jodawill

It's really unfortunate for me because I've never had the opportunity to get into it. I wasn't able to afford them when I was single and had time to do it. Now that I can afford it, I don't have the time to learn a whole new thing because I have young kids. I'd always hoped I'd be able to get into Mindstorms with my son when he's older. I assumed some incarnation of it would always be around. I guess if we're just doing small projects, we could buy used stuff. This is really unfortunate. I don't like the direction the company is going these days (on so many different levels!).

The forestmen hat probably isn't a high production mold. I believe this version was originally created for the magnets and minifigure rereleases at Toys R Us, which was pretty limited. It hasn't appeared in many sets until recently.

I think this is where it becomes subjective. I don't think it's a big problem if someone buys the last 20 of them unless there's someone standing there who clearly wants to get some, then it would be polite to share. That's more like going to the store and seeing there are only three cartons of eggs left. You need three for your family, so you buy them. Compare that to a situation where there are 500 cartons of eggs left, there's a line of people waiting to get eggs, and somebody just pulls the entire rack out of the fridge and pushes it up to the checkout. It's been my experience that some BAM knight buyers are more like the latter. This is why I think Lego needs to set limits on BAM packs. Maybe 5 would be reasonable. I don't know. I think they should allow people to buy as many as possible without depleting the store's inventory within an hour. If it were up to me, I'd crank the production up to 11 and allow everyone to buy them by the thousands. But they don't, so the alternative is limits.

Are you sure they're not licensed? I thought they had some kind of football license on it.

Wow, this turned out to be quite a heated topic. I feel like some of the criticism may (or may not) have been directed at me for comments I made about the gray BAM knights, so here are my thoughts on the subject. If you're able to afford more of something than someone else, that's fine. I think it's good for people to be rewarded for smart budgeting, hunting for deals, and producing a larger income because of their hard work or valuable skills I have absolutely no problem with army building. I've done it myself to a small extent. If I didn't have young kids to take care of, I'd be buying more and building large displays too. It's a lot of fun. I see the value in both large and small displays. Since I have little kids, building a large display is just completely impractical for me right now. So I've been enjoying building smaller things. I'm trying to build up a small army of each faction in anticipation of building more in the future though, and I have to do it while the parts are available. The problem I have with the BAM knights is that a single person will just go into the store and clear out the entire inventory and leave none left for others. Imagine if you had someone in your town who loves to buy eggs for some reason. This person pays someone to tell them when eggs are back in stock, and they immediately go buy up all of the eggs every time there's a new delivery. Maybe this person has a valid use for buying eggs. Maybe they found it's cheap pig feed or something. Who knows. But no one else in town is able to find any eggs. If they do, they're incredibly lucky to get in before this guy buys them all. This person has the money to buy the eggs, and he wants them. What's wrong with that? Do you think it would be ok for this guy to clear out all the eggs at everyone else's expense? I don't care if someone buys 5,000 of these BAM knights if they're available. If Lego would produce enough to keep up with demand, and someone with more money than me is able to buy a million of them, I don't care. They can spend their money however they want. When it comes to PAB, there's not even a way of knowing whether you're depriving other people by ordering the number you want (unless you're just buying the maximum on multiple orders until they're gone). But if you walk into the store knowing that these knights are hard to find, knowing that other people would like some, and you keep going in each week and clearing out the entire inventory, you're just being a real jerk. You should save some for other people. If you want 500 of them, either find a way to order a case for yourself (maybe the store manager can help you?), or buy smaller quantities over an extended period of time so others have a fighting chance at getting some. Does this sound reasonable?

Honestly, I bet the prices are highest on parts they produce fewer of. The Duplo light up brick is a great example. It's something like $20 on PAB. They don't have the production capacity to just do an extra run of those because someone wants to buy 300 of them for some reason. They need to have enough for the sets they sell, but that part isn't worth their time to do extra runs. So they want to discourage people from buying them in bulk. When I look at the parts with ridiculous prices, it seems like the highest priced ones are things like this, especially parts that are particularly hard to produce. It's one thing to do an extra run of some random ABS mold. If it requires non-standard assembly (they have plenty of equipment for assembling minifigures, but not random animals and light up bricks), then it's going to be a much greater effort to produce more if they run low. If it requires 3rd party materials like light and sound parts, it's going to be even more difficult. Cows are somewhere in the middle, I'm guessing. They make fewer of them than horses. They only appear in two sets. They can't hold up production of other parts because someone wants to buy 500 cows. I mean, they can, and they do for LUGBulk, but it comes at a cost and requires special planning. (This is why LUGBulk is practically a year long process.)

They don't need to check the individual parts. They could simply have a limit on BAM packages. They could limit each customer to 3 or 5 per day, or whatever the data says is reasonable. I'd definitely prefer if they just made more of those parts. That would be a win for everyone. Unfortunately, they're also limited by their production capacity, so that's not always an option. Well, this is where it becomes completely subjective to us. We don't know how many they'll get in stock or when they'll get more. Only Lego can decide what limits would be reasonable. If they only have 5 left, is it fair for me to buy all 5? If they "only" have 5,000 left, is it fair for me to buy all of them? Where we draw the line is completely arbitrary, but at some point between those two extremes, buying all of the stock before anyone else gets a chance is a real jerk move. That's also a completely reasonable way to go about it. If they got a case of a thousand, and they only put 50 out at a time, then no one could come in and wipe them out completely. They could restock throughout the day. I'd be ok with this. You're right in saying that not everyone who buys a lot is a scalper. I know a lot of people want to buy them in masses for their own armies. I'm not against anyone buying them for either purpose. It just comes down to the question of whether buying those quantities deprives other people of the ability to buy some also. If you go into the store and clear out their entire inventory (500+) to build your own personal army, you're still being a jerk. You can clearly see that the next person who comes in won't be able to get any knights. With the online PAB, it's impossible to know whether an order is depriving someone else. If I buy 50 forestmen torsos, am I buying their entire stock, or am I buying 0.5% of what's available? No idea. Only Lego can make that determination. So they should implement limits based on the available data and forecasts. It's really not that difficult. Even McDonald's does this. They know how many of each piece of meat to cook at a time based on sales projections. Yeah, there are workarounds. I'm pretty sure some resellers hire people to go in and obtain items that are limited. But it does help. It doesn't need to be tied to VIP accounts. It could be 5 packs per visit and store employees can monitor it. Sure, someone could go in in the morning and come back in the afternoon and they might get away with two purchases. But they'd only be getting 10 packs, not 100. If they came in 10 times a day, the employees would notice.

It's all relative to us. To some people, buying 5 instead of 1 might seem like too much. But Lego had the data. They know how many they're capable of sending to each store and they can take an educated guess at how many people will want to buy them at each store per week. Divide and you have your limit. I called the person in the store a jerk because it's a minifigure that's very difficult to find and they were buying everything the store had. This is why we can never find them in stock. It's not an isolated incident. I've heard from employees at my own store that every time they put them out, someone will come in and buy the entire stock. If Lego wad sending thousands to the stores every week, I have no problem with someone buying 500 for their own army. The problem is that it's incredibly difficult to find them, and these people know that. Limits could be applied to VIP accounts- not forever, but they could have a limit per day to slow the buying down enough so that everyone gets a chance to get some.

It's completely random. The Vikings were added in the afternoon. The forestmen parts were added sometime between midnight and 9am. I have a bookmark on my phone for a search of all the parts I'm looking for. I keep checking every few minutes every day so I won't miss the new castle parts. They were buying them in the plastic containers. They had a huge stack of them. It was a family digging through the bins to find all of them for the dad. I don't know whether he was planning to sell them or build his own army, but that's just a real jerk move. They had HUNDREDS of them. I think the daughter was embarrassed. She left a few sitting on top for me. So I was able to get some, but I'd like to get some more. Lego shouldn't allow this. This is why regular people can't buy them. They need to put limits on BAM. It's a really bad customer service. The same goes for PAB. Just make the things available at a reasonable price and place limits on the orders. A limit of 50 of each part would allow people to get a decent sized army while also keeping them available for people who don't have time to look at PAB incessantly like I have for the past few months. Even better, they could release these parts in small sets so we could actually go to the store and buy them. 😕 I have a love/hate relationship with Lego.

Did anyone else notice that they raised the price of flat silver conical helmets to over 50 cents a few weeks ago? I should have bought more in my last order. I only bought 20, and I expect I'll want about 50 more when all is said and done after the Lion Knights minifigures become available. The red plumes are also 24 cents instead of 17 cents, and the forestmen shields are $1.28... everything is getting stupid expensive, and the interesting parts are only available for a couple hours each week. Maybe increasing the prices is meant to have the effect of increasing availability. I wish they'd just give everyone a limit on in demand items, say 50 of each per order. Then everyone could have a chance to get them at reasonable prices. I've been frustrated with the gray knights at the BAM stations too. They don't have any limits, so the very moment they bring them out, scalpers come in and buy literally every single one they have. I've never found them in stock at my local store. I found them once at the Legoland Discovery Center in Columbus, and someone was already there literally buying the entire stock when I got there. It's incredibly disheartening because I have to travel an hour to get to the store, and they never have them. I could buy them online, but I don't want to reward the scalpers.

I expect it will be available from about 3am to 3:15am, and bardings will be $17, making me regret not buying them on Brickowl at $10 a piece.

As someone who actually does want to buy Duplo parts, the prices are incredibly frustrating. They're just completely absurd. Standard bricks are several dollars, and anything beyond that is $10-$30. But Bricklink isn't a great place to buy Duplos either because not many people carry them, and few parts are available in bulk. I tried contacting Lego about this problem a while back, and they just gave me a canned response. It didn't seem like anyone actually read my email.

As far as I'm aware, the castle is exclusively shipped alone in its dedicated shipping box.

Someone on YouTube said it, so it has to be true. Seriously though, I have no idea. But it seems very likely to be legit given the specificity. The rumored set number was given. I have no idea what the original source was.

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the Blacktron GWP here yet. There was some discussion here a while back about the part showing Blacktron on the radar. It turns out that was correct. There's going to be a remake of 6894 coming out first quarter 2023.

I'm not really familiar with D&D, but I'm really excited about the prospect of a new dragon. I hope whatever the resulting set is includes tons of great new parts for castle building.

I've received two of my three orders so far. I think the third is coming tomorrow. My first order was complete, but they accidentally sent me 200 of the black conical helmets instead of 100. I can't complain! The second order was missing 26 pieces. Hopefully the replacements aren't coming from Denmark. I've seen references to people getting their orders twice. I hope that happens to me with the Black Falcons. That would be amazing.

This is great! I would buy this if they released a wave of sets like this. Really, it's hard to believe they haven't ever returned to this theme!

I was wondering about this also. My first standard order was also shipped, but the only indication is that the order summary view says "shipped" now. There's no tracking, no VIP points, etc. I'm getting excited though! If you read the fine print, it says 28 business days, so my August 24th order is on time.

I just bought a second one at $65. For some reason, the PAYPAL10 code didn't work on my phone, but it did work on my PC. (The opposite of the previous code.) I also installed Honey for this purchase. It gave me a notification about getting $7 back, but that has yet to materialize. We'll see. But at $65, this is likely the best deal I'm ever going to find on this set. Edit: I just got a confirmation email from Honey. I got $7.50 back, putting me at $57.50 total. But I bought it twice and only used Honey the second time. Does anyone know if it's possible to upload your receipt to Honey?

That's a great deal! I was able to get it for $65 with the WOWFRESH promo code. It wouldn't work on my PC, but it worked on my phone. Go figure!

Does anyone know what it means when a standard PAB order is divided between two sets, "In Warehouse" and "Parts Order - Standard?" I have a few outstanding PAB orders right now, and it seems random whether individual parts are listed under each of those categories. Does that differentiate between which parts have been packed, or maybe which ones are in the US warehouse versus those that are in transit from Denmark? Or does it mean some parts were not available and will be canceled?

Paste the element ID into the Bricklink search.

It's listed, but sold out. The element ID is 4211827.