MAB

That is what they said they would do. The yellow BESTSELLER tag is the old PAB, and anything else is the old B+P. At least now it is searchable so easy to locate heads in specific colours, and so on.

It might well be that. If individual horses are selling in high volume and the sets are not selling so well, there is an indication of what LEGO should do - increase the price of individual ones and include them in more (probably expensive) sets. That's interesting. Last year I bought 160 of the clear ones when they were just 6p on PAB. I didn't even need them. I wanted some parts totalling about £2.50 and I had to hit a threshold of £12 to allow me to place the PAB order. I couldn't really see anything else that was under-priced so I loaded up on those as they are easy enough to pass on at cost price. They have now priced them at 18p each.

Primary market demand and sales are of course seasonal. But demand for secondary market sets doesn't change that much though the year despite being seasonal sets. In fact, sometimes secondary market demand for winter village spikes in summer and autumn, especially if it is rumoured that a winter village set is not coming back the following year. In the past, they have changed cycles from being available for 2 Christmas periods to 3 periods or vice versa and this can catch people out, thinking they have missed out so will often buy if it is clear one they want is not coming back for a third year. Buying VW early for the third Christmas appearance is often a very good investment as they are likely to disappear forever once out of stock, especially if it is November or early December when they go. They can then be flipped quick with the gain in price due to lack of primary market stock but still high demand. So it is either very good or very bad, depending on which side of the fence you are on. Whichever side you are on - anyone that doesn't buy a set when it appears one Christmas, and still doesn't buy it the next Christmas, is risking it if they don't buy early when/if it appears for the third Christmas. If they miss it after three goes, chances are they didn't care that much about it. They had plenty of opportunity to get it. If resellers buy some of the 3rd cycle of stock, it is the buyers fault they missed out - they should have bought before given the ample time to buy it. People waiting for something to retire are presumably waiting for a discount, if they gamble to save money hoping for a discount, they are no less greedy than someone buying for resale when stock is cheap.

A LEGO City Bank that isn't being robbed is about as much fun as a LEGO City Mobile Phone Store. How much fun can a kid have putting someone through a door, going to the desk, getting a 1x2 printed tile and then exiting.

We also recently had Benny's Space Squad in 2019 that provided three decent and different classic space figures. Plus another torso in CMF this year.

I hope the answer is no. The anniversary set should be a modern set, celebrating the history / historical theme rather than trying to remake an old theme piece by piece with old parts.

Vinegar is mainly (like 95%) water anyway, so using undiluted vinegar won't do harm. Interestingly though very high concentrations of acetic acid can be used as a stress test solvent for ABS.

Parks parts I wold call legit as LEGO (as in the company) produced them, not someone working at LEGO but using the machines illegitimately. Genuine prototypes are clearly a grey area (even though often red!) as they are officially produced but then manage to leave the factory unofficially. It is fairly clear that all these new parts in new colours that are purposely made for the expensive collectors' market are not legit. Hence the split in the collecting area - we now have figures that are from legitimately made parts and figures that are from illegitimately made ones for collectors willing to spend high $$$ on them. Some people will want every figure in every colour, whereas others will be happy with every figure in every legitimate colour and so can consider their collection complete even though some parts they don't have were illegitimately made. And yes, hopefully LEGO can discipline the workers that are making them. No doubt the people doing it get very little from the middle men selling the items on, but they are the ones likely to be disciplined or even lose their jobs if caught.

Remember some people build MOCs from bricks and are not interested in making instructions (especially if it took months to build using physical bricks). Also the MOC was posted 7 years ago and the designer hasn't been on Eurobricks for about 5 years (click on their name to see their last active date), so chances are they will not see your comment or reply.

I was using LEGO's / Bricklink's language. Legitimate = produced for sale in sets, PAB, etc and illegitimate = stolen or produced on the hush hush specifically for people willing to pay high prices for them.

I've placed orders of 1000s of (total) parts and never had an issue. I don't see why your computer would crash as the cart is handled by their server.

Have you ever thought of using Google or similar search engines to search for such terms? Even without adding LEGO to the search, just about all hits are LEGO related.

Are the coral ones legitimate or illegitimate? It is getting confusing and maybe we need a split topic for real production parts and the illegitimate parts.

Those sets are not just made for retail sale. They are great (free) advertising pieces for "look what you can make out of LEGO" in worldwide press. Plus the Barca one coincided with the opening of the Barcelona store, so great advertising to get people in and buy something even if not that set. Plus they appeal to non-traditional LEGO fans, so lead to sales to people who would not normally buy LEGO, while LEGO fans can choose from the hundreds of other more traditional sets.

LEGO investments can be very good ones, if you pick the right ones. I typically buy at the end of shelf life when anyone that wants the set has had as much chance to buy it as they can possibly have, then store them for a few years, then make my profit. I think I have only ever scalped on one set, when Minecraft was first done at IDEAS. There was a decent promo in Oct 2012 and Minecraft was just enough to get it. So I bought a load expecting to just get close to RRP back on the Minecraft sets while keeping the promo sets. Then at Christmas parents were paying high prices for them as LEGO misjudged demand, so they went for about 2x RRP on ebay auctions even though started very low. Scalpers are never going to have an issue with degrading plastic, as they flip quick.

It is mainly word based discussion forum, so discussion. There are other sites for posting pictures with minimal words or without words that use like buttons.

My point was building and displaying a Classic Space/Pirates/Castle set is no more or less creative than someone building and displaying a Queer Eye or The Office set.

Was that the trains? The Great Train Robbery!

I know one guy who must have at least 500 police. I normally go for just 2 or 3 City style minifigs in obvious trades, so things like the butcher, waiter, plumber, carpenter, etc. It's enough for small vignettes. I do the same for armies now too, just go for enough for a detailed MOC. I normally stop at 12 or 16 these days. I amassed over 50 Spartans and about 120 Roman soldiers, but never used them. And given their prices, I sold them. Sure they would look great as a huge army on a big baseplate if that's your thing, but I prefer the build to be the display piece and normally only need a small group to make it look good. Too many figs and people just focus on those instead of the build.

They have not approved other LOTR submissions through IDEAS reviews, so they must have been working on their own designs for some time. Or maybe they just don't want to do LOTR through IDEAS.

I think he looks really quite nice, as much as a Brickheadz can. It captures most of the important features at a similar level to most other BH. The downside is the lack of a helmet, but I'm not sure how they would do that and still look BH-like.

Plus it has existed for so long, that fashions and styles change over time. In the 1970s I had a bucket of second hand LEGO. I had to be creative as I didn't have that many toys (compared to kids of today) and not loads of LEGO. I was growing out of LEGO by the mid-80s when the so-called Classic themes, with their heavy numbers of minifigures, started coming along. I was more used to building Homemaker maxi-figures but mainly using other companies' small figurines and animals in my builds and I remember having a few of the Legoland style figures with fixed arms and legs but they were rubbish. I remember my younger brother having some Classic Town, but again not that many and he had to break them apart and rebuild if he wanted something different. When I look at how much LEGO my kids had at the same age as I was when I played with LEGO as a kid, they have probably at least 20x as much as I did. They can easily keep the nicer sets together for play and not need to take them apart as they need the bricks for something else. They MOC a lot, but mainly as I give them bags of parts that are not sets. If they get a set, it tends to remain as a set. Some of their friends have LEGO and never free build, they build the set and play. I think this is partly how LEGO markets their product these days, when you complete one then you get another. I know they do the Rebuild the World adverts and they do Classic boxes, but I don't think they promote free building that much. They focus on sets, so the consumer of today focuses on sets. LEGO Masters has helped a bit there, as people see you can be creative although it gives the impression you need access to 1000s of bricks. So people of different ages, or people that come into the hobby at different times, will have very different experiences and hence want to "do LEGO" in different ways. And for themes, while there were licensed (movie or TV based) toys in the 1970s and 80s (especially after Star Wars came along), there were many toys that were not movie based. Whereas now many toys are licensed based, so it is not surprising that LEGO, Playmobil, etc have a significant proportion of licensed themes. If I look at my daughter's dolls, probably 2/3rds of them are based on movies and TV.

Very true. I like building MOCs but I couldn't care about creating instructions. But then, I am not creating MOCs to sell or for others to build.

Yeah, I agree. At least leaving a comment shows that you think the MOC is interesting enough to write a few words. If you cannot be bothered to do that, what good is a number to say that someone has seen a picture of something you made but writing a comment is just too much effort.

That makes sense because often it is easy to imagine what the main build of the set will look like if yo already know the source material and of course some people collect minifigures and want to see new ones being done. But that is also true of the non-licensed but specialised themes. For City and Modulars, it seems nobody cares too much about civilian style figures. But look at the buying frenzy for purple motorcyle helmets caused when LEGO release a purple classic space torso or if they do a CMF that contains a classic style figure (pirates, castle or space). There were some complaints about the figures in the Blacksmith set, that one is wasted by repeating the female pirates waistcoat / vest torso. I've been selling off my spares of Kingdoms figures, and they sell for a very nice price now indicating people are willing to pay high prices for unlicensed figures. If they released blue and (modern) grey spaceships with yellow windows but included white astronaut minifigures instead of coloured minifigures with classic space logos on their chests, I reckon there would be some discussion there. Discussions of non-licensed minifigures in specialist themes has gone on for years too. Remember Knights Kingdom II and the "jellybean" knights (usually used in a derogatory way) when some people weren't buying nice looking castle sets because of the colours of the figures. And the unlicensed themes have minifigure packs too, such as the fun in the park type large sets or the smaller blister packs. I've recently sold my last unopened lion / crown knights blister pack for £40! They got clearanced at £5.99 each in 2015. I opened up all my dragon knights ones as I wanted the torsos. If LEGO released those these days, they'd probably sell very well to some people, at least for a while, to people that want to build armies even though they were ridiculed for being too cartoony when they were released.