MAB

What do fans want? To see huge mocs that are not commercially viable? That is what the ideas submissions are showing.

Huge overlap with castle / fantasy. Why? Because they wouldn't do just the things we want / need. They would probably repeat the entire Fellowship as it has been awhile since wave 1 and they would be aiming at new buyers as well as old. So the whole wave would be competition with anything fantasy. Some of those may sound good, but would be awful when you consider some have to be £12 / $15 sets.

Yes, and it appears that they have enough to last through to November for all worldwide (non-US) online sales at the current sales rate, unless they discount it or put further promotion on it.

I've also bought from them in the past, the parts are fine - similar quality to brickforge and brick warriors. Firestar are predominantly resellers of custom parts, so of course they charge significantly more than the originators.

Telling people it is the last chance to buy it when it is not. It has been available for months since they sent that email.

They can try to have control though. If they've got piles left and they are not selling fast enough, then they have a couple of options (i) discount it to increase sales and (ii) increase sales in some other way. I think they tool the later option. Make people think it is about to go out of stock and hope consumers buy it out of panic / resellers buy it to stock up for the aftermarket sales. As above, hoodwinking people into buying it by making them think it is about to disappear. He is talking about the BTTF set, Aug 2013.

How do you know that? Just like I don't know sales volumes, how do you know production dates? It seems we are using different definitions of decommissioned. I assume it means no longer being sold. You assume it means no longer being produced. The limit is 5 in the UK, and has been for months. As for minifig availability, ebay and bricklink. It's been easy to buy them singlely since the release of the set.

I've still got the orginal email: Subject: Last chance to buy the LEGO® Ideas Exo Suit! Date: Fri, February 27, 2015 10:03 am The Exo Suit will retire soon, get yours now! The hugely popular LEGO® Ideas Exo Suit will be retiring soon! Get your hands on one before it's too late! It is now three months on. Giving someone a "last chance" to buy something then having it in stock three months later looks like failure to me. Last chance / soon / get yours now / before it's too late / retiring soon / decommissioning suggest not waiting 3/6/12 months to get rid of stock. Just about every sentence was promoting timing and that buyers should buy now. Given what happened with the first release of the exo-suit, the Mars Rover and the Research Institute it is fairly clear they were aiming to get people to buy it in anticipation that it was not going to be around very long. But customers (and mainly resellers) know it is not a good seller. People that want them have got them, and there are way too many of them to be of any interest to resellers. If there was a popular set that lego said last chance, then remaining stocks would sell very fast. The fact is that this one hasn't despite the warnings / advertising from lego. The other thing that lego really shot themselves in the foot with this set was selling the minifigures without the set. They dumped huge numbers of them onto the secondary market.

Orthanc is great and I also like Shelob for the size, there is no "waste" in that. However, I voted for Wizard Battle. For such a small set, it packs a lot in and is a key good vs evil scene from the film that was done in lego well. There is no need to surround it by walls or other decoration to increase the set size.

I dread to think how hard it would be to get the army builders. Even if they did 3 army builders to each named character (so equal to the worst unbalanced ratio they have done in CMF), they would be cherry picked away and there would be complaints at how many named characters people are getting.

In Febrauary, it was £11.19 although OOS on lego.com. They kept that price for a day when it came back in stock. I know, as I bought five. As for the others, GhostBusters and the BTTF set have both been heavily discounted though tesco and asda in the UK. Decommissioned means withdraw from service. Lego stated that the set was going to be decommissioned in February. Yet it is still for sale. In my view, they tried to get people to buy this by making them think it was about to go out of stock. That has failed, since they didn't sell them all. I haven't suggested it was a flop - those are YOUR words. I suggested too many were made. The initial demand was high, I think mainly due to reselling. Many hundreds of these were on ebay changing hands at 1.5-2.5x RRP soon after initial release. The initial release did sell very fast. I am fairly sure people thought this was going to be another Mars Rover, both the resellers and the buyers on ebay. Then the additional run came in and has been in continual stock ever since, despite LEGO offering 2x VIP points on them (and only them), and despite them doing the decommissioning campaign. Sure, I don't know sales figures. What I do know is that they are trying to advertise this set in a different way to just about all other sets (especially informing people it is going to be decommissioned), and they still have stock. And in my view, Research Institute sold better than Exo-Suit. That flew off the shelves in store where it is easy to see how fast items sell, and sold very quickly online too although sales rate is harder to judge online.

Hayabusa is completely different, being earlier before the surge in Lego buying and knowledge of cuusoo / ideas. Other ideas sets have been discounted - Research Institute was through Lego.com, GB and BTTF were too at other retailers but maybe not at Lego store. They've tried to shift it with the decommissioning campaign and as that hasn't worked, they'll probably just leave it online until it goes. I think it would have sold better if they reissued more classic space men in other colours. They've done blue and white recently, then green. If they did yellow, red and black then people would be more inclined to get colour sets of minifigs, buying the space sets for them. Including exo-suit.

It's a nice set, but they made too many of them. They seemed to get bought up by resellers initially, more were produced and then there was no market for them. It was meant to be "decomissioned" in February, but is still available. Doing double VIP points on it also didn't help shift remaining stock last year.

It's because charging VAT on purchases outside the EU keeps it fair for UK and EU businesses. If I could import anything from the US or elsewhere where they have lower taxes, then I wouldn't buy much from the UK or EU. The UK would have to drop the VAT rate to match the lowest worldwide rate to enable UK businesses to compete when selling to UK customers. The true value of the goods is the retail cost at the time - that is, what you paid for it.

That doesn't make much sense. You are calling for classic lines to be the only ones made and that a core licensed theme be dropped as it has been out too long. If all they did was castles (or castle, pirates, city, space), then there would be continuous rehashes of those sets and the themes would be out too long. How many castles do you need? You also need to remember that new children are born each day.

There are also different costs of business in different countries (that is, having a presence in the country, individual country regulations, advertising in specific languages, etc). If those costs are spread out over more people (as in the US) then costs will be lower.

And China. Obviously.

You can make anything and anyone but whether they look right or fit in with existing items is another matter. People made LOTR armies long before there were official sets. It's just that now we have official sets with identifiable prints and specially molded parts, the old style of doing it doesn't cut it. This sort of thing looked good in 2010 before we had anything officially printed with the correct markings.

There are two buckets in shot. I also thought it was rubbish. Becuase you can sell them to other people for lots of money.

US is normally cheaper than UK for most retail sets, even after tax. However, we occassionally get crazy sales such as the whole of Hobbit Wave 3 at 50% off over the last few days (so Lonely Mountain at £50 / $75). That makes it worth it.

It looks like an 8x8 build challenge, so facades are often necessary to convey what is there in such a smal space.

I wonder if I'm the only one thinking you spelt "comparisons" wrong? I had to look up caparisons. :-)

Yeah, definitely fake. Good luck getting your money back.

LDD is not really lego. That may well be popular! I'd like to go further and ban all ideas links.

The other thing yuo can do is put a line at the end of the instructions, that if you enjoyed the build, make a donation via paypal. I have often built other people's models from their free instructions, and though that I would have paid a few dollars for the instructions if I had known the build was as good as it was. Whereas others have been fairly boring builds and I wouldn't have paid for them. Paying if you enjoy rather than upfront means that you only give if you think it is worth it.