MAB

I doubt it will do anything. White marks can be calcium or magnesium carbonates that were dissolved in the water, but they can also be soap scum. Whatever they are, think about the particle size. They are tiny, probably no bigger than the minute plastic particles that are caused when you rub one plastic surface against another when posing the arms and legs. Now if you were getting large grains of hard material the size of sand between the pieces then rubbing them, I'd be concerned. But for soft and very fine materials such as chalk dust it won't scratch and wear the parts.

Yes, although I think "then" it was marketed at kids although the market was mainly adults but at a time when AFOLs where still an uncommon thing, whereas "now" it is marketed at adults and adults are used to buying LEGO for themselves. Yes, although this is why I think they could work if done as LEGO exclusives. That way, they are not taking up other retailer shelf space when there are no other LOTR products available. I don't think the product slot is really an issue as they have huge numbers of products anyway, but the issue would be shelf space and sell through rate especially for other retailers. LEGO can afford to have LOTR small tie-in sets on shelves as they would sell to AFOLs wanting them to go with the current big set but they would be an awful product for a supermarket if they didn't have any other LOTR product and wanted a quick turnaround. Whereas supermarkets can take even a single small Batman, Star Wars or Harry Potter set and it will sell as it is aimed at kids and parents pick it up while grocery shopping. I'm happy with my Koruit Gondor Army - althoguh strictly it is the LEGO torsos, legs and heads wearing the Koruit helmets and armour that I'm happy with. I didn't buy them because I'm cheap or happy enough with army building clone brands but because LEGO didn't make them at the time I bought them. It is the same with my Witch King minifigure. I'm happy enough with the LEGO torso, legs and head under the clone helmet and armour because LEGO still hasn't made the helmet. I collect LEGO but refuse to be stuck with only what they give us. If they are parting out the sets and selling the other minifigures and the set parts, they are probably not spending too much on the soldiers although of course it is hard work selling especially the parts. Here, just the Aragorn figure is selling for 10% of the set value, with Pippin, Denethor, Gandalf and Faramir another 20% between them. I have seen some people selling the build itself without minfiigures for about 60%-70% of the set price.

Harry Potter is still a very popular franchise for adults and just as importantly, for new kids despite the lack of new content. I imagine that is why we keep getting both large and small HP sets, there is a strong market for both. Whereas LOTR might struggle if there were multiple small sets and not a large enough audience for the smaller sets. Although it seems like there are many characters, they are soon done and so minifigure repetition in small sets will be frequent. That works fine for HP where new kids get into it every year as those Harry, Ron and Hermione sets have a new audience to buy them. I think the only way that LEGO would successfully market smaller LOTR sets is as battle packs tied to the large sets, and make them LEGO exclusives. So a Gondor vs Orcs battle pack for the current Minas Tirith, which would not sell well on supermarket or toy sore shelves but would sell to the niche of people that have bought the large set. First time around, there was the feeling of how many Frodos and Gandalfs do we really need and that is the problem if the audience is relatively small and doesn't really get replenished every year like it does for sets containing Harry Potter or Batman.

I know it goes back a long time, but they tried that with the Uruk-Hai Army set. There was quite a bit of negativity towards that set along the lines of "It is just a bit of wall". Luckily poor sales meant it was quite heavily discounted. I bought quite a few of them at £12 a set, and someone I knew wanted the bricks for Castle builds and sold of the figures and horses for £1 piece for the cheap bricks. Those were great days! Maybe now there is more interest in LOTR LEGO, battle packs would sell better. But they'd probably need to be LEGO exclusives (and not sold in supermarkets, etc like the original theme was) as they'd probably only relly be of interest to AFOLs unless there are other smaller sets with the main characters in as well.

I used to write on my bricks with felt tips as a kid. I had a bucket full of bricks but very few with store or building names on. I recall writing "police", "fire", "train" and "station" on the sides of many 2x4 bricks. There was no need for stickers or official prints!

A while back they had lots of scammers signing up, leaving themselves feedback with one of their other accounts, then converting to sellers and listing loads of high value in-demand stock that didn't exist. Getting someone to supply a picture of their stock at least puts a (small) barrier to the creation of scammer accounts.

I think they still do. My own kids certainly do, as when they were growing up I tended to buy them lots of parts rather than sets. The larger sets they had bought for them have pretty much stayed as sets, but the smaller ones have been built, taken apart and all mixed up. The mixed up parts are the pieces that really get a lot of use for freebuilding. From collections I buy, I think many kids do something similar with their sets. I find if buying from an adult, they tend to sell complete sets and are often really easy to identify which sets are there even if they are al bundled together. Whereas when I buy a collection that belonged to a kid, the sets are nearly always mixed up with bits or figures missing and lots of other builds or fragments that are not official sets.

Extra handling charges per lot really put me off. I typically least favourite a store that uses them. I don't mind average lot values and so on, as running a store has to be efficient for the owner. But manipulating the prices by advertising low prices then adding on high per lot charges messes up wants list searches so I avoid those stores. I prefer a store to charge high prices then to use low plus a per lot handling fee. I don't mind stores charging higher than average, and I do it myself for some items and especially on cheap ones. If I have a part worth a few pence/cents, it is really not worth listing on its own. However I don't mind selling 25 or 30 of them for £1. If I have 10 of the same item worth a few pennies each, I might still list them at £1 for the lot. And amazingly they will sell but most likely to someone that is placing an order anyway and can save on postage by buying that lot from me rather than placing a separate order with someone else with extra shipping to get those cheap parts. Or maybe just not worth their time checking and removing items to buy them from someone else to save a few £ even if it is cheaper including paying extra shipping. Having higher prices is transparent. The buyer can see the prices when building their cart and choose to buy that lot, or not. It's when the prices look good while building the cart but then suddenly get ramped up at checkout that I dislike.

That is because all the cool kids are too busy playing with licensed sets to care. :-)

It isn't really a theme, but ET had the Dimensions set with minifigure and phone build and is now getting the large brickbuilt figure. I've got the first and will be buying the second. For me LOTR is both the best and the worst of the revivals. Best because they have done stunning large sets. But worst because they have only done stunning large sets, and not a proper theme with multiple opportunities to buy the minifigures or army build (like in SW or HP).

1. I don't. I don't find it any different to before the acquisition. 2. Agree, it is worse and it seems to be built for people that want mobile / tablet use rather than a PC. 3. As it always was. The problem with user input is that users don't necessarily agree with each other. 4. It isn't if you understand how to use wants lists. 5. It isn't if you choose sellers that use instant checkout and understand how to set up automated postage costs. 6. I'm not sure why this surprises you. Any complicated task becomes easier the more experience you have. Even building with LEGO is easier the more experience you have. So I don't find it at all surprising that people that have used BL for years find it easy whereas people that are new find it harder. BL has an incredibly powerful search, for example, if you know how to search for specific types of parts in specific colours. It takes time to learn, like any skill. 7. Lawrence at Brickowl is very good at responding to issues and always has been. But then Brickowl has a much smaller userbase.

I find I often want to avoid reviews of sets that I intend purchase. I don't want to see someone else build it first and reveal any interesting features or build techniques. And since I usually want a discount and I never feel the need to buy it on day 1, I try to avoid looking at reviews of the set. And if I want to know what parts are going to be in it, bricklink inventories will do just fine and will probably be available online when I come to purchase. Or even the LEGO inventory online. Sure, it would be nice if they included the sticker sheet in those inventories and even better still if you were able to purchase them direct with a PAB order without phoning up to order one like you used to be able to do (but often quite pricey). I also cannot really think of an adult interest set that hasn't had a review out on day 1 for many years now. They are usually up often weeks prior to release for the freebie LAN reviewers (and it is this that has really killed off the more independent reviewers that purchase the sets themselves, as they cannot compete for clicks and revenue). If the site or reviewer you prefer hasn't got it up yet (like Brickset have only just reviewed Minas Tirith, way too late to be of any use for early purchasers), chances are another reviewer did have it up on time. And for little Friends or City sets that are not likely to be of interest to adults, does it really matter if they have stickers or there is a review available to indicate this? Kids don't seem to care too much about applying them. As a kid, I used to build lots of airfix models with waterslide decals and one of the fun parts was applying the decal decoration there, turning it from something plain to a finished design. If anything, for kids sets, I'd like it if LEGO included more 'free placement' stickers that the kid can have fun applying to other parts to customise them. So a Friends house could have extra bedroom, bathroom or kitchen stickers so they could decorate a room how they like. When younger my daughter used to love sticking letter stickers on her LEGO parts with her name, or a pet's name and even sometimes drew her own stickers to stick on builds to customise them. It is just another form of creativity.

Stickers aren't meant to be attached to studded surfaces, so the AI generated campaign logo is misleading.

I don't know. Making a mistake, then constantly ignoring people when they tell you that you've made a mistake because you think you know better than everyone else is a good indication of human behaviour. Especially for a person that is focussed so highly on one thing that they define themselves by it.

And then all the other metrics that might matter to other people. The entire box would be full up with disclaimers. For anyone that really cares about it, surely they can do a few minutes research if having stickers in it is going to stop them buying a set.

I agree there have been complaints about the item upload page, but many larger or experienced sellers use brickstore anyway for inventory purposes so won't be affected by the change for uploading. As for auto-search, go beyond using easy buy if you want to apply constraints to your search.

I find this one of the strangest suggestions ever. You have chosen the design based on your bias against stickers. You've used green and a tick for 100% prints, yellow/amber for mixture and red with a warning sign for 100% stickers. LEGO are never going to implement a not exactly subliminal system showing that the inclusion of stickers is bad. The biggest problem though is that your system is completely useless. Pretty much every set will be amber unless it is fully printed (probably Creator where there is often minimal decoration as parts are reused) or no decoration to the parts. Any set with a minifigure in is not 100% stickered if it contains a minifigure with a face and so the traffic light system is useless. A set with a huge sticker sheet and a single plain minifigure with a classic smiley face is "both" as it has a printed element. You would not know how much of the set is stickered or printed. It could be a single part printed and a huge sticker sheet, or a single part with a sticker and loads of printed parts. They are both amber. Unless they do a metric such as 37% of the decorated parts in this set have stickers, then the amber box on most sets won't tell you anything. If a set has a sticker sheet, LEGO only needs to put in one printed element such as a minfiigure head or a 1x1 round tile with a single printed dot on it and the red image with a warning sign can be removed from the box. And from a consumer point of view, they would be leaving themselves open to complaints putting terms like "100% prints", as this will mean different things to different people. One person might read it as all decorated parts are printed, whereas others will read it as 100% parts are printed. As noted above, it also doesn't indicate how many prints you get. A set with 1000 pieces with 1 printed part and no stickers is 100% printed so gets a green tick. A 1000 piece set with 100 printed parts and a sticker sheet for one part is not so doesn't get a green tick, just the amber box. Yet which is likely to be popular is you like printed parts? It might also be that if people start using warnings against stickers as a way of deciding which set they buy, then LEGO just does away with sticker sheets AND decorated elements. So a Friends set where they have a sticker set to show a bathroom background, they just leave the decoration out. It is still obviously a bathroom as it has a toilet and a shower and loads of brick built accessories, but the kid loses the decorative sticker in case some adult whines about it. Is that really a win for consumers? I don't think so. This is 100% printed, as there are two printed elements. This is "none". But if they stuck in a printed eye element, it gets the green tick. This one is 100% printed and gets a green tick , as it has a printed 1x1 round tile element in it (the coins). I'd be really annoyed if a box told me something was 100% printed if there was one or two tiny elements in it that have a print.

This makes no business sense whatsoever. No business with a range of products for a broad range of customers will cut products and lose customers just to focus on producing more of a small number of core products if they cannot increase the number of customers buying those core products. Cutting out Marvel completely and increasing the number of Star Wars sets will not lead to an increase in sales. There is no proof there that themes outside of the top five are not selling or that they should cut any licensed themes or any in-house themes based on the top five. The list of the top five best selling themes proves what the top five best selling themes are, and nothing else. Those "minor" licensed sets may be selling extremely well, but not making the top five simply because not a lot of sets are made within the theme. They are also highly likely to sell to people that are not necessarily buying other LEGO sets. To cut out all the Disney or Marvel sets (aside from Star Wars), would likely mean that the customers buying those sets don't buy any LEGO and LEGO loses that customer. They then buy the Mega Disney sets, or the Mega Marvel sets as the license is their primary interest rather than the LEGO branding on the box. And why would they make unlicensed Space, Castle and Pirates themes, when these would only ever be minor unlicensed themes compared to City, Friends, and Ninjago. You seem to want to cut out minor licensed themes but introduce minor unlicensed themes instead. If there is no room for minor themes outside the top five if they are licensed, why would they introduce unlicensed themes that will never be in the top five? If anything, they should get rid of minor unlicensed themes in favour of minor licensed themes. Each (minor) license already has its own existing fanbase and so that theme is likely to sell reasonably well, even if the customer is not into LEGO. Sets like BTTF and The Fast and The Furious show that LEGO can make individual licensed sets that sell well even to non-LEGO fans and so open up more sales for LEGO. Whereas an unlicensed theme is likely to appeal to people already into LEGO more than those not into LEGO and are less likely to appeal to new customers, and may end up competing with existing unlicensed themes. I doubt there are many generic pirate fans that don't buy LEGO that would suddenly start buying LEGO if only they made pirate sets. Yet that is what new licenses does for LEGO, they bring in new customers that LEGO can sell to no matter how few sets are in the theme. Even if they only buy the sets from that license, that is sales that LEGO would not have made otherwise. One Piece, Animal Crossing, Bluey or Wednesday does not need to become a top five theme to make them worthwhile doing. If they sell to people that were not buying LEGO (and make LEGO money), then they have done their job. Here in Europe, they do a LEGO Marvel magazine, a LEGO DC magazine, a LEGO Minecraft magazine and a LEGO Jurassic World magazine. They seem to sell well as they disappear from shelves and LEGO keeps the contract with the publisher to do more year after year even though they are "minor" licenses. If those themes were not worth doing, as sets or magazines, LEGO would stop doing them. That they continue to do them even though they are not Star Wars or Harry Potter is a good indication that they sell, even though they are not in the top five themes. There is no way LEGO would want to cut a significant number of licensed themes losing fans of those themes just to focus on producing more SW and HP sets that will not bring in a significant number of new customers as they are already likely buying those themes.

Is Shadowfax the same white horse as in the Marvel set? If so, it is Aragorn with his wings pulled off.

It looks fine, and what I'd hope most GWP should look like. There doesn't appear to be anything unique or important that is not readily available so anyone can build something similar easily enough while it comes with the box that shall not be opened for those that need something exclusive.

The last point is equally true of unlicensed sets. Although I disagree with their POV. I frequently take sets apart and redesign sections to be what I want rather than follow instructions, as do others. That is why we have the term MOD as opposed to MOC. I wonder if people that write stuff like this have ever visited forums like the Star Wars forum here or elsewhere or ever look at licensed MOCs online or at conventions. There are loads of creative people building what they want and not just following instructions. They seem to have their own definition of what creativity is and deny anything and anyone that doesn't fit their definition.

I don't necessarily think it is just licences. I know of some people that only buy Botanicals, and one that buys 'wall' sets (mosaicsc and art) but nothing else. And of course there are also people that just collect Modulars, or just Castle, or just Space andcdong look at other themes.

There is another faction, one that I identify with. Faction #3 tends to be older / more established in the fan base and enjoys vintage LEGO while also enjoying modern LEGO. I find it truly amazing how LEGO has been able to produce essentially the same thing for about 65 years now (I've removed some years at the start when they were refining the brick design) but constantly reinvented it to remain meaningful to kids and much more recently become so popular with adults. I think the clever marketing here is that LEGO are not necessarily selling large sets to AFOLs but to adults that might not be AFOLs, but are fans of specific LEGO themes or licenses. There are Adult Fans of LEGO Botanicals, AFOLSW, AFOLHP, AFOLFormula 1 and so on. Not interested in general LEGO but very interested in "their" bit of the product line.

While it might be a good idea to let beneficiaries know what is valuable, the value is not a simple thing to define when needing to get rid of a lot of stuff you are not interested in keeping. The collector might say something is worth $X but the beneficiary is unlikely to get that and telling them what they should get puts pressure on them. If selling everything in one go to a business $0.5X is more realistic. To get more will require the beneficiary to check everything and if they are not interested in it, they are unlikely to want to do that. And unless the beneficiary really cares about any of the collection, there is no sentimental value once the collector is gone. It could just be box loads of unwanted stuff that needs storing or getting rid of. And telling someone how to sell it might also cause issues and a lot of work for someone that doesn't want to do that work. If it is give it all to my local LUG and they will auction it off, that is one thing as there is little work. If it is check each set and sell it on bricklink or ebay, that is totally different. Remember they will probably be grieving and don't want the hassle of having to spend time to sell off your life's collection or arrange and possibly pay for storage for it. If you really care, you should sell off the majority of the collection before you go (especially if you know it is coming), and maybe keep some smaller items that are more likely to be kept as a sentimental reminder. Or ask if anyone wants anything specific. You might even get to see someone enjoy something before you go.

For me, there is no point when the claim that LEGO only produces two unlicensed themes keeps getting repeated. Part reuse also doesn't matter to me, as a specialised part is still a specialised part. The Roman shield is a specialised part. That was introduced in 2012, repeated a few years later in a licensed set, then reused in an unlicensed set as late as 2025. It has longevity in use and breadth as it has been used in four themes (in four sets in total). But is no less a specialised design than a snitch or Vader's helmet.