Blondie-Wan

I'm sure it will indeed be declined as part of this batch, but as we've seen, they're inching ever upwards in terms of the size and price point they're willing to hit with Ideas sets. While we may not get multi-hundred dollar sets through Ideas anytime soon, I could totally see it happening eventually. Meanwhile, this accomplishment is still noteworthy on its own. Even if it doesn't result in a huge Ideas set of the mansion, at the very least it bolsters the odds of The Addams Family appearing in LEGO Dimensions.

The Doctor Who Facebook presence just posted a nifty video. I'd post it if I could...

I understand your frustration, but do note nearly all the projects that have actually been approved to become sets were submitted using builds of real bricks. I think the only digital projects to get approved were the two by Alatariel and the Adventure Time figures.

There is indeed, right here. I had to scroll down to the bottom of this page to find it. Here's what I posted in that one:

Story Pack? What's that?

I'd agree it's not the best fit for TLG's brand standards, but at the same time, it is an iconic moment from the narrative universe of one of their major licenses. I sometimes wonder whether they might have mixed feelings about licensing DC at all, but there you go. Well, no, actually, not everyone. I think the only place the upcoming set has been discussed are a handful of LEGO fansites, like this one, and even among LEGO fandom, not everyone frequents them. TLG hasn't officially announced this set yet, as far as I'm aware. It's unfortunate that this submitter didn't know about the set, but it's not like the set is common knowledge to everyone yet.

I found an apparently freshly-opened box at Target yesterday and felt packets to finally obtain the last two I needed, Alice and the Cheshire Cat. My collection's complete! I'm now mulling over whether to get a couple more Pizza Planet Aliens and another Buzz, for parts and such.

I believe I would, though that's in part because the process of assembling a set is itself something I value, and not just the end result. I can derive pleasure from assembling even bricks I don't own, and which aren't available to me to purchase.

A FIRST STRONGHOLD project that got posted about a hundred days ago and has mostly languished since, with only a couple hundred votes in that time (a support rate too low to prevent it from expiring within a year, if it had stayed at that rate) has suddenly started trending in a big way, jumping onto the "Popular this week" bar on the front page, with over seven hundred votes added in that time; from a cursory look, most of them have come not just within the last week, but the last couple hours. On the Community page, which tracks site activity in general, there's been a steady stream of supports for this project, sometimes several in a row between votes for any / all other projects on Ideas. Picking out a random string of several of them and looking at their profiles, I found that almost all of them had just joined in the last few minutes. It looks like the project creator, after struggling for months to garner attention, finally succeeded in getting the message out, presumably to the FIRST community. Good for him/her! The importance of campaigning to one's potential customer base really can't be overstressed.

There are a lot of modular buildings on Ideas. This one is one of the most beautiful ones I've seen (not just on Ideas, but at all), yet it looks as though it might expire before getting to 5,000. I hope not. I really thinks this one deserves a shot in review, even if modulars in general aren't likely to be approved just yet. It's too gorgeous to let languish in obscurity (and no, mods, it isn't my project :p ). Somebody else just posted a Disney castle. If only they'd known what's around the corner...

If I may return to something brought up a while ago... I'm still not seeing this set of yours. I do see your other, previous submissions, but not this train you submitted back in January. Did you ever get any message from the LEGO Ideas team about it?

Oh, I don't know about that. CM4Sci's Roblox project is still less than four months old, which makes it fairly new, and it already has over 5000 supports (including one from me, BTW), which is farther than lots of projects (most of them, actually, AFAICT) get in their entire existence. I'd say it's doing quite well, overall.

As a general rule, I'm always for getting a part in a new color. There'll always be someone with a use for it.

Tangentially, I do as well, but for me it's more of a complaint with Eurobricks's approach to Ideas than it is with Ideas itself. The way things are now, it lets us only post Ideas projects as MOCs, presenting them like we would any other MOC, while just kind of mentioning almost in passing that they're Ideas projects. I get that EB doesn't want to become just other people's advertising venue, but there's no danger of that anyway, and I don't think this approach services either the projects or this community well.

Oh, it's definitely strange, no question. I'm with you on the possibility of including The A-Team but not doing more Doctor Who stuff for the game, BTW. Then again, it seems like they're going for a strategy of hitting as many different themes and franchises as they can, even if with only a small number of playable characters for each, rather than doing a whole bunch of characters for each of the different themes / franchises. Ninjago and DC Comics seem to be the only ones getting really great numbers of playable characters. (Speaking of which, those hopefully-not-too-limited promo packs for Supergirl and Green Arrow bring the DC playable character count up to 10 - the first franchise to hit double digits, and that's without even counting the apparent Teen Titans GO! packs.) That said, I'm hopeful there'll be more Doctor Who as "regular", non-Dimensions sets anyway. And I'm hopeful it'll happen - after all, Ghostbusters started with a single Ideas set in 2014, then after more than a year of nothing else is getting all kinds of things now.

It doesn't matter - this is a wishlist. Feel free to make a list consisting of nothing but three hundred different background extras from Condorman if you like. :D

Absolutely.

That doesn't contradict what I said, though. They have a set number of production slots put aside for Ideas sets - yes, they're few and far between, and don't amount to much of their business, but they do have them. And they do want to have viable Ideas projects to produce in those slots. If they have more viable sets than they can do at once, they just queue them - note that we've occasionally been waiting on as many as three approved sets at once. They've also approved multiple sets at once on at least three occasions, and they've approved as many as three projects from a single review batch (albeit by doing two right away, and the third after it was held over for a while). And as you yourself point out, the whole Ideas program is quite possibly more valuable to them for publicity than for the actual revenue directly generated by the small number of sets it produces, many of which are limited editions - but that supports my argument as well. It doesn't do much for the brand or fan goodwill or any of that if they have an entire review go by without a single set they can approve. They want to be able to produce Ideas sets, not just for whatever they can directly earn by selling them, but also for the publicity, buzz, what have you.

Not so - if you actually look at what those users supported, you'll see a lot of the same popular projects over and over - including multiple projects that have actually become sets. And that's from just a handful or so, maybe a bit over a dozen, of users singled out in this thread for their own projects. That suggests to me that if we went through all of the literally thousands of creators of less-refined projects, we'd find a healthy percentage of the votes for almost every Ideas project that has become a set, with the sole likely exception of the Minecraft project (which really did garner almost the entirety of its support in a very short time from Minecraft fans outside the Ideas user base, thanks to the social media campaigning). Because it can "keep up" with them just fine, and precisely because it has to reject a lot of stuff. That means they don't always have as many viable options as they'd like in a review batch. Why do you think they recently made a point of soliciting more original, non-licensed projects (note that they didn't say they wanted fewer licensed ones, only that they wanted more non-licensed ones)? Remember, they recently had a whole review in which they were unable to approve anything, despite it being the largest review batch to date. That's because lots of the ideas that make it to review, while nice ideas, just aren't doable for one reason or another. They want to be always able to approve something; they don't like having to give bad news. One of the things that would help with that is having a larger percentage of non-licensed projects, since those are easier to say yes to, but another is simply having larger review batches - i.e., more things making it to review. And with not all the approved projects having made it through so quickly, it's possible some of the approved projects - the ones that actually became sets - would never have made it to review if the Ideas user base had been smaller.

Wait, what?! Seriously? How would they even do that?!

I saw both projects, and figured they might well wind up here. I didn't vote for either, but just went on to other fresh projects, without feeling compelled to bring these up here if no one else did. That said, as long as they've come up now, I'll just quickly note that the Shoes creator joined just two weeks ago and is already supporting 39 projects, while the Arlo creator joined just six days ago and is already supporting nine projects.

I really, really hope neither of those (nor any other pack for this game) winds up being really rare (such as limited in availability to a single event at a single location, and then the aftermarket)... Yeah, it's kind of like Doctor Who that way. Honestly, I think you'd like it, though it might take more than a couple episodes to pull you in (then again, episodes are only about 11 or 12 minutes long, so watching several doesn't require a huge time commitment). At any rate, from what I can tell, there's a fairly significant amount of overlap between the two fandoms. Since you're such a huge Whovian, you might want to give this show a try as well. Well, it's not supposed to be straight comedy - it's partly outright drama, believe it or not, as well as fantasy-adventure. But it is also largely comedic. If the humor just doesn't work for you, then... oh well. Personally I like if a lot more than The Flintstones, say, but then everyone's different. This is the first I've heard about either as well, but both make a lot of sense. I specifically speculated about The Goonies being a likely candidate for inclusion back last year, before even the first wave was released. I wouldn't be surprised to see either of these properties make it in. Well, we know LEGO is officially doing Adventure Time, anyway, even if we don't know for sure about it being in the game. But it also makes sense for inclusion in the game in multiple ways; it's also frankly much more likely a property to resonate with the target audience for the game than The A-Team. But yeah, I could actually see both in there...

Not most of them.

That's entirely possible, but I don't think it accounts for all of their supports; I doubt each of them has commented on every other project they've supported. Whatever the reason for their support, though, I think it's essential to the process. I know there are lots of Ideas users who sign up solely to support one particular project reflecting a passion of theirs, and then are never heard from on the site again. At the same time, though, there are lots of users who are like these folks here - people who might post projects of their own that some of us find lacking or even laughable, but who also support lots of other people's projects. Looking at their "Supporting" lists while making that post, I noticed a lot of overlap - many of them have supported a lot of the same projects as one another, including a lot of the popular vote-getters (including many that have been approved as sets). My takeaway from that is that the top Ideas projects, while undoubtedly drawing single-support supporters who vote for things they're passionate about, also get a great deal of their support from these regular Ideas users. If all the people who submit projects of arguably dubious or minimal merit were to disappear from the site, the people who remain would find the streams of support for their own swankier projects drying up. I therefore hope things like this thread and the Tumblr blog don't discourage too many others from participating. That's my concern (aside from and in addition to the fact I think making a point of deriding creative efforts by regular people just isn't particularly nice).

I actually do occasionally see people post comments to note the unlikelihood of a project passing, albeit usually from legal grounds - opining nothing from a given license is doable because another construction toy company has the rights, for example. I think most people are too polite to say "this build sucks" directly to the creators of the projects (which of course I maintain is more a good thing than a bad one), and IIRC it's also frowned upon in the user guidelines anyway. One can find a fair amount of more constructive feedback, though - "perhaps you might try building this part like this", and so on, and the creators will sometimes take such feedback into consideration when posting updates.