MAB

A brief update. Not surprising, but the price for Sauron has dropped significantly. The worldwide average for March is now sitting at about £30 and the minimum prices are not much below that, so 60% of what he was in January and 55% of the set price. Two sold since January in the UK, for £50, and the lowest price is currently £40 so about 60% of the set price. Even at this "low" price, he is not selling. As other stores are selling the helmet set, I imagine it will be discounted at some stage so I expect his price to drop further. It is crazy really, he has only sold six times in the UK in the past six months on BL, a clear indication of being overpriced. Gothmog has been sold 15 times in the same period. There are 14 UK sellers with him on BL. 10 of them are charging a price equal to that of the new set price or more. Some sellers are either very slow to find out about new releases, or just have no clue about what the market is doing.

Nice. This would have been great as just a MOC, but as a MOC with constraints with being just parts from one set, and being so quick, it is superb. But I think I'll wait and hope for an official one with a minifigure too.

I think one of the hey reasons they bought it to get hold of the "AFOL Designer Program" which turned into the "Bricklink Designer Program". That has been a huge money spinner for LEGO. Every reseller, whether they are a long term investor or a scalper, and whether they buy parts from PAB online or through sets, knows that LEGO can make as many of their parts as they want and can easily manipulate the market by doing so. However, you have got to ask yourself why would they try to get a reseller to invest in a lot of stock then undercut them. Even if someone was investing millions (in whatever currency), they are nothing compared to LEGO. If LEGO tried to get them to buy expensive stock then undercut them, they don't really gain anything in the long term.

That shouldn't really be a problem as they are highlighted with a (S) in the price guide, and superlots were removed from being shown by default in searches over a decade ago because of this behaviour. Presumably they had more, and they sold some that brought the total down. However, you should be able to check out with the remainder even if under the bulk lot requirement, that is how it used to work. If it isn't, it might have been broken and a bug introduced.

Price depends on whether the mistake is interesting or not. Injection errors are definitely better than printing errors. And even with printing errors it depends if they enhance a piece. Since tge early 2010s when LEGO started production in China, 100000s of misprinted parts have been available. I remember one BL seller with a few thousand of each of their misprinted parts.

Any figure is army-buildable if someone wants to. It is then just a question of how many people army build with it.

My point was really to highlight that what looks like unfair or scammy behaviour to a buyer it is not necessarily done to be deceptive, it is done to run the store in the way the seller wants. And that will mean that some buyers cannot buy what they want as they want to place an order that the seller does not want to deal with. Sometimes sellers have multiple lots of the same item because they don't consolidate lots, especially if they keep part out a set and keep the lots of the parts from the set together, rather than storing them with other of the same part. It is easier to part out like that but can be annoying for buyers. If you cannot reach a average lot value due to it, then it is worth asking the seller if they will allow the order to be placed (by dropping the constraint, you place the order, they reinstate the constraint). If they won't, then they lose the order.

I thought the same. If any of them is an army builder, it is likely to be this one. It is easy enough to replace the instruments to form a decent sized band. And buy the purple ones to have rival bands. It is a leak, and you are not meant to post leaked images here.

For me, the whole series can be summed up as some nice accessories but poor figures.

But then if the store also has minifigures or other expensive hard to find items, the average lot value is usually reasonably easy to hit. I have something similar for my store although my average lot value is only about 1 Euro. Most of my orders received are for minifigures and bulk parts where I would expect a normal buyer to easily reach the average lot value for every lot. But I also have lots of low quantity parts of cheap parts that I don't want, so I price them cheap and even if the whole lot is bought it wouldn't reach the average lot value. So customers placing a regular order for more expensive parts can easily add the cheap lots to an order they were already placing and I don't mind the time picking cheap parts when the customer is placing a more valuable order. However, I don't want to deal with customers buying multiple lots of small quantities of penny parts if they are not buying anything expensive. That type of customer would not be able to place an order due to the average lot value. If they decide to least favourite my store then it is not a big deal since I don't want the type of order that they want to place. The cheap low quantity lots are not there to lure in buyers, they are priced low so that they are likely to sell to a buyer that is placing an order anyway.

Leaks don't follow preset rules though. People leak when they can, not according to a schedule.

The last replacement parts I received had exactly the same packaging and labels as a PAB order (and came from Poland). But the part being replaced was from a current set rather than retired, so that might be a difference.

From what I understand replacement parts and PAB come from the same place and the stock is the same. It has been a year or so since I used the replacement parts service, but the envelopes and labels were identical to PAB. They just seem to have poor stock control if they are selling too many of a part then cancelling orders if they want to reserve that stock for another service.

They emailed to say so.

They did the same to me, they backordered a few parts then cancelled them within a couple of days. I was rather annoyed as I had bought some minidoll baby heads and bodies. They sent the bodies but cancelled the heads. So I complained that they did not give me the chance to cancel the bodies and that I want to return them for a refund as they did not supply the heads that go with them. I didn't get a response but a few days later I got an order email saying the heads are on their way even though they are out of stock on PAB. So they do have stock but refused to fulfill the order. I have nothing against them keeping back parts for replacement parts rather than PAB, but if they have accepted orders and held them a couple of months, it is very poor customer service not fulfilling orders but instead retaining those parts for other reasons.

Excellent! I'd love to see some scaled up Great Ball Contraptions for those!

I just received a cancellation for Black Falcon shields. I ordered 10 of them back in November along with other parts (£150+). They held up sending that whole order all that time (I have had three PAB orders delivered since placing that one) and then cancel it. Yet they managed to supply multiple 100s of those shields to bricklink sellers. I don't have anything against people reselling but it seems strange that they don't put limits on popular parts.

No. Different devices would need different stations (or none at all.)

It has been one of those days where you find a bag of stuff hidden at the back of a storage drawer...

So what it meant was that they could not fulfill all my PAB order and have marked various now out of stock parts as backordered which I guess means that they will eventually be cancelled.

My order (UK) from 22nd November has finally changed to "in process" rather than "in warehouse". I don't think I've ever seen that status before. My orders always go from "in warehouse" to "shipped".

That wouldn't be fair. I'd have to dress up to qualify, whereas my brother would easily pass as a hobbit without trying. :-)

I agree, short games are fine. It was more the "aimed at young kids" part. A game of 'Love Letter' is very different to a game of 'Pop to the Shops'.

So do I, and in fact I don't think many adults are "kidults" in the sense of being interested in stuff that is marketed towards children. Especially in terms of LEGO, many of the products adults are buying are now specifically marketed towards adults not children. LEGO may have traditionally aimed products at children but that doesn't mean that all their products are toys or for children. An adult creating a MOC or following instructions to build a model using LEGO is no more a kid than an adult doing the same thing with Meccano, or scratch building, or creating art with felt tip pens. I also play a lot of board games, often aimed at 14+. Those are also typically grouped in with toys yet they are very different to kids playing a 15 minute game aimed at young kids. But then, video games often get classed as toys too even though some of them are 18+.

Adult sets are obviously more expensive, but there are huge numbers of adults buying LEGO with very different habits. I know of adults buying one or two sets a year. I don't think the adult market is necessarily all stereotypical AFOL that spend $1000s a year. Just like there are kids that get maybe a couple of small sets a year through to the other extreme where the kid gets large numbers of sets. For every $700 set, there are about 400 sub-$50 sets, and about 300 of them will be aimed at 5-12 year old kids.