MAB

The LEGO Movie showed them they can create a successful theme by mashing lots of different ideas together so long as there is consistency between them. That is essentially what they have continued to do with Ninjago, the theme that can have space rockets, mechs, futuristic vehicles, traditional ships, futuristic and traditional architecture, pirates, snakes, robotic and underwater adversaries. And it all fits together unlike the classic themes, or Atlantis and Galaxy Squad or Alien Conquest.

I'd assume in the Rivendell range rather than The Shire.

I imagine it is part but not all of the reason. I expect there to be a whole list of different reasons for different countries, some where it is clear cut and others where it could have gone either way. And although it would be nice, I doubt bricklink/LEGO would ever tell us because then it would be "why country A, when country B has the same or similar rules", "country C is more important than country D", and of course there might also be financial reasons and/or strategic partnerships where they would not want to disclose secretive information. Not that any of that helps the genuine sellers or buyers where they are affected by it. But at least they have a little longer to both benefit from pre-Christmas sales this year and to decide whether and where to shift their business to. On some forums and youtube, some people are saying it is the end of bricklink with such bad press. But it really only affects about or less than 2% of buyers when you discount the scam accounts from Vietnam. So it will be interesting to see what the order numbers are like going forwards. For me, they have been tending to an all time high over the past two years when looking month by month (although I keep records on order value rather than order numbers). Even in the last two weeks, about 1/3 of my orders have been from what appear to be new, zero feedback buyers. Whether they are new or just messed up the account integration and need a new account I don't know, but if bricklink can tap into the large number of AFOLs that have been buying / collecting sets and get them to start MOCing as well, then I imagine it will continue to grow. I guess most people (especially adults) start by buying sets then discover bricklink when they want to take the hobby further than just official sets. If so, then then the increase in LEGO fans in recent years will continue to filter through to growth in BL too.

Many countries have new marketplace laws around tax reporting and collection that are coming in, or have come in in the last couple of years. In the UK, tax was always due on sales (on profit after expenses) whether it was sold on BL, ebay, vinted, etc. But, guess what, people didn't declare it. So now sites have to pass on details to government when someone hits 30 orders or £1700 per year. The EU has similar rules, as do many other countries. Similarly VAT was never charged on BL fees but now it is, it has to be collected and remitted in each country where they operate. Laws change and even though business models worked in the past, that doesn't mean that they can ignore new legislation. It is true that any costs are tiny compared to the LEGO groups total earnings, but that doesn't mean that it should not be financially well managed. Even though links are closer than ever with LEGO now accounts are merged, it is supposedly a separate company and if it became loss making I would imagine LEGO would just cut it. I'm not sure how much of an issue it is for the global image. I don't think many customers in LEGO stores or toy stores know about bricklink, or use bricklink, or care about people in other countries access to bricklink. I imagine the numbers are small and get smaller in that order. A lot of youtubers made videos about it once other people had, but I wonder how much of that is because they actually care and how much is because outrage at LEGO gets them hits and they profit from that, or they need to because if other youtubers are outraged then they need to be to keep up.

LEGO can never kill the secondary market for LEGO products and they know that. If they remove items from BL, they would get sold elsewhere (look at the Osprey set). They can choose to destroy their site but that market will move elsewhere or they choose to have some involvement and get the information they want (and some income that is tiny compared to their other operations and probably barely covers their staff and infrastructure costs). But if they choose to have involvement it has to be cost effective. And in some regions it won't be. I'm surprised they didn't take preventative action against Vietnam earlier given how much trouble users there were causing. Of the 100000 or so buyer accounts being blocked, 60% of them are Vietnamese and nearly all of them are scam accounts, used to try to scam others or advertise gambling sites. Those users are pretty rude. I guess the issue is if they block them then the same users will just use VPNs to do the same thing from other virtual regions.

Bricklink has to do more than report and hand over records. When they charge fees to sellers it is a paid service, they have to collect VAT on those fees in some locations but not others and remit those. For sales to buyers, they sometimes have to collect sales tax or VAT and ensure that the correct certificates are issued. Instead of them doing this for each country, they are using 'processing partners' that are essentially a company based in the region that is responsible for correctly calculating, recording, collecting and remitting tax on their behalf. And keeping these updated, so they are always compliant with changing rules. I assume it is not worth them partnering with a company where the revenue is negligible, and it is definitely not worth their time trying to understand often complex rules about what individual countries require. I was looking at some of the stores in countries where there are only a couple of stores and based on the feedback numbers and the size of store, I reckon their yearly sales could be maybe a few hundred dollars. That might be a big deal for their 'pocket money'. But if it was $300, then bricklink gets $9 in fees. Even if there are 10 stores, that's still less than $100 income. If I am wrong by a factor of ten, it is still less than $1000 yearly income for BL. I don't know how much it costs them to partner was a local tax partner and to implement necessary changes in their software to collect the correct information for that country. But I doubt the numbers add up. I used to sell to Germany via BL and I normally did maybe 20 sales a year there so relatively small. But when the new packaging laws came in and the requirements to register (at a cost) to be LUCID compliant, I stopped selling there. It wasn't worth the registration fees. Some people ignore it and get away with it but I prefer to reduce risk and comply. Occasionally German buyers ask why and try to convince me it wouldn't be caught but it isn't worth it, especially as the item is likely to sell to a UK buyer, or maybe to someone in France or The Netherlands if I wait another couple of weeks. Even if there was additional income opening up to German buyers, the additional LUCID fees don't make sense nor does the time required to look into it. I imagine it is the same for BL where there are small numbers, not worth outsourcing to a local company and not worth their employees' time.

I am not at all worried. The UK is a massive market for bricklink. The user numbers (as a proxy for buyer numbers) are almost 10% of the total, and for stores, the UK has over 10% of those registered (just over 2000). So they need to have a single local expert / tax compliance partner to cover 10% of their business. BL made sure that they were fully tax collection and reporting compliant very quickly so that their UK marketplace was not unduly affected. I don't know what other organisations you think are going to have issue with UK sellers on BL , the important thing is that HMRC know that BL is collecting and remitting VAT on imports when UK buyers purchase from abroad, and is also collecting VAT on the service charges for UK based sellers, and reporting sale volumes for UK based sellers for tax reasons. It is nothing to do with the EU. They (or the individual nations) care about their citizens being correctly taxed when selling, and their citizens paying the correct VAT when they import. Bricklink already does that for UK sellers selling into the EU. It is the same for all the EU nations, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Canada. BL have local partners that they use to deal with marketplace tax compliance. And similar in the US for sales tax collection. If they have to employ someone to provide local compliance expertise in a country where they have 10 bricklink stores, the cost per store is enormous. Even worse where there are two stores. The direction of travel is that it is acting in a more professional way, and not circumventing tax laws. If LEGO want to destroy bricklink then the secondary market will not go away. I already sell far more used sets on ebay than I do on bricklink. B+P is also not bricklink, so there would be little difference for used sets. Parts is a bit harder, but if there was no BL sell-by-parts independent alternative (although there already is) then I would probably sell parts bagged by the 100 or whatever on ebay. LEGO does not hold anywhere near the number of elements compared to what bricklink has and nothing I have seen suggests that they want to retain retired parts for future sales. They recently reduced prices of parts to clear stock of parts that were being removed from B+P, suggesting the opposite. Further, if they wanted to boost their direct sales, they would close B+P to drive people to have to buy sets rather than parts. Any successful business concentrates on markets where it will make profit rather than losses. Why would they they open stores in locations where people cannot afford their product as that would lead to losses, and why would they reduce the cost of their product in those areas to make those stores viable when if they did people would buy it there then export it to the richer nations and undercut LEGO's business elsewhere. LEGO is a luxury product, not an essential that is being withheld from poorer nations. If this was food or healthcare, the situation would be different.

I sort roughly by part type, then by colour. So all bricks are at one side. When getting the parts ready, I tend to have bricks bagged by colour and type and keep them in the bags. So if I need a blue 1x2, I just lean towards the bricks, reach to the blue area and pick up the 1x2 bag. If it was much bigger, I might sort by type and brick ID (like my main parts collection) rather than type then colour, but that can take up way more space if you have huge numbers of part types.

It does highlight differences. It is good that they email sellers affected (whether 1, 100 or 1000 that are affected). But it also shows quite a different approach where brickowl is stepping back and essentially saying deal with payments between yourselves using whatever payments you want. Which is great until something goes wrong and there is no buyer protection for the customer. Whereas BL has been tending towards more consumer rights by forcing new stores to use PayPal or stripe rather than bank transfer, and it wouldn't surprise me if they go further that way towards only allowing online and onsite payments. The BO approach is dealing with it by stepping back and not getting involved. I doubt a bigger company would get away with that. I can't see ebay or amazon marketplace telling customers to pay a stranger using bank transfer. I'd also be surprised if Mexico gets removed in the near future from bricklink. Surely BL would know about it and would have rolled it into this group unless they already had a solution for Mexico planned. One very slightly bigger lot of bad news is better than a big one followed by another smaller one a few months later.

The world of online selling has changed. LEGO and bricklink has to comply or not operate. Some of the countries have no stores, more than half of the countries being removed have less than 10 stores. They would need to have their IT systems updated to collect and remit tax records for each country, and that is likely to be a different system for each one. In some cases they would need to have a legal representative in the country. Are they really going to go to the expense for a couple of stores? It is funny you say 2+2=4 as 2 is the number of stores affected in Chile and Colombia, 4 in total. The total number of stores affected worldwide is under 400. That is less than the number of stores in quite a few individual European countries. I can understand the costs of compliance make it unprofitable and probably loss making to allow stores in some countries. When it comes to buyers, it appears to be about 2% of accounts affected. But those stats are less reliable due to the number of spam accounts and accounts with no purchases / feedback. I think a lot of those are due to be removed when the merge deadline is up at the end of the year. At one stage, over 100 new accounts were being created in Vietnam every day, yet barely any were being used to buy (so no feedback) but many have "me" pages advertising gambling sites and were sending loads of messages until the block on new accounts spamming was implemented.

Netherlands is similar, lower population but high number of stores and buyers. I saw a comment on a YouTube video that LEGO had banned 2.5 billion people from playing with LEGO. Some of the claims made are just plain stupid and detract from the sensible comments that people genuinely affected make.

Even if they had to change the style, changing the colour does make it look like a different person. They also reduced the prominence of his cheek mole.

They have extended until 31st January to help affected sellers transition away / sell off stock. Plus waiving fees for Nov-Jan for those sellers.

The communication has definitely been the worst part of it, and I think a bit of an own goal. They should have sent affected users an email rather than putting the announcement in the forum. It is this that some of the clickbait driven anti-LEGO youtubers have gone on about, implying LEGO are trying to hide the decision. I think the problem here is that LEGO/ bricklink has a community forum and they assume that people read what is posted in the announcements there. When the reality is that not many do, including many of the LEGO news type websites as it took most of them a week or so to notice. But when one does, they all do as they seem to copy each other for news rather than keep up with announcements via bricklink forum. Similarly so many are going on about 30% of the world being excluded from bricklink based on population sizes and how this is signaling the end of bricklink (and LEGO). The reality is that in terms of current members it is really quite a small amount. Romania has more stores than Brazil, and The Netherlands has twenty times more stores than Brazil. Brazil's 8500 users are about 0.5% of the total number of registered users. It is sad for those users, but the clickbait youtubers that make money from outrage are really going for it. There seems to be a lot of stored up hatred for LEGO at the moment. I imagine a lot of this is for other reasons, but any anti-LEGO story and they all pile in. Some of the conspiracy theories on YouTube are ridiculous.

This isn't quite right. EU marketplace regulations apply to BL and so if BL wants to operate in the EU they can be forced to get their users to agree to certain terms. Otherwise it is the site that is not complying, rather than individuals. This was done recently, all sellers had to agree to abide by an EU regulation (DSA). The regulations apply to anyone selling into the EU, not just those based in the EU. And because any seller can tick a box and advertise goods for sale into the EU, then BL has to ensure that all sellers agree to follow it, whether they currently sell to the EU or not. https://www.bricklink.com/help.asp?helpID=2655 Other sites are affected by similar things. For example on ebay, we (in UK) have to put the country of origin on products. If we do not, they will not be advertised in the USA even if we select to ship to the USA, as without this information they cannot be processed for tariffs. It is, but it is autonomous. Denmark controls security and foreign policy but otherwise Greenland governs itself, and that includes financial matters, finance regulation, import/export, etc. It is essentially independent for business matters. One of the other rumours doing the rounds is that this is about buyer protection through PayPal and that the countries in the list all have weaker consumer protection that gets implemented through PayPal.

Yes, the quality of design has been increased, with more dual molding and more printing, although whether that makes the figures better or not is debatable. I find too much print can mean that the figures might work well for one off characters but less well if you want more than one (name tags, rips/damage in same place, pouches in the same place, etc), or if you want to use the parts for other things. I really don't like print that goes from torso to legs as that essentially ties the two parts together but then that also happens a lot in normal sets too, not just CMF. There were some individual good accessories in the past but the average has definitely got better, although given the price increase I would expect that. I used to like the frequency as we got essentially one CMF per week, even if I used to buy/swap more towards when they were first released. So I used to make a 8x8 vignette for each one, it was a simple 30 minutes activity once per week. But going to 12 out then nothing for the rest of the year, I find I get out of the habit. I think also it doesn't help (for my interest in CMF) that we are now getting better characters (or at least body parts) in regular sets and these are easy to buy in quantity via PAB for less than the cost of a CMF.

With China, I don't think it had anything to do with fake parts. The 'nightshift' parts were apparently mainly from Mexico but entered bricklink usually via American and European sellers that bought on other sites in bulk to sell on BL. And for used parts, everywhere has sellers that don't check carefully enough when dealing with mass second hand bulk. Agreed. Especially in the last few years this type of thing has grown and as LEGO are a huge company they have far more to lose than when BL was a small company. We've had issues here with imgur. They disagreed with our governmental internet safety organisation and just pulled out of the UK rather than comply. So when people post images here linked from imgur, they are blocked for us unless we use a vpn.

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It is not a particularly good thing to do and the most frustrating part is that no reasons are given. At least doing that makes it understandable and cuts out the rumours as to why it is being done. However you ought to change your post. It does not start until 12th December, whereas you say "today" (1st December). Users in those countries will also still be able to use the site, but not the marketplace. So they can continue to use it for inventories, use studio for digital designs, and the other features, just not the marketplace. It is also not "all around the world" which suggests everyone is affected. It is specific countries and affects only a very small percentage of users. Of course it is very hard on those users, at least the active ones that use the marketplace and especially sellers that were given only three weeks notice before their stores are to be closed. I started a thread on it over a week ago in the buy/sell/trade section where other bricklink marketplace threads go, but it seems that either very few people use that area or they don't care about it. One rumour (probably the most credible one to me) is that LEGO is signing an exclusive distribution contract with a company in these areas so LEGO won't be the primary distributor. To have a LEGO subsidiary arranging grey market sales for sets in those areas would go against that. It is also interesting that there was nowhere near as much outrage when LEGO totally blocked all users from China, they cannot access the site at all with an account, although i think the can access it for inventories. There a reason was given, it is about data storage and to operate in China, they have to be based and keep records on Chinese users in China.

And in the more distant past, we had three unlicensed sets of 16 per year. So 48 unlicensed characters per year. That was the peak of CMF collecting for me.

I also think tan is fine here. For me, it is Sacre Couer that is wrong, it would look better in white as that is always lit up.

It wasn't actually a planned concert. It started raining and so the tennis was postponed and he happened to be there in the audience. So he picked up a microphone and did an impromptu sing-along to keep the crowd entertained.

Nice, good motion. But where is Cliff 1996!?

The B&P were done badly this year for the Western Europe zone. I also had cows, more Black Falcons, etc in my cart at the sale prices but all went out of stock after the central European time zone promotions started but before it did in UK (and presumably Portugal and Ireland). It is an issue where there is shared stock but the promotions don't start at the same time due to local time differences. I assumed it would happen so placed a smaller order at the sale prices beforehand but obviously didn't get the promotions or double points on those.

Yes, it is subjective that people prefer studless smooth models rather than studded designs with rough surfaces created from studded plates. But your view is subjective too. When I look at MOCs of vehicles, I think the majority of builders aim for studless designs and I assume this is because they are more aesthetically pleasing. But yes, it takes a while for a range to change aesthetics. It is highly unrealistic to expect them to develop a full range of panels in one go, but more realistic to expect a slower evolution as they determine what works in terms of design and what people will buy. I don't understand your "fact" that studless beams are easier to connect at the ends, because studded beams can also be connected just as easily and can also be stacked vertically. Although a lot of parts such as studded beams / technic bricks originated in Technic, I don't think of them as Technic only parts or that Technic is or should be completely separate or distanced from System. They have studs so they connect to System parts. There is no need for System and Technic to be separate. At the time they were introduced they had no use in System as the designs then were very simple studs up and relatively small. Plus of course, System as branding hasn't existed for 25 years or so.