MAB

This is why I like displaying MOCs/MODs over sets. You can make them fit the space and be continuous / coherent, rather than having to fit in a mixture of sets at different sizes or scales. If there is a new faction, they can move in to an existing structure or destroy it and rebuild if there is no more space. Whereas squeezing in more sets into an already crowded display looks messy. Plus if they sell the minifigure parts, it can be way cheaper than buying whole new sets.

Of course it could be coincidence. There will be quite a few police constables with that number in the different areas, and the chances of one of them with that number being male and having a moustache is quite high.

A brickset poll will be highly skewed as it has quite a niche membership compared to the more general population or even just LEGO buying adults. You only need to look at the comments when there is a 'controversial' set to see that (not too different to here in that sense.) There have been plenty of sets that seem to have sold quite well in the past, but were trashed by AFOL forum members.

Personally, I don't care what brand people build with. But this is a LEGO based fan site, for discussing building with LEGO. If clone brands or fakes come up as a natural part of a discussion, it is fine. But if someone is only here to promote other brands, start threads about non-LEGO products and continually put down LEGO, then this is not the place for it.

For a short time, they used the name Cleopatra in the online CMF bios for the Egyptian Queen. There are also employee 'business cards' minifigures.

Presumably Firefabric copied the poses of the other designer to highlight what he was calling copying.

Don't use the easy buy, instead go to the next page and look at the stores it is selecting. It will try to minimise the number of stores, but that tends to favour larger stores that charge higher prices. Least favourite any stores you think are over charging, then run the wants list search again. As for the pricing, remember these are hand picked orders, and the seller is not working for free. And if you are wanting more in-demand pieces, these will cost more than low demand pieces. The price you pay for parts on bricklink really depends on supply and demand. Many parts cost a few cents but some will be much higher. It really depends what you are buying. I cannot say I have ever seen picking fees of 60 Euro. But least favourite that store and select again.

Or they could use sales data.

Fleshie or yellow ...? :-) George Lucas chose to sell it. The new owners can do whatever they like with their property.

If they are producing sets with better figures, they aren't reproducing the old sets. They are making new sets based on the old, but they are different. Remember that AFOL collectors care about that sort of thing much more than kids. Bringing in new collectors that don't care which variant they have doesn't really change demand for the old. Without the new sets, chances are they wouldn't have bought the old. But also even if just 1% of the new collectors want every version, that will change the demand for the old. Sales volumes for the original figures are low after 10 years. Even just 10 new collectors worldwide wanting new condition original figures every year and willing to pay inflated prices is enough to prop up the high prices for them. I've sold two sets of the original Fellowship figures (individually) since Rivendell was released. I put prices up after selling the first lot and the second lot still sold. For example, Boromir sold for £38 then £42 (June and July) at the same time the new one was about £15. Two does sound like many, but bear in mind it is probably about 5% of worldwide sales per year before Rivendell was released. As long as there is a tiny demand for the originals, prices remain. Volumes are probably at leat 10x more for the new, with even larger stocks. There is no need to drop prices to try to compete with the new, when even a small number are prepared to pay higher prices for the old. If someone listed their new condition original figures at the prices of the new versions, I'd buy them in an instant even though i still have a reasonable number of each left.

It will be hard if you wantvto match the font style. However AC had a few sets with stickers. You could use one of those on a panel if you want a perfect match in style.

Why would you want the old ones to drop in price if the newer ones are better? Even if the originals lost 50% of the value, the new ones would still be cheaper. Aside from the Hobbit legs, I think I prefer the prints of the original ones as a whole group.

I find you can trim a collection, which helps increase space for other stuff, as you dont need to display it all at once. I was LOTR complete but I don't want the Brickheadz and I've not really got space for Rivendell. I borrowed and built it, but I won't be buying it. I've already got the original figures and I've built smaller parts of Rivendell for display, along with small parts of other scenes, without needing the whole thing. The only set I've got built as a set is Bag End. Orthanc, I went the other way and I increased that in height. The other sets, I've now either boxed away or sold without minifigs. Or used as moc parts. After a while distinct sets that are different sizes just create a messy sprawl. I prefer doing a 16x16 vignette with a few figures to create a scene. Then have a series of the same size vignettes. I find that is neater and gives me more space for other stuff on display.I do the same for SW aside from the occasional big set. I only do the original trilogy, but have most important scenes shrunk to 16x16, at least enough of them to recreate the storyline. Jabba created a big problem, needing a double slot. Then similar for other movie franchises. So I have a 16x16 display for each of Indiana Jones, ET, The Goonies, Gremlins, Mission Impossible, Stand By Me, and so on. For those, the core characters plus a bit of scene is enough for me. I kep the licensed and unlicensed separate (in different rooms), partly as unlicensed doesn't work so well as vignettes.

Remember this is a LEGO fan site, and not a general brick building site. There are threads for discussing Mega, Bluebrixx, etc in the community section. https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?/forums/forum/7-community/ So it is understandable why LEGO fans here sometimes get fed up with discussion of other brands. The mods are pretty fair handed when it comes to dealing / moving the out of pace discussions. If it is a little and in context, I don't think most people mind. When it comes over as straight up advertising, they move them. When someone continually posts anti-LEGO and/or pro-other brand threads, they are also likely to get added to ignore lists.

I'm not sure, my last Matchbox car would have been a Lesney one! But I agree there is plenty of room on the brick building shelves for legitimate clone brands. LEGO won't do so many subjects, other brands can take up the slack there. I still have all my Character Building Doctor Who figures, an example of a clone company doing a better job than LEGO when they had the licence. I also think Mega did a better (and more timely) job with Despicable Me / Minions.

They have the same parent company, both are Mattel.

The new Fellowship minifigures are considerably cheaper than the originals despite coming in a very large set, and they haven't really had any impact on the prices of the originals. If they re-release the Gandalf Arrives set, I doubt the value of the two figures from the original set would change very much, but the volume of sales would decrease. They are relatively common and cheap compared to other original figures already. A re-release would impact the price of modern Gandalf figures from Rivendell and any other new sets, as people wanting a modern Gandalf in grey robes can easily get one. That is pretty much what happened first time around. Gandalf the Grey figures were cheap, as were the two Frodo figures as they were repeated or in a cheap polybag. Whereas Gandalf the White wasn't repeated and has kept value. Even with how common the sand green Frodo is, there have been just 29 transactions on bricklink in the past six months for new ones, worldwide. If a new version comes out, sellers are likely to keep the same prices and accept slower sales. They have been holding them for 10 years, waiting another 10 is not a big deal.

First, you are running a business. This is not a one off, you have more than ten sets of instructions for sale on rebrickable. You are repeating the same action, making MOCs to profit from them, which is a business. It might not be a very profitable one, but the intention is to make money from the sales so it is a business. They are also all based on other companies' intellectual property, which puts you in a grey area both with the company and with other designers that are giving away or selling instructions for the same object. What does it matter how others feel? If you feel OK about it, that's fine. If you feel angry about it, that's fine. Different people will feel differently. Something you may not have considered is that you have almost certainly infringed on the other designer's copyright. Presumably you do not have permission to use his images - and he owns the copyright to those images (even if not the design, he has copyright over his own images, he created them). Obviously I am assuming he has not given you permission to use his images to portray him in a negative way online. Unless you have built his design and taken the comparison images that you have published, you are infringing on his copyright. You are taking his property and using it without permission.

Unless they are direct copies, I doubt the old sets would fall in value if they did a new smallish range. If anything, new sets increase the number of people looking for the old sets so increases the demand and helps to push up prices. If they suddenly released multiple new versions of Saruman or Theoden it might hit the value if the original figures. But the new versions of the Fellowship minifigures have not really impacted the prices of the old ones. That was part of the problem with Harry Potter, they released so many sets with multiple repetitions of Harry, Ron and Hermione that the old sets were no longer valued as sets or minifigure packs. If they started doing as many sets as Harry Potter, and they were done well and contained lots of variants of the characters, and did it year after year, then old set prices would be impacted.

Indeed, LEGO are the ones that choose all the rules of the game. They choose to take orders a year in advance. They choose the maximum number they will produce, even if many more people want them but are too late to order despite them not starting production for many months (presumably as they want to limit how much is paid to non-LEGO designers). They choose the limits. They choose not to do more regular crowd funding where you pay upfront but allow you to order and drop out. If someone decides to drop out, or buy something else in the meantime then flip what they bought as they no longer want it, it is on LEGO.

You should feel how you feel. If you want to be outraged by it, then be outraged. If you don't mind it, then don't mind it. If you want an exact percentage that can be produced in the same or similar way then you'd have to ask a lawyer. There is no community guideline. However, a lawyer would probably tell you that you are on very thin ice as you are trying to profit from another company's design without their permission. If someone copied a design that was truly of your making, then more people would care and in fact there have been similar discussions about it when a designer was giving instructions for free and someone took them and started selling the designs - they suffered a lot of backlash from various sites. But where you have reproduced a third party's IP in a way that many others have done before, and you are expecting payment for it, then other people care a lot less.

No it isn't, copying a component is like copying a brick. Copying a whole car design is more like copying a set. LEGO has either copied or produced similar bricks to other companies, depending on your viewpoint. The humble 1x5 plate for example, MB had it years before LEGO. LEGO have also either copied or alternatively came up with by themselves (again depending on your viewpoint) very similar minifigure accessories to small thrid party companies.

They are not rejecting playsets. Many of the successful sets have play features. They have just passed the modular-like Botanical Garden, and have done other buildings that are modular-like scale and style, even if not the exact same footprint as the official ones. It makes sense that they don't pass things that look like their own regular modulars, but they have shown that they will pass sets similar in style but outside of what might be expected in the official range. And they will do castle related sets if they think there is a reason to do one through IDEAS (like the Blacksmith). In my view, no. It shouldn't be based on affordability just to enter the competition. It used to be that you could draw a picture to enter! If it had to be physically built, you'd still get the same sorts of sets passing review, just that they would come from a smaller range of designers with bigger budgets (and probably youtube channels) behind them.

It looks great. I know it can be hard when restricting yourself to only parts from before a specific date, or also parts after a specific date. When you know there is a part that would be perfect for a particular use, but cannot use it.

I can also see similarities in places between yours and other designs of the same car that came before. Those designers could feel that you have copied bits from their design including part selection for specific items, even if not the whole thing, and it becomes a closed argument. You've also both used the same parts as LEGO used in their version in some places. Should the first person to design something that looks like a third company's intellectual property get to close down any future versions, because they use similar parts for the decoration on the outside. Of course the reality is often many people would have chosen the same LEGO element if they were designing the same thing at the same scale.