Elysiumfountain

@icm Apparently only the finalists who make the $10,000 crowdfunding goal will be approved as sets, because people who "vote" for them are placing pre-orders for the sets. So some of the finalists might make it, or none at all! We'll just have to see. I want to know what the other twelve look like.

Well, the first four out of the 16 finalists have been announced on the landing page! Sneak peeks only, as the pricing and details don't get announced until February 1 when the crowdfunding begins. I can't wait to see all of them!

@TeriXeri Oh no, I was not implying that you were one of those people! It was definitely meant as a generic statement! (Most of the people I've met, which number very little, were not on EB)

I like both formats, for me it's always helpful to build in digital first and then build in physical, unless they don't have parts in that color. (Otherwise I'm stuck halfway through a build after four to five hours of building having to undo the whole thing just to fix one piece that could easily be fixed digitally before the physical build). But that's just me. I've just never understood the people who REFUSE to support a decent or exceptional Ideas project solely because it is built with physical bricks or digitally rendered. Nevermind how artfully put together and coherent and feasible the project is, good lord it's a render, the world is ending! Believe me, those people exist! Similarly, the people who believe that what's on the Ideas page is the final design, that that's how it's going to arrive in finished set form, no modifications or changes necessary. I realize people have standards, but TLG has a say in the final product too! (Speaking from the viewpoint that my builds will always have room for modification and improvement). Rant over :)

@Modeltrainman thank you! :)

I remember supporting it the first time it came out! Glad it got resubmitted, I'll have to pop over and support again :)

@icm THIS. So much this. I'm in the same boat as the in-between builds. I think the most I ever got was in the 3000s for one project, but I finally had to stop because Ideas was consuming so much of my life! Constantly taking time to support others and update and such, I think takes time. I mean it's meant to, if it were easy everyone's projects would be at 10,000! So I'm letting all my projects die a slow painful death. However, I do notice for those that seem to have less of a "fanbase" or easy connections it's harder. Like the top builders on Ideas I think have a certain number of people who will vote for whatever they put up no matter what, which will always contribute the initial push of around 1000 supporters or so. Either that or they have massive twitter followings ;) Is it just me or has the Ideas site become more confusing and cluttered? I love the contests and such, but if anything finding new projects and supporting seems to be a slower process than it used to be. The hardest thing is drawing people to the site, which because most people don't usually go there on a regular basis or are only one time supporters is hard. And there's that fine line of self-promotion and spam that I'm too polite to try to cross lol. Maybe making the Ideas site more visible for people?

The only modular building I purchased was the Town Hall, back in 2011-2012. Back then I was still in school so $200 USD was the biggest I'd ever paid for anything in the history of ever. Then I haven't bought any modulars since. I was really really REALLY tempted by Parisian Restaurant and Brick Bank. This year though I figured that if the new modular was better than those two I would buy it. The Garage is okay, I like the overall design, but it's not something I could afford to spend so much money on. Although it would be interesting to see if someone mods the ground floor gas pump into a cute little corner store with food and everything! tl;dr: I'll pass on this one this year, and watch a speed build video of it instead when it comes out ;)

In the regrettable absence of my physical bricks until the end of the year, I've had to occupy myself with rendered builds. I present to you my newest build, The Centennial Building! Unlike a lot of my previous builds, this one is based on an actual building. It's heavily influenced by the design of the Old Nassau County Courthouse in Fernandina Beach Florida. I lived there for a year long ago and found some of the architecture there to be fascinating! As one of my friends pointed out, you can tell it's a digital model because half of those sand green roof pieces don't exist in real life! An interior shot of the upstairs of the building. I reused my chandelier design from the Glacier Falls Lodge here. My favorite part about this build is that it hinges open, allowing for ease of access into the build itself. The total piece count for this build is 2,960. Originally, when I put it all together, it was around 3,590, so a lot of the exterior cladding and some of the smaller parts had to be sacrificed. This is because this build is now active and gathering support on LEGO Ideas! If you would like to pop over and lend your support to it I would be very grateful! The link is below: https://ideas.lego.com/projects/8e81a710-684f-4c0f-962c-62c52c7c2c00 So there you have it, everyone! The Centennial Building! Thanks for looking and brick on!

@Digger of Bricks I saw those too! I really hope they're official, because some of those food tiles looked pretty sweet! And the minifig printing as well

@anothergol I didn't notice that the first time I looked at the graph, but on second glance I did. I wonder what they'll do about them? I'm best when working with buildings and landscapes so the palette worked pretty well for my entries. I did include a couple minifigs, but most of them were statues.

And maybe sure some people got frustrated with the palette and didn't bother? I know there were some complaints about people finding it to be too limited.

I think most of my submissions turned out to be buildings or landscapes lol! (Not that great with animals or objects), finished the last yesterday. And now we wait! :)

True but even among the (up to potentially) 20 finalists how many of those are people are going to make it? Hard to say lol! It's always the 'up to' that is the fine print. They might only select one!

I think in some ways for the finalists it might be harder than Ideas to make it through the crowdfunding stage. Because unlike Ideas, people have to actually commit to buy the sets if they make it through (even though it says if the set doesn't make it the funder doesn't have to pay). I wonder if that's going to discourage some people who like the set but don't really want to pay lots of money

Ooh good luck! I still have to submit my design, there's a couple more photos I have to render. They take so long on my computer, it's at least 1-2 hours per photo!

Also the mini figure parts are quite limited too! Which made me sad. But I'll enter anyways! Another thing to watch out for if you do import something from LDD is the conflicts that you'll come up with regarding the different palettes. But it is kind of nice because it tells you which parts aren't allowed. (I had to manually replace 400+ parts so it was a pain)

It also doesn't even have to be that the creators don't know how to promote them. I remember one person telling me several months ago that the precise reason my projects wouldn't make it is because I was one of the people who didn't spam everywhere they could regardless of the consequences. That people with the decency to try to make their projects relevant had no chance. Still don't know how I feel about that. I think eventually I just gave up because I didn't have hours every day to devote to promotion! ;)

Hi everyone, I'm back! (It's been months since I've been here, everything's just too busy). I'm not sure what to think of the redesign, as I'm kind of just letting all my projects die a slow death. I do wish though that LEGO had included the option to resubmit. Like when your project expires, on your profile it could have a resubmit button that just allows you to change whatever you need and then resubmit the project.

Wow, haven't been back on this page in a while! I'm happy to report that the project on Ideas is now 3/10 of the way there with 3012 supporters!! But it only has 98 days left so it probably won't make it. But it's been a great run! https://ideas.lego.com/projects/66655f37-9622-4836-a2cb-797e916f4e2b

I just checked, apparently I'm at 3373 projects supported (gasp)

And then there are the small percentage, probably less than 0.03%, who support and follow everything! (I'm partly guilty of this). But these are interestingly the members that submit projects and are on the site almost every day. I think another limiting factor for some people is the fact that you have to have a LEGO account to support projects. Therefore views don't necessarily equal supporters. For every 10 who look at a project, you might have 1 who actually wants to take the time to sign up and support the project itself.

His engines are gaining steam fast! Personally I like the train projects that include at least a passenger coach, (or more) lol! :)

@Faefrost Yes exactly! That is LEGO's business model (I expect similar to almost every product-producing company in the world) Also bearing in mind that LEGO designers are paid professionals whereas many builders on Ideas are not. I simply meant that it would be an interesting process lol! :) And of course Ideas is not indicative of the regular business model through which LEGO gets consumer data (as you mentioned, niche market). An example being that Ideas is not a website that many people even know exists, hence the self promotion to draw views and members to the site itself. I actually found it amazing that there are 892891 member accounts on Ideas as of today! Of course one could get into semantics and argue over how many of those represent the AFOL population or non, licensing and twitter followings and whatnot, but someone else can talk about that ;)

I've always found it interesting that some of the sets that TLG puts out wouldn't even get 10,000 votes if they had been put through Ideas first (Maybe not even 1000). That would be interesting to watch, if one of the regular sets was put through Ideas first, just to see what would happen! Obviously that would never happen since TLG would never do that, but it would be funny!