe him over you..."), and if your info turns out to be even slightly wrong, a half-dozen people will fall over themselves to tell you you're an idiot. Thanks, but... no.

Why, exactly? There are plenty of sets that LEGO could scale to fit the $30 price point.

Okay, fair enough. A quick search shows it was marked "retiring soon"in August, then sold out, then some stock was made available again for VIPs shortly after that. I picked it up that August, and never saw it again in my local stores or online after that...

In the US, it was marked down and shortly thereafter sold out on LEGO's website and stores the summer after it was released... I think it only lasted ~15 months, shorter than even the B-Wing. It reappeared in one or two European countries briefly after that point, so it's possible Bricklink is using that as the official "end date". I don't think Brickset's date is accurate in this case.

Snowspeeder.

Product page for the Probe Droid, on LEGO's website. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the photos.

Observant viewers may spot a little something extra in LEGO's video for the Probe Droid... around the 27 second mark?

Hasbro canceled two Cara Dune figures but left one, which was presumably too far into production (i.e., already manufactured) to stop. LEGO's August/September sets would not go into production until April or May... so still plenty of time to make adjustments, if they so desire.

The problem here is that, while LEGO does a good job releasing a broad array of characters from new/current media, their support for older media (OT, PT, etc.) is pretty lackluster when it comes to minifigs. Looking back over the past 4-5 years of sets, we only get a few truly new characters per year. (This year, Dadonna is the only one so far; last year, the only new characters came in the cantina, a $350 D2C; the year before that, it was Bail Antilles and Zuckuss). Other than that, it's pretty much existing OT/PT characters recycled, with "upgraded" printing or the occasional variation like scorch marks on Ani/Obi. While, yes, there would be lots of mainstream heroes in a CMF, there is also room for more obscure secondary characters and unproduced outfits that would otherwise never see the light of day (unless they somehow show up in Mandalorian or Rogue Squadron or whatever movie/show comes next). And, make no mistake about it... there are a lot of these left to do.

CMF figures are typically much more deluxe than regular minifigures. Dual-molded legs, wrap-around leg printing, arm printing, and/or dual-molded arms are the norm... whereas mainline Star Wars minifigs typically only get front leg printing, and maybe only ⅔ of them at that. Not to mention that CMF figs often come with cloth pieces, new molds and unique (and plentiful) accessories. I have no doubt that LEGO could offer new designs so compelling that many of us would buy even common figures like Farm Boy Luke in multiples. And as for which characters to include, they could follow the Disney model (choose pairs of characters from different movies, representing a cross-section of the SW timeline (Han and Chewie, Anakin and Padme, Snoke and Kylo, etc.), or they could follow the Harry Potter model (limit each series to a particular timeframe, or perhaps in this case movie... an all-ANH series, followed by an all-ESB series... or an all-OT series, followed by an all-PT series, etc.)

Yes we've all got anecdotal evidence to support whatever narrative we're peddling. But rows and rows of peg-warmers are only a testament to Hasbro's horrid distribution and lopsided case assortments — and anyone who's been collecting action figures for more than five minutes can tell you they've hardly been unique to the sequel-era toys. (And again, Hasbro ≠ LEGO.) For every "The Star Wars merchandising sky is falling and it's all Disney's fault" story I see on JTA, etc., there is yet another quarterly report saying Hasbro's sales are through the roof, Star Wars is among LEGO's top-selling lines, etc. At the end of the day, I put more stock in what the companies making the toys say, than in the "well-documented" reporting of fan sites pushing a particular agenda. Right, LEGO is producing sets to support the media that is current/active right now, just as they were producing ST sets when those movies were current, and PT sets when those movies were current, and Clone Wars sets when that series was current. Saying "LEGO stopped selling ST sets because ST toys didn't sell" is no different (and no more true) than saying "LEGO stopped selling CW toys because CW toys didn't sell." Fact is, the sequel trilogy ended, and other things began, and so LEGO moved on. When The Mandalorian ends, or Bad Batch, or whatever, LEGO will move on again. That doesn't mean those products failed, or that they won't ever grace toy shelves again. We had 5+ years of near non-stop ST sets; it's only natural that LEGO would now hit pause for a while and give some love to other media.

Diamond Select makes statues, busts, and other pricey display pieces, all targeted squarely at adult collectors. While there is no doubt some small overlap with LEGO's target market (primarily, kids... secondarily, parents of kids... tertiarily, AFOLs), the two companies are by no means selling to the same customer as a whole. What sells for Diamond (or Hasbro, or Funko, or...) is not necessarily the same as what sells for LEGO.

I think if LEGO made a mistake here, it was in not being clearer up-front about what the they meant by the three choices being put to a vote. It would not have hurt to specify a general price range and set size for each option... e.g., "the Nebulon B, roughly in scale with this Star Destroyer, at around $500", "the TIE Bomber, roughly in scale with the UCS TIE Fighter, at $350", and "the Republic Gunship, roughly in scale with the UCS X-Wing, at $350". Or whatever. There was clearly a lot of speculation and confusion about what they meant by the Gunship in particular during the vote, which LEGO easily could have clarified at the time.

I think doing this kind of math is a losing battle. After all, mInifigs do not scale to human proportions at all (unless we're talking cavemen, perhaps) and LEGO frequently cheats the proportions of sets in one dimension but not others, as I think was the case with the gunship. When I look at the last LEGO gunship, it seems like the overall height and wingspan are closer to the source material than the length, for instance... so you might only need to elongate LEGO's version to get it closer to scale-accuracy... this wouldn't require 1.5x the total number of parts in the set, or anything close to it. (The same could be said of the First Order Troop Transport, which lots of people modded to be longer, keeping the rest of the build consistent with LEGO's.)