MAB

I imagine release in the next six months. And presumably it will be available for a couple of years. So even if it is $500, putting away $20 a month will be enough to buy it during its shelf life, and better still allows the buyer to look for offers or deals.

They could do what they did with the remake of the UCS Millennium Falcon and issue UCS wheels for the boxes.

It might be that when teens are into that semi-rebellious phase then they are also starting to rebel against their 'little kid' toys too, and where they are still into their toys then there is too much difference into what they might be into. There have been some smaller sets and especially CMFs in the past that touch on themes like the skater boys and girls, the trendsetter, various gamers and DJ characters, a few goth-like figures, k-pop style fashion, and so on.

So Ninjago can never replace realistic sci-fi, but City is "poor" because it is too realistic? This type of set doesn't look very NASA like to me. This looks like a direct descendent of earlier fantasy-based Space themes. Ninjago (along with City) can replace Castle, Pirates and Space. We know that because it has literally replaced them. Times move on, and kids' interests change. Classic Castle, Pirates and Space are now just nostalgia based ideas primarily for adults covered by ICONS.

It doesn't need to replace realistic space / sci-fi, as City does that. And Ninjago covers much of fantasy. Then there is the shorter lived 'guest' theme of Monkie Kidd, Nexo Knights, Hidden Side. That is LEGO's current unlicensed arrangement, with no need for one year themes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Is 95th a big anniversary, bigger (in importance) than 90th? No doubt the 100th anniversary in 6/7 years time will bring plenty of a nod to history sets but if they stick a 95th anniversary badge it looks a bit desperate to me. Especially with the 50th anniversary of the minifigure coming, that seems a bigger deal than 95th of the company and I expect we'll get remakes of minifigures. The question is, do they (re-)release just the minifigures or also some building sets for them to go in?

Given the timescales for production, I doubt they compete for sales! "Hey, look I'm really positive about BDP. How about giving me the sets to review?"

At least you are fairly quick to remove once reported. The same level of spamming at bricklink can take many hours to remove.

It is also worth remembering that collectors of the original series were used to getting 48 different generic / unlicensed characters per year, whereas now it is more like 12. Those were the days when if I didn't like a character, there would be new ones along very soon. I'd get them anyway to be complete, especially as they were cheap, and there would soon be something else to look forward to. For each one, I'd build a little 8x8 vignette, it was a regular 30 min build every week. It was also when swaping and trading figures was quite popular so there was a community aspect to it. Whereas now, I reckon for every one CMF I get hold of, I buy at least 25 on PAB. I'm no longer CMF complete so I didn't mind getting rid of my older early figures that I don't like, and good for me the late to the party collectors pay silly money for them. I find now that I have very little anticipation for a new series, I'll buy a couple of any I like but that is it. There is barely any community swapping, people buy boxes to get complete series rather than individual packs. Very different times.

I like the new Paris set, but I agree it isn't really what I'd expect in Architecture. It is more Art than Architecture.

It is not necessarily my job either but I always flag obvious spam. I think it is the job of users to report anything like that, then the mods can clean up.

I think LEGO are still very dedicated to non-licensed themes, but not necessarily the classic ones that people used to play with 30+ years ago. And for the people that did play back then, they know nostalgia sells well and so I reckon we will continue to see single expensive sets every so often but not full themes composed of small, medium and large sets. Classic may equal non-licensed, but non-licensed doesn't equal classic (at least, not yet, but give it time and no doubt we will see the terms Classic Ninjago and Classic Friends.)

Makes sense. One of the admins was pretty quick to remove them. Hopefully the spammers see it disappear quickly and give up.

It looks like the spammers are back, this time temu. This is obviously not working. I have just reported 20+ posts from I think four different new accounts, accounts are all less than 30 minutes old yet posting multiple copies of the same spam a minute or so apart.

I guess it depends why you want a bigger one as that will affect what changes to make. Maybe measure your display area or decide how big you want it, then convert that to studs so you have an idea about what changes you will need to make to get the size you want.

Although the others are not minifigure scale, I find the plants are fine. It is not like things are to scale in LEGO anyway. Not that I'd buy the sets for the plants.