MAB

Even if they are opposed to individual small sets, putting together different parts of the city in one large combined set still works for me.

There is also the issue with design techniques that if someone claims they were the first person to use a technique in an IDEAS submission then chances are someone else will have used it on a public viewable space before. I remember a decade or so ago some telling me to take down a MOC on Flickr because I used a technique without crediting them (a tiled floor from headlight bricks to create a dogtooth like check pattern) that they claimed to have invented. Yet I know I put four together like it 20 years before that, even though at the time I never had enough to create a larger pattern, or the Internet to claim it as mine. And I have no doubt some else did it 10 years before me.

They always have the explanation: The reason we designed the parts like that was so they could fit together in many different ways including that way.

Yes, she has a different point of view to some people that want to cancel her because she has strong views on women's rights especially where they overlap with trans rights. Public opinion here wavers and has done so even in the last couple of weeks. And some people can separate art from the artist. But that is a different off-topic matter not for here. A lot of kids worldwide still read the books and even more watch the movies and go to theme parks. LEGO would be crazy to give up on that fan-base. I think it is hard to say. I like minifigure scale sets, but don't necessarily care too much for the play aspects. I'd take a decent looking minifigure based display set over a not so good looking minifigure based play set. I enjoyed the first rounds of playsets, although they were also decent display sets. But (large number of) other adults didn't buy into them. No! Fleshie fans need the yellowskin fans and vice versa. Who do you think we swap all those unwanted yellow heads and hands with in exchange for nice flesh tones. It was interesting to see that the latest batch of LOTR figures had lose a lot of the little neck area of skin print, so ideal for changing to yellow, just as recently more generic yellowskin characters have been easier to change to fleshie.

To me that one is awful, as do most of the entire city of Minas Tirith in one set type MOCs. The 2020 review one was better but similar flaws. It fails as a play type set as the buildings are too small for figures. The ballistas are twice the size of the great hall. The fellbeast is larger than the top level. It also fails as a display set since it doesn't really look like Minas Tirith. It tries to be both play and display and ends up failing at both. I'd prefer either a microscale set for the location with no trying to shoehorn in minifigs or decent sized buildings that are minifig scale without trying to represent the entire city. Do one thing well rather than two things badly.

A big difference now compared to 10 years ago is that people know LEGO is valuable on the resale market and as soon as decent sets have a discount they get cleared out. 20-30% is a pretty decent discount now on popular sets. A decade ago I wouldn't buy unless it has a 30% discount as it was almost guaranteed that every (non-D2C) set would get that discount at some stage. Some sets don't need discounting at all if the retailer knows they are selling well.

This does it perfectly well in a single level with the courtyard and White Tree of Gondor surrounded by the Great Hall and Citadel. Just like Rivendell doesn't need the full location, Minas Tirith is recognizable at a large minifigure scale without needing to show the geography of the whole city. They can go big minifigure scale and do really nicely detailed buildings that figures can fit in and focus on character based scenes within Minas Tirith or a small minifigure scale like the MOCS on IDEAS, and have a tiny great hall that is just a couple of minifigures tall and focus on the shape of the overall city. Personally, I prefer the former to the latter. It comes down to do they want a display of the whole city or scenes within the city. I don't think there is any need to. They are different audiences. It doesn't matter if they run out of new stuff for HP, since the audience is constantly refreshed and it is still popular with young kids now just as it was in the past. It has been three years since the burrow. Give it another two years, and they can probably do it again. Repeat that with Hagrid's Hut, the Forbidden Forest, and just about every room in Hogwarts. Kids will continue to want them. It doesn't really matter if adults don't buy the 8-12 age range sets as kids do. Give it a few months and it wouldn't surprise me if Indy was bigger than LOTR for the 8-12 and 12-16 year old age brackets.

They were so long ago though, they would be ignored. Look at repeats in SW and HP. Minifigure scale makes perfect sense for Minas Tirith. Lego knows minifigures help sell large sets. Minas Tirith does not need to be a complete city, just like the Rivendell set is a small fraction of the on screen location. I can imagine them doing part of the great hall (about the same depth as Rivendell), a beacon and a bit of the courtyard, maybe a small part of wall / fortification. I also imagine they would repeat some of the characters they are now doing (Pippin and Gandalf, Aragorn and Arwen) in different outfits.

In many cases, I don't think customer service knows as much as us!

We already can, at least if you have been a LOTR LEGO fan for a while.

That seems a bit soon. I doubt they have even analysed sales figures of the brickheadz sets yet, let alone had time to produce a new one based on those sales.

No. The eye in both sets are references to the flash of the eye seen in the movies when Gimli tries to destroy the ring.

I think my favourite part has to be the chairs made from sausages and a lolly. Will they supply a tool to align all those 1x1 tiles? I'm pleased the minifigures are different enough from the originals to distinguish them. I'm not sure they've necessarily improved on them though. The Hobbit legs are great. Merry and Pippin look a bit goofy with those big grins and teeth showing, but at least they will be double sided heads. Boromir still has orange hair although his beard does seem to be a bit darker, and Gimli joins him fresh from the hairdresser with his new orange beard. Bilbo looks good. Legolas looks weird, I don't know what it is about him but I prefer the original one. I also don't like the brick built legs to get Frodo to sit, but that is easy to avoid.

I found Flash and the single pack Kylo Ren did OK. I think I paid £3.25 each and they sold for between £9-11 each before postage. But yeah, Cyborg not so good for resale. We don't get heavy discounts on decent sets any more though, stuff seems to disappear at 30% off, and rarely gets to 50% let alone 75% like it used to.

I guess it depends what the quest is ... to get your hands on one, or to get it home again. Still, building it is going to take even longer!

That looks great. Good to see some appropriate use for one of the Nexo tiles too.

It took Frodo and Sam about six months to get to Mordor and destroy the ring to complete their quest, and you cannot spend 2.5 hours on a train to complete yours? :-)

I feel much the same. Especially if they are doing market research for a concept, the details don't really matter. But the fact that they are at least thinking of releasing such a set is at least a positive. But way too early to discuss what details were in the images.

Their location says Russia, so that might not be an option as LEGO was meant to have halted deliveries there. Although LEGO also said that they had closed their stores in Russia too. From what I understand, they stopped publishing them in calendars for two reasons: the first is that during covid times there were delays in getting products delivered to their hubs and so they couldn't guarantee GWP would be available at the right time (bearing in mind the calendars were online a couple of months in advance) and second that it looks bad and they get complaints if they are still advertising a GWP in the online calendar and it has run out of stock. They have probably learnt that they no longer need to tell people far in advance about GWPs and sets sell very well with out this knowledge. Plus of course late notice helps with incentivizing impulse buys.

Didn't LEGO pull out of Russia and close their stores there?

There are many possible reasons. It may be that they bought it then regretted it and cannot return it, they may be in a country where LEGO stores are franchises and not run by LEGO and give discounts, they may have bought it to get freebies, employee discount if they work or used to work in the factory, ... Sure you can, it just depends what price you are comparing to.

It is unrealistic to expect them to say you cannot submit a Snow White set if they have one in development. It would be akin to saying we are doing a Snow White set. To keep their development sets secret, they'd have to hide it by banning loads of submissions, whether they were in development or not.

In the same way that you cannot discount Dimensions sets, if you count anything with the LOTR branding on the box. When it comes to the listing of the brickheadz sets on bricklink, brickset, etc they are under Brickheadz (just like the Dimensions sets are under Dimensions). Same on LEGO's site, they are primarily under brickheadz, with just a link to them from the LOTR page. So anyone getting a list of all the LOTR sets on bricklink or brickset will not find these within the LOTR categories.

So either they are working on adding loads of new parts or they have totally broken it. It could be good or it could be bad!

Did it reach 10K and get rejected? Looking at what is archived on IDEAS, one person submitted in 2015 and got to about 1500 votes, then a different user submitted in 2018 and got to almost 2300, and a third user submitted later in 2018 and got to just over 600. Was there another one that is missing? Who did LEGO steal the idea from? The middle one that didn't make even 25% of the required vote, or the first one that had even less. And did the second submission steal the idea from the first? Maybe LEGO asked some train fans what adult builders might be interested in and they came up with that. The dates also don't quite match up. The official set was released July 2020, and the 2300 vote one was automatically rejected for not enough support in Oct 2019. So LEGO managed to design and produce one of the first ICONS sets and get it on shelves in a little over six months. Why would they be taking such a big risk on a train that didn't even get to 25% of the required vote to make it to the review stage? Surely they would have stolen an idea that actually achieved review status because they know there is some demand for it. Or do you think they stole the idea when it got to maybe 1000 votes and started planning their version then?