MAB

You'll probably have to sell it to another Russian AFOL, as many (personal account) international banking systems will block payments to / from Russia. Paypal is out, Mastercard/Visa is out, Swift is out, Googlepay is out, Transferwise/Wise is out, even using bricklink is out (internal transactions only). There are some methods still open where money can be sent (crypto, and some transfer methods) but they tend to have no buyer protection and I would hope most buyers would be wary of sending money via any of those services (to any unknown seller, not just sellers in Russia).

I would have seconded it but I don't check the thread much. I went the opposite way, instead of checking to see if other people spot new colours I leave it to myself to find them, looking at new sets and CMFs and using bricklin to search. Back to the days when I "discovered" monochromes before I realised it was a thing and other people also did it. It focuses more on the joy of the chase than the purchase of a ready made display.

It depends on the size of the MOC / set. I reckon this castle could easily be populated with 40 or 50 soldiers in various places depending on what you want to have going on and whether you have it opened or closed. Similarly, you could add a load of peasants from Kingdoms and it would help make it look like a more bustling environment. I like my builds to look a bit like those cross sectional kids' books, that show what goes on in every room. Something like this. That way, you get the whole model as a display from a distance, but you can look at the detail in every room when up close. I find the baseplates full of aligned soldiers posed in a formation with nothing else around it quite boring. But if they are posed such that they are all doing something, a large number can look much more interesting. And this castle is large enough to get a lot of action in.

Not long ago there were complaints that IDEAS was too much about realistic space sets.

They haven't really changed anything about how bricklink works and haven't really changed much about the GWP offerings, so I don't think they feel any obligation to resellers.

It was a different time. It was never difficult to buy any Fantasy Era sets so they were all shelf warmers in the sense that they were always on shelves. There were of course occasional discounts but there weren't really hard and fast EOL times (especially in non LEGO stores) so there weren't any of the massive discounts seen later with Kingdoms. I remember seeing some Fantasy Era sets on shelves when Kingdoms was out.

As an AFOL, I do play with minifigures. I use minifigures, and animals, and so on posed to give a bit of life to the build. A model with no people populating it always looks a bit odd to me. A cart without a horse or other animal pulling it, a table with food on it but no people to eat it, an armory full of swords but no soldiers, ... it looks like all the life was suddenly vaporised.

I didn't realise there is a rule against replying to multiple comments individually. I know there is a guideline against upping post counts by posting lots of individual short posts but I was hardly doing that. It's not my fault that you time out merge posts.

Models don't have to be creatively designed to be enjoyed in the form they are sold. The end user puts in the same (low) creativity building The Office as they do building something like the marble maze. They look at the instructions, they pick the right piece and put it in the right place. If creativity in the design is paramount, they should get rid of the Art series. There is no creativity in the design there. They can take an image (unlicensed or licensed) and run it through a program to pixilate it, matching to LEGO colours. And do the same thing again and again. No creativity in design. Then the end user picks the right colour dot and puts it on a grid, again and again. To some, that is mind numbingly boring. To others, a distressing repetitive task that creates something they want to look at.

The first six CUUSOO / IDEAS sets were license based. It is currently 29:18 licenses:unlicensed (including approved ones) and some of the unlicensed ones are copies of objects. Yes, they do lots of licensed themes but with typically smallish numbers of sets per theme per year. Whereas unlicensed themes may be few in number but large in the number of sets within those themes.

Again, I totally disagree with this. The LEGO community has grown because of sets like this. However the existence of this set does not have to change what people enjoy building. It is not like the only set available for a year is The Office and you either buy and discuss it, or you are out of the LEGO community. So what if they make something that you or I don't want, but others do. Has the existence of The Big Bang Theory or FRIENDS damaged the LEGO community so much that nobody is allowed to MOC what they like, or discussed other aspects of LEGO? I don't think there is a LEGO community. There are loads of smaller interest groups that meet in many places, online and in person, that use a common tool and you are free to join any of them. Just because a new group may start or grow, doesn't mean another group has to stop enjoying what they do. If the decided not to do The Office, it would not be a benefit to the existing communities. So a kid that wants a Millennium Falcon now can't have one because he should have bought the version that LEGO did 10 years before he was born? Designing a new model from the same object is creativity (on the part of the designer.) And why only apply it to license sets? They did a castle in the 1980s. Why do we need another one now? If you want one you can buy the original one! Why do we need yet another sailing ship or train or spaceship? LEGO will make and continue to make what sells.

This is assuming that the other people would all get joy from MOCing. Not everybody does, for some it can cause them distress or frustration. If they get joy from following instructions and displaying and looking at the result or playing with the finished set, I don't think that is a problem at all. If they get their joy in a different way, they are not necessarily missing out on anything just because others find their joy in MOCing. I don't. Just look at any licensed theme MOC that accurately reproduces something from that license. There is often huge creativity in parts use or in the design of models LEGO havent done or done at a different scale. It is a different type of creativity to what what if I put extra wings on a spaceship or what if I make a Modular style library instead of a Modular book store, but it is still creativity. And once a theme is established, it essentially becomes a license anyway. Build a spaceship in LBG with dark pink, or use your creativity to change colours of windscreens and still call it Classic Space and you will anger some people as you go against "the rules", even though others will like it.

Whereas I think a lot of the current popularity of LEGO among adults is because sets can be made to look realistic. If they hadn't made any new parts since 1980 or 2000 or whenever you want to set a threshold, I doubt it would be anywhere bear as popular now. A bigger issue for me now is colours. I think we have enough in some parts of the spectrum but not enough in others. And the huge range in colours means we don't get most useful parts (especially bricks) easily available in most colours. I think it is the best year ever. I can't think of many years from decades ago when there were many AFOL popular sets I so many themes.

It really depends what the large part is, how often it appears in sets and how useful and in demand it is. If it is a popular part in a big set, chances are BL prices will be high. Whereas an unpopular big part in many sets will be cheap. I have had loads of large parts that are worth so little and have such a low sales volume that they are not worth the bother of listing and, just as big an issue, storing. They go in the bulk sold by weight lots instead.

A downside is that these are adult aimed and/or expensive sets. To get more small sets for army building, parts packs and small vignettes to be added to the larger sets, then LEGO need to believe in kids wanting castle sets too. They have to reboot the theme (if they want to do Castke), as it has not been around for a decade. They can't just sell expansions to sets from 10, 20 or 40 years ago. Or if you are talking of factions, I'd prefer they do both. Modern print versions of old factions (as they are doing), plus I'd like to see some new ones. The boar insignia from CMF would be good. I'd also hope to see some fantasy again. Elves and dwarves would be nice to see again.

Most collectors (even sealed box collectors) do use and enjoy what they buy. They just use it in a different way to a MOCer. Collecting and enjoying what you collect is not a character flaw. If it is people buying stuff then hiding it away, or not able to move because of stacked high boxes, and they keep buying as they have to have it but not enjoying it, then I'd agree they have a problem. It is not unhealthy to buy something you enjoy, build it as LEGO intended and display it. And it shouldn't matter to anyone what someone else does with what they buy, and they certainly shouldn't be judged for enjoying it in a different way to others. If there was a group of 100 people that enjoy MOCing and displaying MOCs and a group of 100 that like to display sets, then the popularity grows and then 150 like MOCs and 400 like displaying sets and this leads to more variation in sets and parts, more discussion about MOCs and significantly more discussion about sets, I think it is a good thing. MOCs may be a minority of the community but it is still more popular than before, with a wider range of parts, inspiration from official sets and inspiration from new minifigures or parts.

The Big Bang Theory and Friends are fairly obvious trom the set. Take the minifigures away, and that B99 set could be anything.

The Queen's torso is nice and it's good it can be used for men and women. The legs aren't great though. Dual molded legs have been around ages and look much better than front printing only. Even side printing would be better than just front printing. Still, even those are better than the red print on blue legs where the colour is way off what it should be.

Being a baseplate with some walls on it, it also looks very similar to The Office that has been approved, with just a change of minifigures.

If they make a set that is a great parts pack for your (or my) building style and you (or I) buy it, then it is still consumerism. We are buying to increase our collections to make bigger or more MOCs or use new techniques. By designing and selling new must have parts they are also promoting consumerism. We feel we must have it to make bigger, better, more, new, ... We buy new sets or parts to mix with our old to do what we enjoy. That is not necessarily that different to someone wanting to buy a new set to display with their old to enjoy looking at. The only people not sucked into consumerism are the people still using only the bricks they had back in the 1970s or 80s or whenever they first built with LEGO.

It is interesting. I have some LOTR MOCs that I have had for about 10 years now, built when the first sets came out. I built the sets, broke them apart after a couple of weeks, bought extra on BL and made some two sided scenery MOCs to display the minifigures on my home office shelf. I dust them a few times a year, I occasionally move the minifigs around, probably twice a year I rotate them to show the other scenes. I appreciate them a lot, I look at them most days. But I could have easily used the official sets to do the same thing (if they fit on my shelf!). I still enjoy MOCing, but I can afford enough bricks that I don't need to take apart MOCs or sets. Sometimes I can go a few months without making a MOC but still appreciate what I have displayed all that time.

There has also been a marked change in the company too which has also fed change in AFOL nature. Well, multiple marked changes really: Blind bag collectable minifigures with check lists (collect them all). Brickheadz Funkopops(numbered to collect them all). Ending one year in-house themes and ending modern versions of classics. Display only objects. Adult sets. Large numbers of expensive sets (for adults and kids). Widespread media for in-house themes (collect all the characters). Huge range of licensing (collect all the characters). Nearly all of these lead to collecting and keeping sets rather than creativity. I don't mind too much if my kids have a £35 set and they mix it all up with other small sets. A £70 set, I would really discourage mixing and creativity. £200, no way are they mixing it up. But we also have so many more ways to get MOC building, creativity kits. Job lots of used, cheap sets that don't sell well and are discounted (although less easy now compared to 8-10 years ago), bricklink, PAB/B+P. I purposely buy lots of random stuff for my kids, and specific but useful bits for me, for MOC building so we don't have to mix up (valuable) sets. That is not to say MOC builders have changed or disappeared. There are way more MOC builders now than 20 years ago. It is just that there are even more collectors / non-MOCers now too, changing the balance overall.

I imagine most collectors appreciate what they have, just in a different way to builders. Even people that keep stuff sealed. I've got a built IDEAS Mars Rover, but I've also got one sealed. I appreciate them both, in different ways.

Clear panels or even glass doors slotted in might be better, as putting it behind bricks would loose the lovely detailing of the frames. If they are too far back, they'd look like curtains instead.

I have seen something similar on Flickr. It is good when you want something to look like a stained glass window without being able to see through like in a cylindrical tower with hidden supports inside.