davee123

I just heard yesterday that the plastic is not the same. The story goes that according to Chinese law, LEGO could NOT import the raw plastic material into China for molding. Instead, LEGO was forced to choose an in-country plastic as the source. It seems LEGO chose the plastic that most closely matched their ABS used elsewhere, but it was not a perfect match, and is of lower quality than LEGO would have really wanted. DaveE

Promotional sets appear in a variety of ways. In the past they've appeared: - In certain stores, like Toys R Us or Target (like the current Bricktober figs) - At special events, like baseball games, conventions, store openings, etc (Audi TT set, Red Sox minifigs, etc) - As gifts for employees of other companies (Maersk ship, Vespa, etc) - In exclusive LEGO offers like magazines (Brickmaster sets) - As incredibly exclusive gifts or prizes (Gold Bionicle mask, Celebration invites, etc) - At particular locations, commonly Legoland or monthly model builds (Pelican, US Flag, etc) You can't always get every promotional set without buying it online. The best way to make sure you get everything you're looking for is to check BrickSet for new set additions, and more importantly: keep up with the online hobbyist forums. SOMEONE out there will probably find it when it appears, and will post about it. Sometimes you'll still be able to take advantage of the promotion, and sometimes you won't be. DaveE

I think it's because the Chinese figures are more translucent in their coloring, making the plastic appear cheap. And our natural tendency is to think that translucent, cheap plastic is lighter weight than heavy-duty plastic, which ought to be dense and heavy. Hence, I would guess it's not based on the fact that we feel like the parts are actually heavier, but rather that we ASSUME they're heavier thanks to the visual perception of the plastic. I'll grant that these figures probably get a little more attention, but I have to say there are a LOT of AFOLs that scrutinize ALL the elements they get-- especially when something just "feels" wrong. I remember noticing that IMMEDIATELY when receiving the 2007 castle sets, with their milky gray bricks. It was only afterward that I learned about the new technique they were using with dye injection. Fans are pretty perceptive, and although LEGO is usually quick to respond with "we'll get it fixed!", LEGO has seemingly not followed through with the Chinese-produced figures. I haven't gotten one yet that's resolved the plastic issue, even though I believe we were told that the issues would be addressed for Series 1 collectible minifigs. Hence, they get even more scrutiny, because people are increasingly aware of the problem. DaveE

They were listed for that price on the website, but there was no actual way to purchase them it seemed. But I was never under the impression that they'd be selling them individually. It would be DISASTROUS to sell these. They'd sell out in the first 4 hours, and they'd have none at all for you or anyone that came by for the free offer that week. I'd be all for them selling the figs AFTER the week concludes, though. Considering that the imperial soldier figure alone is selling for around $4-$5 on BrickLink, they'll be lucky if a few savvy employees don't swipe or "buy" bunches of them to sell online. DaveE

Probably not. Most of the things you find in PAB are pretty common (cheap) on BrickLink for precisely that reason. Your best bet is to bring a mobile web device with you to check prices while you're there, so you can compare prices of anything that looks like it might be valuable. DaveE

I think it's also unfair to say that they haven't done this in the past. The earliest I can recall is back in 2000, when they requested that LUGNET remove links to scans of a retailer catalog. They've done this in the past with varying levels of tenacity, and this year they've done it to EuroBricks... what, twice? I don't think it ought to be a big deal for LEGO, and I also don't think it ought to be a big deal for fans, either. I don't think LEGO is fuming mad, storming up and down their halls about how EuroBricks posted links to leaked information. My guess would be that someone saw it, and thought "You know, that really shouldn't be there. I'll ask them to take it down." Now, if EuroBricks was getting threatened with legal action for not following through, that'd be another matter. THEN I'd say LEGO was overreacting. In the end, I see it as luck of the draw. You were fortunate enough to see a retailer catalog? Great! You just happened to be online when the pictures were posted? Good for you! But if you missed it, then oh well, no big deal. This hobby is FILLED with opportunities for people that happen to be at the right place at the right time. Count yourself lucky if you get to see preliminary pictures. And if you don't get to see them, don't sweat it. DaveE

Nah, LUGNET had more specific forums for virtually everything already. LUGNET became disused because of competition. Web forums up until roughly 2001 were pretty technical to set up. What other online forums existed prior to then in the LEGO hobby? RTL, FBTB and 1000steine, I think, and that's it. And RTL wasn't really a web-forum, and 1000steine was only for German speakers. But suddenly, other people were able to make their own web forums. Classic-Castle, Classic-Space, Eurobricks, ILTCO, BrickLink, all started popping up with web forums. At that point, software was available for people to effectively just purchase out-of-the-box and run on their own. LEGO clubs started forming their own sites, and various other sites have been popping up ever since. LUGNET wasn't customizable enough for people, and couldn't meet the same appeal as a "do-it-yourself" site where you could have authority and creative control. Additionally, LUGNET had other problems-- new members had to be manually approved with a difficult-to-manage admin system, and people were required to provide their real-life names (a staple of newsgroups of old, rather than Web 2.0). On top of that, people were discouraged from posting fluff (as often happens in a population of old-timers), which disallows new blood from being active. Yep. LUGNET had competition. Web forums up until 2000-2002 or so were VERY difficult to set up. Now, almost anyone can set up a web forum very easily. But a customized set database for LEGO? That requires some customized coding, so there's less competition. Peeron's effectively cornered the market in terms of maintaining people's set lists and inventories-- there are only a scant few competitors. Definitely. Admittedly, that's pretty harsh, because they ARE active-- but there's no way they can keep up with the fast pace of new additions and so forth. There aren't many admins at Peeron, and their rewards for their hard work are mostly self-satisfaction. That's good enough for SOME work, but without something extra, it's difficult to keep people motivated. I've mentioned that before a long time ago, and I think the reasoning not to do it at the time was that the unwashed masses are dumb in the ways of LEGO. They'll enter incorrect colors and part numbers a LOT, and the admins were very worried that it would quickly become a mishmash of crappy data. You really have to know your stuff when it comes to LEGO colors and parts. DaveE

People have been posting their stats on FBTB and Classic-Castle-- so far it looks like the S@H pickers for Series 2 are better than Series 1 (where it was VERY slanted towards receiving duplicates), but it's still not at the mathematical model of perfect randomness. If all the odds were perfectly random and evenly distributed, your odds of getting a certain number of minifigs is approximately: 1 - 0.0000000000000000867362% 2 - 0.0000000000426313% 3 - 0.000000130083% 4 - 0.0000406802% 5 - 0.0031148% 6 - 0.0854835% 7 - 1.0257934% 8 - 6.0249157% 9 - 18.4713377% 10 - 30.5225119% 11 - 27.350845% 12 - 13.029987% 13 - 3.1308438% 14 - 0.3414022% 15 - 0.0136107% 16 - 0.000113423% So in a perfectly statistically random world, most people would be getting about 9, 10, or 11 different minifigs, with some people getting 8 or 12. It'd be pretty rare to see anyone get 7 different figs or 13 figs, and virtually unheard of to get 6 or fewer, or 14 or more. Your chances of getting 16 different figs is around 1 in 881,658-- almost 1 in a million. However, the actual statistics so far have been (assuming you order 16 minifigs): 1 - 0 people 2 - 0 people 3 - 0 people 4 - 0 people 5 - 1 person 6 - 0 people 7 - 3 people 8 - 11 people 9 - 7 people 10 - 8 people 11 - 3 people 12 - 2 people 13 - 2 people 14 - 0 people 15 - 0 people 16 - 0 people So, rather than the center being around 10.5, the center appears to be around 8.5 different figs that you can expect. Of the 43 S@H orders that have been reported (6 of them being for more or less than 16 figs), EVERYONE has gotten at least 1 duplicate. Current stats: Lifeguard - 60 received in 31 orders Karate Master - 56 received in 27 orders Witch - 53 received in 32 orders Weightlifter - 52 received in 25 orders Traffic Cop - 51 received in 29 orders Ringmaster - 46 received in 24 orders Surfer - 44 received in 27 orders Spartan - 44 received in 26 orders Mr. Mariachi - 44 received in 25 orders Mime - 37 received in 22 orders Skier - 33 received in 19 orders Disco Dancer - 32 received in 22 orders Vampire - 32 received in 21 orders Pop Star - 31 received in 21 orders Pharoah - 30 received in 24 orders Explorer - 23 received in 18 orders As for pairings in a single order (as in the number of times people said "I got 4 of ______", or "I got 2 copies of _______"): 1 - 219 instances 2 - 104 instances 3 - 47 instances 4 - 16 instances 5 - 6 instances 6 - 1 instance DaveE

Old brown: http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemIn.asp?P=30293&colorID=8&in=A New brown: http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemIn.asp?P=30293&colorID=88&in=A DaveE

There was some debate about this-- I believe pigs were probably *available* within LEGO during the first LUGBULK order, but they had not been released yet. We knew that LEGO was about to release them, but neither LEGO, Peeron, or BrickLink had any part numbers or design IDs. We knew that we could probably ask for "pigs", and Jan probably could have figured it out, but it made us curious. The other issue would be what happens in the event that an element isn't in your system? Suppose (for example) that pigs were JUST released, but were not yet in your database? Would you have to manually add them before they could be included? What if the person ordering claims that they know what the Design ID will be? Basically, this was a huge issue for me-- I don't expect to be constantly maintaining a database of available parts based on LEGO, BrickLink, and Peeron. So what happens when one of the users happens to know better than my system does? When the list comes back with prices, how do you select which 50 different parts will be included in the order? In our orders, some people initially said that they wanted certain pieces, but when the prices came back from LEGO and were too high, they no longer were interested in them. Is there a re-evaluation after the prices are returned? What happens if someone wants to change the amount that they want to buy? Are orders "final" once submitted? DaveE

We didn't actually have a problem reducing our list to 80, because our club organizers told members to submit no more than 5 parts each. As a result, we had something like 60-70 parts that were submitted to LEGO for evaluation. We also use a quantity, as in "approximately how many would you like to order?" Some things (cows, fences, etc) people only want 10-50 or so. Other elements (basic bricks, tiles, plates), people want to order a LOT of. Our club has an "Executive Committee", which selected the elements manually, but used people's input to make the decision-- no official algorithm. Ultimately, they made the decision based on how many different people wanted the same elements, and what quantities they wanted them in. For narrowing down the final 50 parts, I proposed that it be done based on: 1) the number of different members interested in a particular part 2) the total quantity ordered for each part 3) the total amount of money being spent on a part Ultimately, the tool I wrote always allows those selections to be made manually, because sometimes humans simply know better. But it tries to give the order organizers as much information as possible so they can make fair decisions. One of the most difficult parts I had was allowing people to submit requests for "unnamed" pieces. Some members might request "those new 1x2 cheese slopes", because they don't know the part number (since the element might not have been released yet, or because they didn't know how to find the part number), and another member might ask for "the double-wide cheese slopes". That made things difficult. How does yours handle custom inputs? DaveE

Technically, the thumb would be represented in a LEGO minifig by one entire side of the "clip". So one side is the thumb, and the other side is the 4 fingers. Given that the pinky is shorter, and that the thumb is further away from the pinky, I would think that the "fatter" end makes more sense to be the "top" of the hand (pointing up/forward). DaveE

:( Can you pass it in as a word with spaces in it? I've written a few searches for LEGO elements, and I typically recognized "N x N" or "N x N x N" or "N x N x N/N" as actual words within the CGI, and used them to do the search. Technically, you want some smart regular expressions that treat "NxN" and "N x N" and "NX N" as the same thing. But those dimensions are typically REALLY important for LEGO element searches :) Interesting-- I've done a similar thing for my club, and made it potentially useable for other clubs. Ideally, I'd love to get a central system done to potentially leverage it with the LEGO company (get them to give us a full list of available things to search through, so they don't have to do it for every club!), but who knows if that's possible or not. DaveE

Search needs some fixing. I searched for "plate 6 x 14", but I didn't get the expected 3456 element immediately at the top of the search results. Instead, it seemed to match every set in the database containing the word "plate", but only showed me the top 50 matches. Also didn't seem to return me any parts, just sets, unless searching the top for people's collections. Speaking of which, you might want to default people's collections to "private" unless they explicitly specify them to be public. For LUGBULK-- it looks like there's some functionality in there, or WILL be-- but I can't seem to figure out exactly what's going on with it. Is that only for members of your club? DaveE

Peeron's development is, likely, winding down. I've been close to the site owners for quite some time, and without getting into the particulars of the situation, it's not likely in the near term to see much in the way of new functionality added to the site. However, the site's data maintenance continues-- that's why you see activity. The AFOLs that enter new data into the system continue to be active. There has been discussion of how to improve the site and get active development started again, and that discussion has progressed quite slowly over the last few years. Hopefully, there will be a breakthrough, but it's not here yet. It's similar in some respects to what happened with LUGNET. BrickLink isn't likely to have any features like the ones seen on Peeron for inventory tracking. BrickLink is meant to be a shopping site, not a free site for you to keep track of your collection and get information. BrickLink's owner appears to be very protective of his data, and hasn't been especially forthcoming with utilities like historical searches, personal collections, set reviews, and so forth. That data would be invaluable to the community as a whole, but it's unlikely to much money for BrickLink, and would likely cost more in development, storage, capacity, and bandwidth, so it won't likely happen, unless the owner has a change of heart about giving more information freely to the community. For the foreseeable future, the most likely candidate for the features you're after would probably be BrickSet-- not Peeron, LUGNET, or BrickLink. BrickSet's owner/developer is still actively adding features, and has been for years. I'm sure if he ever adds inventories (no doubt it's crossed his mind), you'll see many of the features that Peeron currently has start to get mirrored on BrickSet. But that's most likely still a ways off as well. DaveE

Does anyone have any useful and/or reputable information about this survey? Is LEGO SERIOUSLY considering releasing these parts? Or is this just some wishlist that an AFOL invented because it's a bunch of parts they wished they could get? If it's a legitimate list from LEGO, what's it for? Pick-A-Brick online? LUGBULK? Future elements for sets? Why the hell is it called "color change", when that's about the scariest choice of words imaginable for AFOLs? Who's conducting the survey? Were the results really lost? Why is the "cover letter" posted to Eurobricks, but seemingly nowhere else official? Apologies to whoever is conducting this survey, but it just seems really unclear to me what's going on with it. DaveE

Came from the Beta I Command Base in 1980: http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItem.asp?P=3754pb01 DaveE

You'd have to ask them for the overheads and profits that they get-- but I expect it takes years to make back the money that was made on individual pieces. Plus, the elements that they're making are unique. They're making molds that LEGO has never made, so they're effectively guaranteed to get 100% of the income from people buying those elements. Suppose instead that someone were faking up old-brown pitchforks or something. You'd have to compete with all the other sellers that are selling genuine LEGO pitchforks. But by contrast, if you're selling LEGO-compatible grenades, you're probably the only one selling them. But you're even going one step further into the realm of crazy. If you wanted to fake up LEGO pitchforks, or crater baseplates, or something similar, and sell them individually, that's reasonably feasible. There's not much money in it, it's illegal, and it's a bunch of effort. But it's plausible. And in my 11-or-so year history in the fan community, I've never heard of it happening or having been even suspected of happening. But you're worried that someone's selling ENTIRE SETS with various faked elements. And yes, I understand that you don't mean to imply that the entire set would be comprised of fake elements, but rather that various elements would be fake in the sets. That's just crossed the border into lunacy. Sure, you can knock out that 1 rare pitchfork, and maybe that rare brown plastic cape from 6040-- but now you have to scrounge together all the OTHER pieces of GENUINE LEGO to package with that set to sell it. Now you've got what you can only describe as a "used" set (which will lower the value), and you still won't be able to put together all that much money. And the overhead of selling the set means that you'd have to sell thousands of them in order to make back your investment of $20,000+ on the molds, AND the cost of the other genuine LEGO that you needed. By contrast, selling individual elements is much more cost effective. Selling 1000+ pitchforks individually at $5.00 per probably makes back your investment in the mold, and from then on makes you a profit (assuming LEGO hasn't sued you by this point, and that LEGO hobbyists haven't black-listed your items as fakes). But selling 1000+ complete SETS, which have to be of roughly the same type would be FAR more difficult. But suppose for a minute that we're all wrong. Suppose that that thousands of fake LEGO elements have been making it into the market for years, and NOBODY out of the thousands of LEGO experts out there has ever caught on. So what? If it's good enough to fool everyone else including me, I honestly can't say I care if it's fake or not. To go even slightly off-topic, what about newly re-molded LEGO elements that are genuine? The new green head wrap in the minifig collector's series? It's made in China, probably from a different mold, with crappier plastic. It's ACTUAL LEGO, and it's probably worse quality than anything that's going to fool collectors. So again, if it's good enough to fool us serious collectors, it's fine in my book. In the end, if you're still worried about it, your only recourse is going to be to ONLY ever buy MISB sets, and you'll pay a HUGE premium for that if you're buying sets from before, say, 2000. In the early 2000's, people have stockpiled MISB sets to collect and re-sell later, with the popularity of eBay and a growing collector market. But prior to that, there's an incredibly short supply of MISB sets, so you're going to have to pay some serious top dollar! DaveE

Indeed. It would be ludicrous to come up with a mold for the purposes of making fake LEGO elements. The lowest mold cost that I've heard mentioned was $10,000. In order to break even, you'd have to sell a hell of a lot of them. And if you're scared that MULTIPLE pieces would be fakes, that's another $10,000+ that the person had to spend to fake the element. And if LEGO ever found out that you were minting elements with the LEGO logo on them, you'd be in serious trouble. So it would be an incredibly stupid risk for anyone to take to fake elements. If you're talking about faking things that sell for $100+ per element, then maybe it might be worth your time to fake something like that. But in the LEGO world, individual elements just aren't that valuable. Pricey elements are generally in the $5.00-$20.00 range, not in the $100+ range. The bigger risk in buying secondhand is that you get crap. Some companies make cheap knock-offs using LEGO images, but it's REALLY easy to tell as soon as you look at the elements themselves that they're not LEGO. But most of the time, buying secondhand results in things like broken, chewed, yellowed, and missing parts. Any way you slice it, get pictures first-- unless you're buying from BrickLink, in which case you can get a pretty good idea of the seller by reading their feedback. You might still want pictures anyway, but sometimes a seller's reputation is good enough that you don't need to bother. DaveE

Yep-- many AFOLs also have less need of more basic bricks because we've got childhood collections which were jam-packed with basic bricks. But there's also great sources available these days like Pick-A-Brick, BrickLink, etc. The trouble as I see it is more for people who aren't as experienced in building, that don't have an already large amount of basic brick. It would be really interesting to me, actually, to compare (say) a bunch of 10-year-olds' creations from 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. How has the piece selection affected childrens' abilities to build things? True, they're building different things these days than they were in the 1970's, but I'm sure many kids still try and build the standard things like fire trucks and police stations. But has the quality of building improved with the different piece selection? Are kids actually *using* things like SNOT? Or are the more specialized elements actually more frustrating for younger builders to work with? DaveE

The trend in recent years seems to have favored nicer-looking models-- probably because kids aren't interested in simplistic ones as much as they used to be. To me, this is made clear in the increased use in SNOT, tiles, and slope/curve elements. These days, a lot of models use tiles to hide studs-- back in the 70's and before, tiles were a rare commodity because they were only used when functionally necessary. If a set contained a tile, it was because it was used for things to slide on, or perhaps to stick stickers to. That was still true through the late 1970's through the mid 1990's, except tiles also became common with printing on them. So, they were either functional or decorative with printing or stickers. But I'd guess sometime in the late 90's or early 2000's (I'm not sure), tiles started getting used for decorative purposes and hiding studs-- to make models look more realistic, and less like a building toy. Same holds true with SNOT, except I think it's a tougher call to judge when it started happening. As noted, SNOT techniques have been used probably since the dawn of plates. I can find examples from the early 70's, and I'm reasonably sure there were older examples still. The first brackets and explicitly SNOT bricks seemed to appear around the same time as Legoland sets in the late 70's and early 80's, and others were introduced gradually as time has gone on. But I think generally SNOT was avoided until recent years (mid-to-late 2000's), as we've seen a shift in set design. One reason that SNOT techniques were avoided was because kids didn't "understand" it. If you give a child a bunch of bricks, they almost immediately grasp the concept of stacking bricks vertically, but don't think to build horizontally, except maybe in small chunks here or there-- much like the old 1980's Legoland line. Same goes with technic connections using liftarms-- kids can follow the instructions, but they have a difficult time simply creating in those same terms. Hence, LEGO attempted to keep the system simple so that kids wouldn't be frustrated. The fact that they're using SNOT more commonly now may indicate that either LEGO can't compete with such simplistic designs, and/or perhaps that kids today are more capable of "understanding" the concept of SNOT, and aren't as frustrated by it. Quite probably both. The upshot is that today's models, and MOCs made from today's element selections, can look AMAZINGLY realistic. The downside (aside from making older models look worse) seems to be a shortage of regular bricks and plates in your element selection. There are an increasingly large amount of specialty pieces (including tiles, curved bricks, SNOT brackets, etc), and fewer basic bricks. DaveE

As brickzone stated, this has nothing to do with them intentionally changing the colors, or being political. It has to do with LEGO changing its coloring process in roughly 2006-2007. They used to spend more money on a high-quality system whereby the ABS was colored prior to molding. Hence, since all ABS pieces came from the same batch of ABS pellets, they would all match colors EXCELLENTLY. All the ABS was colored in small pellets from the same source, making everything very uniform. But that means that they had to buy their colors separately, and spend lots of money on storage for pellets of different colors, many of which might not be used for years. Now, they color the elements during the molding process, which means that each element requires a different formula for color matching. Each color dye behaves differently, and each injection point affects the mold differently. The timing has to be different for each color and each mold. And even then, there's a degree of randomness to each element (pretty minimal) in terms of the particular dynamics of that element at the time of molding. It's INCREDIBLY complex compared to the old system. And as a result, the colors vary-- not just from one part to another, but even within the same individual molded element. But it's cheaper, so LEGO can save money doing it, which is why they're still in business. It has nothing to do with LEGO actively wanting to change their color palette, and saying "screw what you want, fans". That's not their attitude whatsoever. It's totally involuntary-- it has to do with LEGO no longer being able to maintain their once perfectionist attitude towards quality. DaveE

The locked color list: http://news.lugnet.com/lego/?n=2605 DaveE

BrickLink's had them for a while now-- I think last year sometime: http://www.bricklink.com/catalogList.asp?q=microfig Granted, they don't have the ones that were just released, but the older ones are there. DaveE

I think I have 39: 13 - Ramses' Pyramid 12 - Minotaurus 9 - Harry Potter 4 - Lava Dragon 1 - Creationary They also seem to be in: 6 - Lunar Command 5 - Pirate's Plank 5 - Orient Bazaar? 4 - Magma Monster 1 - UFO Attack 1 - Atlantis Treasure? They're cute and all, but I'm not really interested in buying them in bulk or anything. Unfortunately, many of them are in very primary colors (because they're playing pieces), but I suppose there could be some appeal in that. So, really, it comes down to what you want to use them for. Ramses' Pyramid may have a chunk of them, but 9 of them are mummies, which may not be something you'd find useful. Figure out which set of 'figs you think are the best, and buy those games! DaveE