icm

I guess they'll have to stay at Bricksafe. Good thing I already downloaded your last version! I wonder what the next shoe to drop at Bricklink will be.

Well, I didn't believe for a minute that TLG wasn't going to change things at Bricklink and make it less useful as an AFOL marketplace. This morning they announced that downloads are being disabled on all Studio models that use any third party IP. So that means no more downloading digital Star Destroyers and Batmobiles from that site. It's easy to see why they're changing that, but it's still disappointing. There's still Rebrickable and Bricksafe, but they don't have as much content as the Studio gallery in the genres that interest me, and their interfaces are harder to use. What's the next shoe to drop, I wonder?

I'm not asking more questions to challenge you per se, but because these questions are quite relevant to understanding how much effort Lego puts into interacting with AFOLs. If Lego's internal market research pegged the AFOL market share at 40% of sales revenue, they - as you say - would behave very differently than if they pegged the AFOL share at 5% of sales revenue. But if they have an erroneously high or low estimation of the AFOL share, they could make some serious mistakes which they then might or might not correct after further study of adult fans' reactions to their products. But I wouldn't trust any old person who works for Lego to have an accurate, quantified, statistically solid understanding of what percentage of Lego sales are due to adult fans, any more than I would trust any old person who works for General Motors to have an accurate, quantified, statistically solid understanding of what percentage of car sales are due to any given demographic. That's why I asked where in the company your contact works, approximately speaking. I don't want your contact's job to be in danger due to any personally identifiable information getting out any more than you do, but I really would like a bit more information. Just for understanding's sake. .... And for goodness' sake, asking questions is what a forum like this is for! Speaking in a manner that is more directly on topic, nothing much comes to mind of concrete instances in which the adult fan community pointed out a flaw in manufacturing, design, or marketing so clearly and so persistently that Lego fixed that flaw, but maybe someone better-informed than me can think of something more. The new VIP program is said to include its various miscellaneous "rewards" because some people wanted to spend their VIP points on other things besides more sets, but that's just hearsay. The AFOL Designer Program at Bricklink was, in part, a way to experiment with the desires, voiced every so often on the forums, to make various MOCs and rejected Ideas models available in limited numbers without the fuss of a full production run, although there was a lot more to it than that. Lego runs, or used to run, a program in which local fan clubs could place large custom orders of bulk bricks a few times a year in order to make big displays for conventions and events. Certain UCS and D2C sets clearly respond to a groundswell of clamor in the AFOL community for that particular model: the 2017 Millennium Falcon, the 2018 Cloud City, the 2019 Star Destroyer, the 2019 Batmobile. (Fans had been asking for that one since at least 2014, when the Tumbler was released.) Then there's the trend of extremely large Technic flagships since 2016: the Porsche, Bugatti, Land Rover, Bucket Wheel Excavator, Rough Terrain Crane, and Liebherr. You wouldn't believe it now from the way people on the Technic forums respond to these sets and their flaws, but I remember when (not so long ago) the Technic forums were clamoring for very large, very detailed "UCS"-like sets. They got them! I know that Lego also reformulated their brown and dark red colors a year or so ago in order to try to make those parts less brittle and prone to snapping. That's a clear quality control issue that they would certainly have been working on without AFOL feedback, but it's probable that the many AFOL complaints over snapped parts were considered in that process. If I think of anything else I'll edit this post. EDIT: The reintroduction of the color teal in 2018 for the Downtown Diner, and its subsequent use for the colorful interior parts in a lot of miscellaneous sets, was at least partially in response to the longstanding desire in some parts of the AFOL community for the reintroduction of that color. I don't have time to look up an exact citation for that right now, but you should be able to get most of the story by looking for "Mark Stafford killed teal" in your favorite search engine. EDIT 2: Some parts of the AFOL community had been clamoring for a roller coaster for a few years. Last year's Creator Expert Roller Coaster is a pretty clear response to that market segment. But again, that's not a quality or manufacturing issue, so I don't know if it really answers @Lego David's question.

If no one asked you before, how could you tell them? You've said before that you know a guy who you're not allowed to talk about. I get that. I'm not asking you to splash his name all across the internet. But that 40% number would be a lot more credible if you would just give a tiny bit more context. Does this guy work in corporate market research for Lego, or does he work at a Lego brand retail store? Why would this person (man, woman, or non-binary) have any authoritative answer to the question of AFOL market share? Until you say something about that, I see no reason to give your 40% number any more authority than the 5, 10, 15, or 20% numbers I've variously seen bandied about the web. But it's a question that I think a lot of AFOLs have asked many times, and we'd like a reliable answer. So that's why I'm asking: not to criticize, but because I want to know.

You keep saying that number. Where does it come from? Please tell us where it comes from. I think several people have asked you this question before.

The Old Fishing Store is about as closely related to a Creator Expert Modular Building as the Pirate Bay would be to a hypothetical Pirates revival, so I don't think we can conclusively rule out a revival on that basis, even while we remember that there is no solid substance to the rumor.

My entry is the fourth one on page 1. The BUSH was just what I needed! But then, I was using it exactly for its design purpose as a spaceship hull ....

That's a very informative review, thanks for the link. I'm very impressed by the Ferrari. There's another review on the same site for the Jaguar set, which I was mainly interested in because I thought the larger car in that kit had a second row of seats. Turns out it's another two-seater, so I can scratch it off my list. But the Ferrari stays!

Exactly. That's why I didn't say it right out, because it's an exciting rumor but there's no substance to it yet.

Best theme: Hidden Side Best minifigure: CMF Johnny Thunder Best set: UCS Batmobile or The Upside Down Worst theme: Marvel Super Heroes Worst minifigure: Mercy (75975) Worst set: Wooden Minifigure Most anticipated for 2020: the theme that is rumored to be coming back "in a big way"

I can't tell you what sets to buy, but I like to build NCS ships in Bricklink Studio. I've learned a lot of techniques that way. You might try that.

I just downloaded the Studio file, thanks a million for posting it! I really like the way you've handled the retractable rear landing gear on this version. The bay doors look much more robust than they are on the Jerac model.

Thank you for this post and all the helpful pictures. Do you plan to make an LXF or IO file available for this version?

@ks6349, I think you've brought up this exact same worry a few months ago. It wasn't a big problem then, and it's not a big problem now. Walmart and Amazon may be big scary corporations with pretty lax return policies, but the chance that you'll get tampered Lego from them is extremely small. Bricklink may be a mess of many individual sellers with different policies and practices, but Bricklink sellers aren't out to get you. The chance that you'll get tampered Lego from them is extremely small. Don't worry about it.

Can you post pictures? Upload them to Flickr and put links in this thread.

Not just license plates, but also registration numbers and hull numbers on ships and aircraft. This goes all the way back to Classic Space in 1979, where the spaceships in kits 918, 924, 928 had bricks printed with "LL ###".

I think they're mostly retroactive, mostly apocryphal. Just because Jens Knudsen may have had those colors in mind when he designed the sets doesn't mean that they're hard-and-fast canon in the same way that Bionicle colors are firmly fixed: red for fire, white for ice, and so on. After all, the entire Classic Space lore is mostly apocryphal and hearsay and that's why we like it so much - it can be whatever you want it to be. Edit: Post 500! I dub me Sir icm, Knight of the Bricks Euro!

Let's hope not. That would be the end of what was one of the pillars of the early online AFOL community, back when the world was young and FBTB and Brickshelf were brand new and the place to go for online Lego: Star Wars builds. As for building an alternative secondary marketplace (ie making BrickOwl "the new Bricklink") - that's possible, but it would take a lot of time and effort, and there could be a lot of damage done to the hobby in the meantime.

Are! Shiver me timbers, ye salty sea dogs! Those blue coats in yon flagship will strike their colors to us yet, as Davy Jones is my witness!

The thing that really gets me about it is when they say they have no plans to change anything, while in the same breath announcing a change that bans an entire category of wares from the platform. It's that immediate juxtaposition that makes fears of wholesale changes for the worse credible, though not yet necessarily probable. How can I believe them when they say there won't be changes to the way Bricklink operates, when they announce a non-trivial change the moment they announce the purchase? How can I then believe anything else they say in the press release, when one part of it brazenly puts the lie to another part?

Guess I better stop procrastinating and start buying the parts for the digital MOCs in my backlog. I would have welcomed more partnerships between TLG and Bricklink along the lines of the AFOL Designer Program, but not this. This is just monopoly power intruding on an independent marketplace.

I was a kid when Adventurers came out in 1998, and I had several of the sets. By the time Pharoah's Quest came out, I was old enough to have Adventurers nostalgia. For me, as for many others on the forums at that time, one of my dream themes was a revival of Adventurers. When Pharoah's Quest came out, I was thoroughly disappointed that it focused so much on supernatural Egyptian monsters instead of people racing each other for the treasure, and I didn't like the color scheme of dark red, dark blue, and dark tan. To me, Pharoah's Quest wasn't a theme about exploring ancient ruins anymore, it was just another theme about fighting monsters. My memory may be skewed by my own disappointment, but I remember many AFOLs at the time expressing their own displeasure. Of course, AFOLs are a notoriously fickle bunch, so that may not mean a lot, but it certainly seems to me like the overall awareness of Pharoah's Quest among AFOLs today is relatively low. People generally include it in their lists of creative in-house themes to bring back instead of making licensed sets, but they don't talk about it much individually or build many MOCs after its pattern. But obviously that's just my perspective; clearly most people who've bothered to comment on this thread liked it. We'll never have the numbers to gauge its "true" sales success among kids at the time nor its "true" popularity among kids at the time, AFOLs at the time, or AFOLs today, so if you like it that's good enough for you and if I don't that's good enough for me.

I think of them as: Red: pilots Yellow: engineers Green: heavy equipment operators Blue: combat pilots, or command sometimes Black: spies White: scientists Gray: cadets Pink: medical staff Alternatively, in the limited context of 1978-9, the whites are Americans and the reds are Russians.

Wasn't there some rumor about next year's Marvel sets being "game changing"? Surely that must not refer to anything in the January wave.

Excellent, thanks for the pictures! The race car twin pack looks great, the vehicles in the gas station are very good even if the gas station itself leaves much to be desired, and all the vehicles in the tuning shop are amazing. The building itself is really good too. This is the level of building we expect from City! I'm actually quite impressed by how well they translated Speed Champions-type vehicles into City-appropriate builds in 60256.