Clone OPatra

Same for me for orders placed on January 11 and January 24. It's interesting because it hasn't even been 6 weeks since the first of those orders.

Yes there was, sanctioned though not originated by LEGO. Jay's Bricks Blog approached LEGO about starting a fake Uncharted leak. Of course the most reputable leak sources didn't pick it up. HOWEVER LEGO was hiring - I think last year? - for a position to help combat leaks, including putting fake information out there from what I understand. We could be seeing that. Maybe we are, maybe we're not. I have a hard time believing that Hasbro would partner with LEGO, unless LEGO is simply too dominant in this space now to ignore. Hasbro did cancel their own LEGO clone after 2017, but I still have trouble accepting this from any source.

Yeah the AUD prices have gone slightly berserk with these. Regional pricing has never been about actual currency conversions, but like you said USD $40 sets have recently been AUD $60, and USD $100 sets are usually between AUD $150 and $180. Why these are all 200% of the US numerical value is unclear. The JP set is fun, and definitely something JP fans and AFOLs have dreamt of - a full, committed representation of a classic scene in Minifigure scale. Not like the previous Jurassic Park UCS, which was a giant scale display with Minifigure scenes shoehorned in. The other sets are typical Jurassic World fare to me - ok utilitarian vehicles with high prices because of the specialised Dinos. For Dino fans it is nice that LEGO has finally found a way to make a dino theme successful on an ongoing basis, and keep delivering new stuff.

One might think so, but unfortunately not. Another week has passed with no sign of them this side. The wait continues!

PEOPLE. Yes we had an off topic spammy incident here. THANK YOU to those who reported the posts. NO THANK YOU to those who replied to the user within this topic, nor posted saying "can this person be banned already?" Use the report button only and don't engage. Thanks.

Fennec's helmet says hello.

There is like no chance LEGO makes anything based on this video game being discussed. Zero. LEGO has before and will continue to make sets based on popular Star Wars video games. Force Awakens. Old Republic. New Battlefront II. Now Fallen Order. Videogames have been a big part of Star Wars fandom for a long time now, and have absolutely gigantic marketing pushes. Them making sets based on dark material from another property also says nothing about what the current Harry Potter team feels like creating for the Harry Potter line. Different properties, different targets. They're making Star Wars set based on the scene where Bib Fortuna gets shot point blank in cold blood. Doesn't mean the Harry Potter team is suddenly going to make the Voldemort dinner scene with Professor Burbage.

Higher prices for certain desirable parts (like animals), inability to see out of stock parts - those are the two keys things that are worse. There's also now a service fee but with a very low threshold to get rid of it, and a somewhat higher shipping cost for Europe, but ours was already outrageous in Aus.

Yes please. And a Dex's Diner 18+ quote set with the quote "How big your... pocketbook is". Seriously need Dex and that waitress droid after all these years. Throw in Sleezebaggano as a passerby on the street outside. Sorry, as a MOD I should do better than this wishlisting, but AotC and has been treated so pathetically by LEGO over all these years.

It was. Promobricks says so themselves - first line of their article.

The list isn't too good to be true yet, because Promobricks themselves presents over half of it as their own speculation. It quite literally might not be true, and they haven't presented it as true. Cad Bane's ship is kind of a left field surprise, but then again without new films it makes sense that LEGO is leaning more heavily into what new Star Wars content there is, from the shows. Shame that it's such a random, not very interesting design and unimportant ship that has no reason to be a very large set. And if it is from Bad Batch, and is the only set with Omega... ugh. People are actually still excited for Obi-Wan after the utter mess that has been the Star Wars shows thus far? At this point I expect half the show to be flashbacks to Obi-Wan's childhood, then insert an episode about Hayden Christensen building his castle on Mustafar and chilling with Palps where Obi-Wan doesn't appear but Palpatine mentions Grogu out of the blue, then a finale episode where Obi-Wan fights a giant sand monster we've never seen before. Fin. Hopefully there are some cool things for sets though.

Well I felt compelled not to wait for March and get one more small US order in before B&P gets wrecked for the US too. Something weird is the difference in price between the tan and medium nougat Superman hair - 76782. The medium nougat is double the price of the tan one!

I like it. From this picture it does feel maybe just a tad small, but not too bad, and all of the exclusive and otherwise hard to obtain figures are great. For the people saying 2012 was better, I get that that one got the overall shape of Jabba's palace better, but this one does the interior proportions of the throne room more accurately and is SO much more highly detailed. Bless the person who uploaded pics of the old one to LEGO leaks, making it so easy to compare side by side. Of course all of the 2012 characters were more memorable and beloved though. My only true knock against it would be the lack of Fennec's helmet (though maybe it is included, just not in this picture?). Besides that, it's just incredibly niche getting Big Fortuna who sees so little screen time, but that also means we're almost certainly never going to get him ever again, so it's now or never.

More like Clone OProcrastination from doing more important things. But it's a pleasure.

It's from Ninjago 2019: https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?M=njo517#T=S&O={"iconly":0}

I don't think it would make sense to be honest. You'd need a really big stuffed movie to make it work and have enough characters that people actually want. LEGO has surely learned from experience by now that stuffing a series full of extremely random minor characters isn't going to sell - ala LEGO Movie 2 and both LEGO Batman series. That's going to narrow it down considerably to your Avengers films or something like No Way Home, but then you run into the problem of working from concept art or having characters you can't even include because of marketing decisions around spoilers. These lines also typically have sets along with them, and you can't have TOO much overlap with the sets, but in the Marvel and Star Wars movies it's not like the characters change costume all that much. All in all, I think the best they could do for a tie in series would be to do characters from the property overall to run alongside the release of the film, but not from the film specifically. Kind of like what they did with Wizarding World Series 1 - it tied in with the release of FB2, but wasn't from FB2. With the overall 2022 Minifigures lineup and a second unlicensed series, it does kind of feel like they must have had something else planned that got pushed due to external factors. An Indiana Jones series that was pushed because of the delay of the film? I'm excited for S23 anyway. Series 21 and 22 have shown a strong direction for the in house series in my opinion, listening to fan desires for more sci fi and fantasy characters. They're not perfect, but I like what they've been doing and how they've been applying a high level of detail while not going too far.

Employees used to have access to A LOT of information. I doubt they do any more, now that leaks are oh so prevalent. I had a buddy who worked at a LEGO Store at the lowest possible level circa 2015. Just a regular store employee. He could access a computer in the backroom with not only set names for six+ months in advance but also often confidential images, including preliminary artwork. I still have artwork he sent me of some things that never saw the light of day and I have never ever seen online. It was ridiculous that that stuff would be on a computer system like that, but it was there. The fact is that while basic employees had this level of access, the majority wouldn't have even cared, and the rest wanted to keep their jobs so they weren't going to risk anything. Same goes for managers, who had/have as much or more access and more time for it, but who also wouldn't risk their own jobs. Leaks get out, but overall, the vast vast majority of people who know stuff aren't telling anyone because they don't want to breach their agreements.

@Pendra37 this isn't the place for a big post about Ideas overall. No need to air all of your grievances in this thread. A topic in General LEGO Discussion is for that: Or perhaps the Unpopular Opinions thread, if you like: Please keep to the topic at hand. Thanks!

Yeah I don't think it's a ploy, just incompetence or ill-considered corporate thinking, like "oh we don't want to confuse or disappoint people by showing what's out of stock, so we'll just make that stuff disappear". Showing out of stock, but purchase-able parts itself implicitly encouraged you to order multiple times, because you could at least know what you wanted to check for in another order. Now it'll be difficult to even know what might ultimately be in stock, since the system effectively treats "purchase-able but out of stock" and "non purchase-able" parts the same way to us end users! Personally I'll just keep following this thread because we have a good pool of active B&Pers to report on what's purchase-able, but I'm not going to bang my head against the wall continually searching parts I want that might never show up. Exactly. There were already other better places to see a set's FULL inventory (and actually you can browse the Missing Parts site to see the full thing online), but you could make your own private B&P wishlist if you at least know what would ultimately be available. To be slightly devil's advocate, B&P's shipping rate and lack of a handling fee for the US and parts of Europe was always absurdly low, especially for a service where actual people making Danish wages had to hand-pick every order. I mean of course it was great, and LEGO is a massive corporation that doesn't need any excuses from us and doesn't need to push all of its real costs off onto consumers, but it was still an unreasonably low fee. If they'd changed the prices on an order that was already placed that'd be dirty, but this was about changing the prices of things just sitting in a cart. That's reasonable to update.

Unfortunately Mr No admitted to lying about all of the "information" he shared, so this has been a total time waste for us all.

I just read on the comments of Brickset's article about this that the new system doesn't show you out of stock parts at all. If you search for something out of stock, it simply doesn't appear, even if it is something they sell. That alone SUCKS. A huge part of B&P was searching new sets and new parts to see what would be added with a price and purchase-able eventually, and what wouldn't be. How the hell can you plan an order if the system treats out of stock parts and parts they don't sell in the same way? Now you'd have no idea what parts will eventually be for sale and which won't unless you just keep checking constantly.

Holy F! Where is that screenshot from though? I haven't seen anything on B&P that looks like that.

This is out of line, and we'll have a private chat if you display more of this attitude. This discussion is not going a happy place. Let's veer away now everyone. Thanks.

B&P is still active here in Australia, and actually still looks active when I change region to US too. I had no intention to place another order at least until the March sets release, though.

The major obstacle LEGO faced with the details on the hammer head itself is that the major details are on the sloped sides. Instead of the actual slope bricks that they're using now, they would've needed to figure out a solution to mount tiles at an angle so that they could sticker over them, which could have stability issues and also then lead to the question: which tiles? They have 2x6 now, but that wouldn't fill the space by itself. Perhaps 2x4 plates with one row of studs could've worked, but then they get studs. It would've ended up with lots of tiles with individual stickers, interrupting the pattern anyway and leaving loads of room for error. All in all, what that actually points is that perhaps this wasn't the best scale. If they had a gone a bit smaller, then tiles in the current parts library could've been used for the sloped sides and accurately capture the detail in easy-to-apply stickers. Instead, paradoxically, we get a massive build, but less actual detail. Then again, "life size" is one of the major selling points here, so I see why they went with this scale.