AndyC

Yellow is a colour Lego have seemingly had problems keeping consistent ever since the move from pre-dyed pellets to doing their own dying in-house. And that has been a problem since long before Chinese production. As I've said before, the yellow colouring on collectible minifigs (which are all Chinese made) is, if anything, much more consistently the same colour than parts coming out of other Lego factories like Denmark. The texture of surfaces can be just as much a mold problem as a material one, it's not nearly as clear cut as you suggest.

Weight is a better metric than piece count, but 60043 also has more minfigs than 4434. Because of their complex design, minifigs are by far one of the most expensive "pieces" to be included in any set.

Nope because Superman, Batman, Wonderwoman etc were all fleshies, so if you apply that sort of logic consistently to the entire movie then yellow is just yellow. It can't represent "white" people. Lego genius if you ask me.

I was rather disappointed by it, particularly the comment about modern Lego being reduced to "little more than a jigsaw puzzle" - which just strikes me as a rather lazy opinion formed from nothing other than seeing a large variety of bricks and nothing else.

Not quite. "Didn't make enough..." implies that the line was profitable, but that the profits were considered to small a margin to be worthwhile (because other lines would be more profitable, the amount was too small for the risks involved etc). "Was a loss" is very different. It means that TLG actually lost money overall and simply couldn't sell enough sets at a high enough price to actually recover the investment costs, let alone make any actual money. Now it's also true that the monorails came from an era when TLG was doing a poor job of understanding the true cost of individual sets at design time and often weren't pricing them as high as they perhaps should have (or conversely adjusting the design to better target the proposed price point). I suspect that if they had been as effective at that as they are today, we may never have seen monorails released at all.

We got one! (A Cuusoo Ghostbusters set that is ) Brilliant news, can't wait to get hold of it.

I wonder if straight and curved rails are part of the same mould. If so, it might explain why they wouldn't want to risk selling more straights than curves.

Yellow has been a consistently poor colour ever since the switch away from pre-coloured pellets. And, if anything, I'd say the yellow coming out of China is more consistently the same shade than anywhere else.

Not to mention that "ordering from the factory in Denmark" is absolutely no guarantee that the order is fulfilled using only parts produced in Denmark. There's just as much chance they'll send on parts that had originally been produced in China. And using "quality" as a metric for determining they came from China is obviously flawed, because it's entirely based on the assumption that the point of origin for flawed parts has to be China.

How do you know they are "not of the same quality as pieces made in Denmark" when you've no idea where any part is made? What would you expect to happen if they told you those parts had been made in Denmark?

The complaints mostly seem centred solely on China. Whether that's a genuine issue or just happens coincidentally because it's known that the factories in China had the most advanced tooling and were the only ones capable of producing some of the more complex minifigure parts is a whole different question, of course.

If there were, there'd be a public recall. Which you'll notice there hasn't been. Over the years I've seen complaints about "Chinese plastic" on sets which contained no parts at all from China and also seen sets that do contain parts from China go by without a mention of any quality issues, simply because they didn't have speciality minifigs in and thus determining which pieces to complain about would presumably be a lot harder. If there is a quality issue with a part, it's a Quality Control issue. Where the part was made is basically irrelevant.

1) It's an Architecture set, because, well it's Architecture and branding it anything else would just be weird and pointless. People who like the Architecture line would still want it - see the GB Olympics minifgures, which most treated as part of the normal Minifigures line, despite different branding or the change in branding on the Modular Buildings, people still collect them as one set. 2) It's limited edition for some business reason. Whether it's an expectation of low sales or restrictions placed on TLG by the licensor is something we'll never know. 3) If you really want it, it can be obtained via third party channels. As demonstrated by the fact many have bought it. I'm not sure what you imagine the "solution" is. Branding it differently won't work, because people will still see it as being one of the Architecture models. Widening the distribution isn't necessarily possible and even if it is, are you really suggesting TLG make more than they could sell just so it's easier for you to buy one? And, in any case, those keen enough to buy it will do so.

Some of it is almost certainly Lego, the tail section of the coastguard helicopter for example. Pretty sure that boat hull, thus probably a proportion of the rest, is clone bricks though.

I believe TLG said at the time it came out that all V1 receivers had been used up and so buying one on S&H will get you a V2 one (you can tell because it has V2 printed on it) Hasn't heard of any issues with using two M motors on the same channel though. Do you have details?

I'm not sure you could actually physically construct that left design, surely there isn't enough flex in that part to pin the rotors in like that using half pins? And if there is, surely they wouldn't stay in long?

If TLG ever do decide to upgrade the PF components, a polarity switch on the train motors would be super useful for this kind of thing and surely not much more difficult to add?

I wouldn't object to paying a yearly fee (monthly becomes too much of a chore to bother with, IMO) to help the upkeep of the site, although I can't really think of any "perks" I'd particularly see a need for. I would be concerned about "badges" for paying members though, that sort of thing leads to somewhat of a two-tier system in my opinion and I think that ends up being rather divisive.

Oddly enough that's one of the counter examples with attempting to classify solely by function being easier that sprang instantly to mind. Because what's the difference between a 2x2 plate and a 2x2 turntable if you consider only the connection points? Sooner or later you find yourself coming up with the equivalents of "tile, modified" to try and describe pieces anyway because the sheer variety of pieces with very similar connection points makes them difficult to differentiate between.

They absolutely can. The minute you upload your creation to Cuusoo, you've signed away any rights to ever sell instructions or promotional material of that set in any other form whatsoever. Those rights now belong to TLG and it's up to them how they can be used on other sites. Uploading a creation to Cuusoo is not just casually sharing it with the community the way brickshelf or mocpages are, you are entering into a formal contract with Lego on the expectation your design could become a real set and you should not do so if you aren't prepared to accept the terms and conditions of doing so.

I notice that in the blog post announcing the updates to the Cuusoo rules, one of the things they specifically call out is that by submitting a project you are granting exclusive marketing rights to Lego and you cannot then go on to sell items containing the design or things like instructions on how to build a model you've submitted,

1) Those projects were already going to fail. The simple fact is that the goalposts haven't really moved at all, they've just clarified a bunch of situations in which your project was guaranteed not to pass review. 2) As far as I'm aware, every project that has been shut down was given a few weeks notice to amend their project where possible. Obviously in many cases, that just wasn't feasible because it was a project fundamentally based on something that is now excluded.

You could submit anything, but their guidelines always recommended your avoided things that relied on entirely new parts, that you focus on single sets rather than themes and that you kept the idea within reasonable limits in terms of likely cost etc. In many ways I think they were trying to be too open, because the last thing anyone wanted was for Cuusoo to be too constrained, dissuading good and plausible ideas for no good reason. The practicalities of real world business come into play eventually though and some things just weren't ever going to be viable within the scope of Cuusoo. It has to be better in the long run to make that clear up front. Thing is, Cuusoo is not meant to be a way to showcase your models, there are plenty of ways to do that already, including officially provided Lego sites. Filling the site with ideas that can't ever go into production doesn't help anyone, it wastes time and money in the Lego review process, it gets fan hopes up for no reason and ends up generating a lot of negative feeling that just never needed to happen. I know that I, and suspect that many others, would not want to see Cuusoo just become an avenue for cheap knock-off quality sets with the Lego branding. It cheapens the overall product and diminishes the overall expectations of what you get when you buy Lego products. How would you feel if you bought a bunch of Lego bricks from Bricklink and they were all low quality parts because they'd come from a Cuusoo set and low quality was considered acceptable there? As to the figure only projects, like yours (which btw I supported as they were great) I think many people are overlooking another issue with them. Such projects were inevitably for licensed characters, but people were voting on the designs as they saw them, leaving TLG very little scope for redesign without stepping well away from what had originally been proposed. If, for example, your Batman and Robin had reached 10,000 votes and gone under review, DC Comics might have decided that the 60s style wasn't what they wanted and insisted that the Duplo figures instead looked like whatever Batman cartoon incarnation they were currently pushing. So then TLG would be stuck with either releasing something that looked nothing like the proposal or failing it for no real reason other than they had no market knowledge of how the idea would be received, in which case all the prep work with licensing would have gone to waste. It's simply a no win situation for them. The complaints over the DeLorean redesign probably highlighted just how much voters were expecting a product that looks pretty much identical to what was originally proposed, something which may well end up influencing just how much Lego designers can adapt a design before just having to reject it on the grounds it has to change more than is liable to be acceptable by the community.

I don't think the gender skew in minifigs really is the issue here. TLG spent a lot of time and money looking into this and firmly established that girls in the target audience just don't relate to female minifigs regardless. That's why Paradisa wasn't a huge success and it's why the minidolls exist and have been staggeringly successful despite an even bigger bias in the opposite direction. The actual proposal of a Janus head would actually make the situation worse, in my opinion, since it would only emphasize the idea amongst girls that the females have "boy like bodies" and that's what they mostly objected to. Now it's a fair question why society still places such enormous importance on the physical appearance of women and so heavily impresses that same mentality onto ever younger girls. That's a much, much bigger issue though and one that wouldn't even be dented by a toy company trying to fight the tide, especially not a toy company that makes what many still think of as a "boys toy" It's much more important, in my opinion, to give girls Lego sets they can identify and happily play with without feeling it is something that ostracizes them from their peers. There are enormous cognitive benefits from regular play with Lego as a child and I'd much rather focus on bringing those benefits to as many children as possible. Gender balance and equally the over-emphasis of physical appearance for women are much, much bigger issues and need to be tackled at a cultural scale, rather than picking out comparatively small examples and trying to solve the world's problems through them.

Probably because it was a limited initial production run. I guess TLG weren't really sure what demand for a set would be like, it's fairly different to existing product lines for example. Hopefully if it really is doing that well it'll get subsequent productions runs and become available again.