MAB

It depends exactly on how you count them, but the Death Star contains about 18 different scenes. So £50 a scene, slightly lower than dioramas. Some of the DS scenes are done better than the dioramas but some are significantly worse, but I'd say the variety in scenes is pretty decent. They also managed to do three different Lukes in one set so there is still a possibility of multiple versions of one character in a big set. Compare that to using the same Frodo and Sam in Rivendell and Barad-Dûr, and it shows that getting multiple sets doesn't necessarily mean more variety in minifigures. Would I like ten £100 LOTR diorama sets? Sure. But I'd also take a £1000 set that had ten scenes built into a giant ring.

Yet if they did many (let's say 10) iconic moments diorama sets at €100 each and you display them together, it becomes justifiable to spend that much as it is not a single set?

Probably not if they were only buying sets for the minifigures. But do people do that for unlicensed sets when you can buy the minifigure parts through PAB? Current castle sets seem to sell OK suggesting people buy them for the bricks and design and not just the minifigures.

It is understandable when you look atbthe numbers. If they get a BDP set approved and sell a large number of sets, they can make huge sums of money. They get 5% after delivery and taxes are taken off. So a £300 set makes them in the order of £12 per set sold. If they sell 25000 sets, that is £300,000, about eight years average UK salary.

That looks great. I really like the way you have inset the scarf and made the head/hat swapable. The only bit I don't like is the cravat / neck tie. I think this sticks out too much especially with the clip.

The numbers passing have become ridiculous. I can't even be bothered to look through the qualifiers to think about what might be made this time.

Football and licensing is a mess. A very expensive mess. Each team usually owns its own licensing rights and so getting all 48 teams to agree will be difficult. In the past, England used to sign a deal with Merlin to produce official stickers instead of Panini. That is why in a lot of older Panini collections, the badge is just an England flag instead of the real badge, and all the shirts are airbrushed so there is no badge or any other FA insignia on them. I guess that is why in the past when they have done sports sets or CMFs they have been either a single company (Nike) or association (DFB for football, Team GB for Olympics) or so generic like the vintage football figures that they contain no official badges.

Very nice. I have a load of the Koruit Gondor soldier armour and helmets (I use genuine LEGO figures and weapons but the Koruit armour) and agree, they look great and definitely fill a gap that LEGO didn't produce.

I would just build on it. Once you have a layer of bricks across it, and then extra weight of the build on top, it will soon lay flat.

I tend to read as far as the link or mention of 'vote for me' then stop. So if the link is at the bottom, I would have looked at the images and might be interested enough to vote. If the link is at the top, I don't get any further. And if there is just a link to IDEAS and the user couldn't even be bothered to learn how to link images, they have no chance of a vote from me. This is usually new users that have signed up only to post their IDEAS submission with no interest in the site or duscussion. Chances are that they have also recently joined other LEGO fan forums and will have posted the same on those too.

There is a huge range of choices. Ring binders with inserts, or box files, or old LEGO boxes to store them by theme, or a filing cabinet with hanger files, or a shelving system, or plastic drawers, or tubs with fitted lids, etc. It really depends how many you have, how much space you have, how often you want to access them, how much you want to spend on storage, what condition you want them kept in, and no doubt other factors.

Looking at the visible parts, I imagine the build is going to be fairly solid without any space for components. You are probably getter off designing a case from scratch around your preferred components. I've done it for raspberry pi and a number of arduino boards in the past but have always started knowing what I want to put in and building around that rather than the other way around.

Yeah. Buying for my daughter was much cheaper than buying for my son. He wanted natural colours for castles, she wanted lots of pinks and pastels for Friends houses and shops.

Raised base plates were from an era when people didn't care about numbers of parts or price per part ratios. While OK for a toy, I don't think I'd want them as an adult. There is no customisation possible with them. They take up a lot of space. They break quite easily then the whole thing looks bad.

Price fixing is difficult, especially when the company owns the resale site. They could alternatively force sellers to not sell cheaper than PAB. But even among resellers, pricing is all over the place for common parts. If I have one of something I tend to price it cheap, just to get rid of it as it doesn't matter if it sells for 6p when others are charging 10p as 4p is no big deal. Whereas turn that around, when I have 1000 of something and people buy 100s at once, there is no way I'd charge to match the low end as in this case, it is £40 lost. I often get people asking me to price match another store when I have bulk quantities and the other store is doing very low prices for a few. I always refuse for this reason. So what the true 'cheaper end' value is is difficult to pin down as it depends on more than just price. Of course, the real way to force LEGO to sell at the cheaper end is for buyers to not buy at PAB and instead use BL (although even then, I doubt they'd change their pricing policy). But I cannot really see that happening. It is too convenient, comes with Insiders and GWP, has great variety. And if the price difference is only a few quid on a big order, PAB will often win for the buyer.

I went into a LEGO store yesterday, it was absolutely packed with kids. More to the pont, there were significant queues at the tills, and it was all families with kids. As a BL seller, I like to see what people are buying, so I look quite closely. There were some people buying large sets that could well be a 'whole family' purchase but by far the majority of people were buying smaller sets which the kid was holding. And they seemed to be purchasing everything, City and Friends, Creator, Disney, One Piece, all the licenses. BAM was incredibly busy, PAB less so. And plenty of people willing to pay full price. There was one kid, probably 12-13, wanting the "adult set" Star Wars logo. I told his mum that it was on sale at a store less than five minutes walk away for 25% off but just got a profanity back. I don't buy the view that LEGO isn't for kids. I totally agree that LEGO is marketing itself towards adults and has done incredibly well in doing that, but kids are still cramming into stores and buying their product.

Custom made parts tend to be discussed in the forum relevant to the theme rather than there being a section for all custom parts. There is a lot in trains, as there are many improvements to be made there.

Painting doesn't really work for LEGO as tight fitting parts rub against each other when assembled/disassembled and you tend to look very closely at LEGO due to the scale.

I doubt it, as sellers only pay 3% fees so getting 5% back for buyers is unlikely. If they do then I will be buying a lot of LEGO from myself.

This is where using the favourite/least favourite feature for stores is useful. Or check back what feedback you have left in the past. There has always been a bit of an issue with sellers vs historians at bricklink. Sellers are the real customers of BL as they buy services from BL. Whereas historians have primarily been responsible for maintaining the catalogue. So the catalogue tends to be historically accurate rather than seller friendly. For example, remember parting out the sets wit the original brick built Groot. Because he didn't fit in with the definition of a minifigure, he wasn't allowed in the catalogue so couldn't be sold through a catalogue entry and had to be parted out or listed as a custom item. It was easier to sell him instead on ebay. Similarly the historians have gone down the route of everything that was in a new box should be included in the set and where parts were on sprues with one piece used in minifigures, the additional sprued parts are in the main inventory and not extra parts. Whereas they don't need to be included if the set is used, even though they are listed in the main inventory. They have also got into a bit of a mess with minifigures. Since SW droids were classed as minifigures, the definition was extended to many characters without any minifigure parts. So now we have teacups, furniture (even without faces), cars, planes, single bricks, etc as minifigures.

I guess anyone that doesn't use bricklink very much and doesn't read emails from them. They have put up many warnings about it. It also isn't enough to have a LEGO account, users will need to actively link the two and presumably this will require users to log in and do it. Personally, I don't think it is a bad thing to delete old inactive accounts where the user hasn't logged in or responded to emails for years. In fact BL had a big clearout of inactive accounts about 10 days ago. We know this as lots of stores saw the number of 'fans' of their store drop dramatically before and after the maintenance period. I am a bit surprised it is not on Brickset, as they tend to be quite good for retaining multiple names for these sets where different locations had different names. Obviously much of the early work on Bricklink was done by Americans and as the site is (and was then also) American they tend to favour North American set names. I think at the time, they did not consider it valuable enough to keep such data and it is only through fan sites that some of this has been brought back into being available. For older sets, there are far better places to find instructions than LEGO itself! I don't think the data itself is at risk as many people keep copies of the full catalogue. But one thing for sure, the usernames of the people that submitted specific information will eventually be lost, as if they are no longer active and the accounts are de-registered, then the submitting names get changed to the bbXXXXXX format and the original submitting username is lost.

I don't think this is due to being over sensitive about the name but rather their database for old sets is poor. Those sets had different names in different locations. The bigger shock for me is that they actually have instructions available when many sets of the 80s and 99s are missing on the LEGO site. They still use the word Weapon in sets like 9591 Weapon Pack or 70617 Temple of The Ultimate Ultimate Weapon, so it is clearly not banned.

I'm a BL seller and I'm not at all worried by the account integration. It simplifies the management of accounts and since kids use other LEGO sites and they are based in Europe, it means that they have to protect the data more than BL does. I hope it also cuts down on the spam that has plagued the BL forums in the past few years from the 100s of new accounts set up every day, and also stop all the new spam accounts claiming to be from LEGO or BL admin tricking new users into making bank transfer payments to confirm their accounts. I cannot see them trying to kill off the secondary market on BL as often they do not compete on price with BL sellers vs PAB for new and frequently cannot sell the parts people want to buy (retired sets, minifigs and licensed parts). If they want to compete on price for basic parts then they can go for it and reduce PAB prices. And if they do want to compete by making anti-competitive features for sellers, then they will just drive those sellers and eventually the buyers elsewhere.

I was having a look around. Under the SNOT section, you have the bag tag cube as a SNOT piece, but don't list the die cube (BL = 64776pb01). The latter is just as good.

You can buy cheaper parts. Especially on the secondary market, popular parts are expensive whereas unpopular parts are cheap. Even for the same part, popular colours will cost way more than unpopular colours. So if you want to buy cheap LEGO then build in colours that are less popular with adults.