Mylenium

Unlikely. The market will soon be flooded with these items. What is now a "rare" color will become commonplace. And it's not that you couldn't already buy tons of tiles and studs in the more standard colors. Mylenium

Nothing to be confused about. People still have money and are staying home. Things will look totally different next year when moratoriums on evictions, bankruptcy and other things run out and a ton of people get unemployed. Also one mustn't forget that LEGO have fired out a ton of super-expensive sets across the board this year (and still do), most of which are even directly distributed by LEGO, so they can cash in fully on them. That's sure going to show up on your tabulation. So for all intents and purposes we may be seeing a lot of limited one-off effects. The real acid test will be next year. Mylenium Not really. I concur with @MAB here. It was actually on the market for rather long already. I'mm sure they could eek out a few more sales if they re-released it, but not as many as people generally seem to think. It was also a rather costly set at 329 Euro, so re-releasing it would only add to the pile of frustration for people who just don't have the money and/ or are also already backlogged on other expensive sets. Mylenium I'm all for that. Mylenium Not really, given how poor a good chunk of the currently available sets are. Mylenium

You could say that about pretty much any celebrity on some level, but why should that stop anyone from representing them as "art"? The world's not going to come to an end from a hacky LEGO mosaic based on a hacky piece of pop-art. Mylenium They are worth a fraction of a cent fresh out of the factory, which is kinda the point. Even your infrastructure elements are likely much, much cheaper, even if you account for the cost of the new molds. LEGO are sure milking this to max out their revenue. On the other hand of course your math wouldn't add up for people who don't have a huge pile of pieces to sit on. That's the crux of it. Still, it seems to me that around 80-ish Euro would be well enough for one such set. Mylenium

Or they never existed to begin with? I can only reiterate what I said a bunch of times elsewhere: I'm pretty much doing LEGO for 4.5 years at this point with no prior exposure and it seems to me people are always somehow caught up in some weird, idealized perception of the before-times rather than what it actually was. LEGO have had a ton of missteps in their entire existence no matter what decade you look at. The "old Lego" was just as terrible as its contemporary counterpart on many levels. The rest is pretty much beside the point. Again you mustn't hang on to the illusion that LEGO is anything but a big corporation and those run on money, not ideals and moralities. They may brag on about their own ethical standards, but LEGO is far removed from the benevolent "pop's workshop" it likes to present itself. At the end of the day it's all about cold hard cash. Mylenium

Not a single one. They're all pretty crappy in terms of code stability. You should expect regular crashes. Mylenium

Nope, no real mechanics. Just illusions. :-) I considered it, but that would have required to build it larger to accommodate the gear and at the time I really was too busy to invest much effort due to helping my brother. It's almost miraculous I even managed to make third place with such a small scene, but I guess originality counts on some level. :-) Mylenium

Due to the forum SSL certificate issues over the weekend I wasn#t able to post this, but here we go. This is a competition entry I did for a May the 4th... contest on Zusammengebaut.com. They only now got around to announcing the winners and I made third place with this. Here's some more info on my blog: https://myleniumsbrickcorner.wordpress.com/2020/08/09/sharp-swords-and-colorful-plants/ Here are the images: Mylenium

Title says it all. Someone please refresh the certificate. I'm getting SSL warnings all over the place. Mylenium

What has this to do with anything? I'm merely commenting on the technical and procedural shortcomings of the contest. Whether I actually like any of the winners is a whole different matter on which I simply choose to not comment on and that is that. Mylenium

I fail to see your point. If there's any irony in your original post and I missed it, then so be it, but ultimately it doesn't matter what the actual reason is. And it still wouldn't matter if LEGO factualkyl were unable to outfit their testing crowd with pre-production models of new components. It has been and remains one big shit show thus far. Mylenium

QFA. And to add one more: It might help if the powers that be actually promoted the contest across all sub-forums via respective mod posts instead of relying on people clicking on a banner. 36 votes is pretty laughable, all things considered... Mylenium

If you're using JPEG, the pin holes and other smaller elements will get in the way. They produce lots of "noise" and reduce the efficiency of the compression because more smaller blocks are being generated. I would definitely try PNG in such a case. Just doing a quick & dirty conversion of your image in PS reduced the file size to 100k and that doesn't even account for the unnecessary noise you introduced via the JPEG compression. Rendering directly to PNG and optimizing this could easily yield half of that size with the added benefit that you could even ramp up the DPI/ dimensions a bit without adverse effects. Getting this to be under 50 MB is absolutely feasible. Mylenium

Aside from the built-in PDF exports in both LPub and Stud.io being rather shitty, the key point is how the PDF's "objects" are generated. More "editable" objects, more data. It is typically much more efficient to flatten your PDF, either by rasterizing your pages in tools like Acrobat or rendering image-based pages right away and assembling them in a PDF creation tool. Unfortunately even that isn't as simple as it sounds, as the effective file size is determined by the internal encoding of the PDF and what options you use for image embedding. If you have well-optimized PNGs for instance, you would need to set the PDF options in such a way that your images don't get converted to JPEG or even TIFF data inside the PDF. In contrast to @supertruper1988 I'd stay away from transparencies right away in such a case, as having the layout program generate a fill color for the background automatically means that it's re-flattened and the image data may change. As to your specific predicament - it's impossible to judge without understanding your model structure and in turn how the PDF data has been generated. Providing sample PDF pages or at least some screenshots might help to clarify and put this in perspective. Mylenium

You know, there are consumer laws and that, even if on a general level it will always remain an open question what actually counts as a "working" product. Point in case: Inside our own AFOL bubble we can of course fix such things easily because we know where to look, how to do it and have the spare parts, but imagine some uninitiated person building this, shredding it on the first day and wanting a refund from his generic store where he bought it.... And given how LEGO keep beating about the bush about their high standards, things just don't mesh here. So no, consumers can't be Beta testers, especially on a material product with limited options to fix things after the fact. LEGO need to get their act together and avoid such debacles at all cost regardless whether they are construction issues or just fluctuating shades of colors... Mylenium

Funny enough I have a series of MOCs in my head that would probably make for a good series along those lines... Now I only need to find a way to sell those ideas to LEGO. *lol* Agree, though. the demise of Elves is cramp in the gluteal muscles. Many interesting parts in those pastel-y colors. Mylenium

Utterly irrelevant IMO. It simply comes down to people's expectations and things having moved on considerably. What worked only 10 years ago may no longer work today other than some people getting nostalgic over the good old days. Mylenium

You keep reading about "focus group testing" and such nonsense, which is purely a marketing level thing, but I doubt there is any actual technical testing happening on a broader basis. Too many things went wrong in the last two years to let me believe any such thing even exists. Mylenium That just sounds like a made up excuse. From what I can tell, the construction is fundamentally flawed, no matter what. And seriously, you wouldn't climb into a car that had such fundamental issues and uses untested parts. It was simply a dumb move to even release the set in this state, at least for those actually using the motorized functions, which of course in itself is a bit ironical: If LEGO wasn't so bent on pushing PoweredUp onto people in every set to inflate the prices, they could have created a more conservative, simpler mechanism and nobody would have even noticed... Mylenium

...and then the High Republic comes along. See? I find such statements at best premature and you just need to watch the various "Making of..."s to see how many ideas are still out there that never made it to screen. That's actually my point - as Karl Lagerfeld once said "The (design) trashcan is my best client.". Great design means scrapping a lot of ideas before arriving at one that actually makes it out there. Unfortunately people seem to have the mistaken impression that design is a self-fulfilling promise and that's just not the case. Many things you may take granted as great design, be that in architecture, car design or even everyday utilities were birthed on heaps of wasted sketch paper... Don't get me wrong: I agree that Disney/ Lucas are control freaks and not least of all the forced reset with the latest trilogy about what's canon and what not has nixed many great ideas and concepts, but at the same time I don't think the situation is as bad as you seem to think. Again, a lot of stuff simply doesn't make it out of the labs and specific to LEGO it's only natural that they cannot do unapproved/ unreleased designs that conflict with the powers to be... Perhaps, perhaps not. Personally I don't care for these schlock-y B-movie designs, neither as a sci-fi and science nerd, nor as a graphics designer from an aesthetics point of view. The rose-tinted nostalgia is lost on me, anyway, being that I do LEGO only for four years now. And, grand statement here, those designs look backwards as in the system having dictated how they look, not the design having been applied to the system. Either way, the original point also sticks: You have to "design" a ton of drafts before one makes it and I can't see LEGO being able to do that on a level that I would find competitive. LEGO just doesn't have 20 people that just scribble spaceship designs all day while the other designers take care to convert them into models... Mylenium

...which at this point only 3% of the world's population get to see. Unless they expand their viewer base by allowing their series on other services and traditional TV stations, this will be insignificant, at least outside the US. Disney+ launched in February here in Germany but I don't know anyone who has subscribed beyond the first three months you get free on some cable and Internet providers, so the user base is probably laughably low. Based on that LEGO could fire out all sorts of sets for those exclusive Star Wars series, but at the end of the day it would be another Freemaker disaster waiting to happen because quite literally nobody ever got to see the materials that put the models into context. Mylenium

Definitely not LEGO, but I think some Asian knock-off brands may have alternate product lines. There are "micro" brick formats, so it stands to reason a micro Technic line could exist somewhere. Mylenium

"Done well" would mean they would likely have to invest so much design effort like Star Wars itself, which is the critical point and the reason I don't think it's going to happen. People are spoiled by every movie, TV series and video game being elaborately designed to a T and unless you are willing to invest those same hundreds of millions, you'd end up with something that would possibly not sell that well other than for nostalgia's sake. Disney and Star Wars licensing may figure in somewhere, though I think they wouldn't even care. It's just that there are serious creative/ technical hurdles that would make establishing yet another sci-fi space theme extremely difficult. Mylenium

Same here. I have bought multiple sets and never used the app. I also like the graphical fidelity of the comics and what they hint at was planned like the much touted Newbury Zoo with the ghostly animals (https://myleniumsbrickcorner.wordpress.com/2020/07/14/july-jack/). A pity to see it all go to waste... Mylenium

Yeah, sure. Structurally they are all pretty much the same and of course kids are a bit OCD about their favorite stuff, which is something you still can exploit and marketers do so successfully... Mylenium

Do they have to, though? I doubt the viewer ratings for the Ninjago TV series are actually that high. At least here in Germany it runs at obscure times buried on third-rate private TV channels. That's not going to have much of an impact on kids' desire for Ninjago and wouldn't do much if the products wouldn't stand for themselves... And to be honest, as someone who has worked in that field: Those cheaply produced filler series these days likely barely make an impression. It's literally run-off-the-mill stuff with stories, characters and settings being utterly interchangeable. Five minutes after watching you may already have forgotten what it was about. Mylenium

I don't think it's a good idea to blame this all on Ninjago. I'm not in the mood, but I could recount millions of very abstract and rational reasons why one or the other series may have failed. It's really not that difficult to analyze this down to the last micron, but the simple fact remains that even if you knew what went wrong and fixed it in a second round, that still doesn't imply that any of these series could be successful in whatever sense. And that is also a truth here: Something radical like Ninjago isn't going to happen again simply because there is no external pressure to change anything. LEGO's business is stable enough as it is and the company has fallen in that typical pattern of playing for keeps like any other such company. It's all about trusting endless market research more than gutsy intuitive decisions and risking as little as possible just to keep revenues stable... Mylenium